Rodrigues parrot

Extinct species of parrot that was endemic to Rodrigues

The Rodrigues parrot or Leguat's parrot (Necropsittacus rodricanus) is an extinct species of parrot that was endemic to the Mascarene island of Rodrigues. The species is known from subfossil bones and from mentions in contemporary accounts. It is unclear to which other species it is most closely related, but it is classified as a member of the tribe Psittaculini, along with other Mascarene parrots. The Rodrigues parrot bore similarities to the broad billed parrot of Mauritius, and may have been related. Two additional species have been assigned to its genus (N. francicus and N. borbonicus), based on descriptions of parrots from the other Mascarene islands, but their identities and validity have been debated. The Rodrigues parrot was green, and had a proportionally large head and beak and a long tail. Its exact size is unknown, but it may have been around long. It was the largest parrot on Rodrigues, and it had the largest head of any Mascarene parrot. It may have looked similar to the great billed parrot. By the time it was discovered, it frequented and nested on islets off southern Rodrigues, where introduced rats were absent, and fed on the seeds of the shrub Fernelia buxifolia. The species was last mentioned in 1761, and probably became extinct soon after, perhaps due to a combination of predation by introduced animals, deforestation, and hunting by humans.

Birds thought to be the Rodrigues parrot were first mentioned by the French traveler François Leguat in his 1708 memoir, A New Voyage to the East Indies. Leguat was the leader of a group of nine French Huguenot refugees who colonised Rodrigues between 1691 and 1693 after they were marooned there. Subsequent accounts were written by the French sailor Julien Tafforet, who was marooned on the island in 1726, in his Relation de l'Île Rodrigue, and then by the French astronomer Alexandre Pingré, who travelled to Rodrigues to view the 1761 transit of Venus. In 1867, the French zoologist Alphonse Milne Edwards described subfossil bird bones from Rodrigues he had received via the British ornithologist Alfred Newton, which had been excavated under the supervision of his brother, Colonial Secretary Edward Newton. Among the bones was a fragmentary front part of an upper beak that he identified as belonging to a parrot. Based on this beak, he scientifically described and named the new species Psittacus rodricanus. While he found the bone similar to the beaks of the lories in the genus Eclectus, he preferred to give it a less precise classification than assigning it to that genus, due to the scant remains. The specific name rodricanus refers to Rodrigues, which is itself named after the discoverer of the island, the Portuguese navigator Diogo Rodrigues. After receiving a more complete upper and lower beak which he thought showed the bird to be close to the parrot genus Palaeornis, Milne Edwards moved the species to its own genus Necropsittacus in 1873; the name is derived from the Greek words nekros, which means dead, and psittakos, parrot, in reference to the bird being extinct. In another footnote to his 1873 compilation, Milne Edwards correlated the subfossil species with parrots mentioned by Leguat. In a footnote in an 1891 edition of Leguat's memoir, the British writer Samuel Pasfield Oliver doubted that the parrots mentioned were the Rodrigues parrot, due to their smaller size, and suggested they may have been Newton's parakeet. In 1879 the German ornithologist Albert Günther and E. Newton described more fossils of the Rodrigues parrot, including a skull and limb bones.

Many endemic Mascarene birds, including the dodo, are derived from South Asian ancestors, and the British ecologist Anthony S. Cheke and Hume have proposed that this may be the case for all the parrots there as well. Sea levels were lower during the Pleistocene, so it was possible for species to colonise some of the then less isolated islands. The British ornithologist Graham S. Cowles instead found their skulls too dissimilar for them to be close relatives in 1987. Hume has suggested that the Mascarene parrots have a common origin in the radiation of the tribe Psittaculini, basing this theory on morphological features and the fact that parrots of that group have managed to colonise many isolated islands in the Indian Ocean.