If you have visited the Sarasota Audubon Nature Center, adjacent to the Celery Fields on Palmer Boulevard in Sarasota, you may have noticed a group of very boisterous green and gold birds with black heads. At first glance, you might think they’re parrots — and you’d be right.
Specifically, they’re nanday conures, which are native to a subtropical part of South America where the climate is not so different from ours. Like the other wild parrots you might see in Florida (monk parakeets can be spotted statewide, and there are about a dozen other species breeding in the Miami area), these nandays are the descendants of escaped cage birds.
But if you hop in your time machine and head back to the early 1800s, you’ll find wild parrots across most of the U.S., from New York to Florida and west to Colorado. Carolina parakeets (Conuropsis carolinensis) were a common bird at the time. By the 1860s, they were rare outside of Central Florida’s swampy forests, and in 1904, the last known wild Carolina parakeet was killed in Okeechobee County. The last captive bird died in 1918…