Painted Parakeet

About the Painted Parakeet

The painted parakeet (Pyrrhura picta), known as the painted conure in aviculture, is a species of bird in subfamily Arinae of the family Psittacidae, the African and New World parrots. It is found in northeastern South America.

The painted parakeet was described in 1776 as Psittacus pictus by the German zoologist Philipp Statius Müller. Müller gave the locality as Cayenne, now French Guiana. Müller cited "Buffon" as the source of his information on the parakeet. Although the Comte de Buffon published a description of the "La perriche à gorge variée" in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux, this was in 1779, after Müller's publication. Instead, Müller had access to the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle, a set of hand-coloured plates engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet that were produced to accompany Buffon's work. Before Buffon, the painted parakeet had been described in 1648 as the "Anaca" by the German naturalist Georg Marcgrave and in 1760 by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson as "La petite perruche brune du Brésil". The specific epithet pictus is from Latin meaning "painted". The painted parakeet is placed in the genus Pyrrhura that was introduced... Wikipedia →