Rare New Species of Parrot Discovered in the Yucatan Ian Sample - The Guardian
go to original June 27, 2017

Listen to the call of the blue-winged Amazon parrot (Guardian Wires)

Miguel Gómez Garza was on his final expedition to the Yucatán Peninsula to gather information for his book Parrots of Mexico when it happened. He heard a group of parrots in the distance, but their call was like none on record. So he loitered by a tree full of pods that parrots like for lunch, hoping they would come and feed.

The wait was worth it. When half a dozen parrots flew over to the tree, Gómez Garza noticed their intense red fronts and the beautiful blue tips on their wing feathers. The plumage set them apart from the two species known to live in the area, which both have distinctive white fronts.

“I could not believe it. The different noise belonged to a different parrot,” said Gómez Garza, a vet and ornithologist at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in Monterrey, Mexico.

In research published on Tuesday, an international team of scientists describe the new parrot for the first time. Named the blue-winged Amazon parrot, or Amazona gomezgarzai in honor of its discoverer, the bird stands 25cm or so tall and has a loud, short and repetitive call that would not sound out of place on the soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

One of the calls the bird makes imitates that of the hawk, a natural enemy of parrots. While scientists are not sure why the parrot mimics the predator, they speculate that it scares other birds from the surrounding trees, leaving more seeds, fruit and flowers for the parrots to eat.

Read the rest at The Guardian

Related: The Mexican Finch That Has Learned to Use Cigarette Butts to Protect Its Nest from Ticks (DailyMail)

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