For many years, my work in the thoroughbred business sent me to upstate New York every August. I’ve spent nearly two months of my life in Saratoga Springs and its surrounds. It’s a lovely part of the country, and reminds me much of East Tennessee because the area is along the northern end of the Appalachian Mountains.

Around Lake George you’ll even find similar (though fewer) attractions to those found along the Pigeon Forge Parkway, water parks, putt-putt golf, wax museums and such. One of my favorite oddities is the Tiki Motel, with fake palm trees around it. Makes as much sense as Porpoise Island. Two considerable differences are stricter regulations on signage and far less littering and illegal dumping. I said what I said.

It is the land of the French and Indian Wars, the American Revolution, baseball and horse racing halls of fame, winter Olympics and James Fenimore Cooper. The first of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, The Pioneers, was published just over 200 years ago. And in his stories of Natty Bumpo, he weaved in his own concern for the destruction of the land and trees for expanding settlement as well as the wholesale slaughter of wildlife. He was a conservationist ahead of his time.

On one of my trips, I was checking out other nearby towns like South Glens Falls, where Cooper’s Cave (made famous in The Last of the Mohicans) is, Hudson Falls and Fort Edward. Somewhere between the latter two I popped into an antiquarian book store. Among the treasures I brought home is The Living World by James W. Buel published in 1891. It is a massive tome with illustrations and descriptions of critters across the planet.

On page 299, in the section on parrots and cockatoos, he writes:

Carolina Parrot (Conurus carolinensis) is the only one of the genera found with the United States, and though it was at one time very numerous along the southeast coast of Florida, and was once found as far north as New York, and west to Ohio, it is not very commonly met with, owing to its persistent slaughter by cruel huntsmen.

John J. Audubon illustration of Carolina parakeets

The historical range of the birds for years was accepted as pretty much from Eastern Colorado, across the plains states and everywhere east of the Mississippi River. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park website states, “The radiant Carolina parakeet used to inhabit the park’s low, forested river valleys. These birds ate sycamore seeds and, as the area became more settled, farm crops.” The latter upset farmers everywhere.

The Audubon Society reported in 2017 on research that suggests the range was much smaller and that there were two subspecies, one that remained east of the Appalachians and the other, west. The range map did not include the state of New York, yet the article began with a historical account of a massive flock descending on the town of Schoharie, just west of Albany, during the Revolution. The new range maps exclude east Tennessee.

I’m not going to quibble with the person who did the research. I will simply say the birds had been largely extirpated from their former ranges by the Civil War, and pretty much only remained in Florida. Nowadays, the phrase is “video or it didn’t happen.” Which is obviously a fallacy. I’ll give some room that just because no one wrote it down somewhere in the years before photography and widespread literacy doesn’t mean the birds weren’t here.

Captive Carolina parakeet, circa 1900, public domain.

In the end, it’s such a shame that they are gone. One of the sadder observations about the highly social creatures is that they would return to mourn their dead. Which left more of them to be killed, and easily, by irate farmers or hunters looking to selling their feathers to milliners. The destruction of old growth forests contributed, as they were cavity nesters. Pet captures and diseases from domestic poultry are also suspected as contributors to their decline.

The last wild Carolina parakeet was killed in Okeechobee, Florida, in 1904. Inca, the last captive bird of the species, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918 in the very same cage that housed Martha, the last passenger pigeon. There are presently 163 threatened or endangered species (animal, plant, bird, insect, fish and other aquatic critters) in the state of Tennessee.

Beth Kinnane writes a history feature for KnoxTNToday.com. It’s published each Tuesday and is one of our best-read features.

Sources: The Audubon Society, Smithsonian Institue

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