Blue-winged Parrot

About the Blue-winged Parrot

The blue-winged parrot (Neophema chrysostoma), also known as the blue-banded parakeet or blue-banded grass-parakeet, is a small parrot found in Tasmania and southeast mainland Australia. It is partly migratory, with populations of blue-winged parrots travelling to Tasmania for the summer. The parrot is sexually dimorphic – the males have more blue on the wings and a two-toned blue frontal band on the head, while females are duller and have more green on the wings and a wingbar. Both sexes have predominantly olive-green plumage. Predominantly a feeder on the ground, the blue-winged parrot mainly eats seeds of grasses. It adapts readily to captivity.

German naturalist Heinrich Kuhl described the blue-winged parrot in 1820 as Psittacus chrysostomus, noting that it had been confused with the turquoise parrot (N. pulchella). However, the material used to describe it contained specimens of both this species and the elegant parrot. The species' name is from the Ancient Greek words khrysos "golden" and stoma "mouth", from the yellow skin around the eyes. In 1821, Coenraad Jacob Temminck gave the species the name Psittacus venustus, however Kuhl had used this binomial name for... Wikipedia →