I read a book recently about a writer who decided to try his hand at the Appalachian Trail. His plan was to start outside of Atlanta and get as far north as he could before winter set in. It was a humourous book as he had not trained nor was he really accustomed to the great outdoors. While he was still along the trail in north Georgia he mentioned some of the history of the land and how quickly the area, as well as the eastern US, was deforested.
What I think is missed here is not only the scale but the rapidity of the deforestation over 70 years. In 2022 I completed a painting of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, where I ask the viewer to put themselves in the 1850s along the Choctawhatchee River in Northwest Florida and smell the purity of the air, but also notice the natural sounds as well as the natural silence as you wait for the Lord God Bird. I suggest the next extinct bird we visit should be the Carolina Parakeet.
This visit to the Carolina Parakeet is more funereal than the previous visit with the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. That visit contained a glimmer of desperate hope, as there is a miniscule chance that a breeding population still exists somewhere along the Choctawhatchee or Apalachicola River basins. For the Carolina Parakeet, however, we are left with only Audubon’s painting and museum specimens, whose colorful feathers have faded with age and not quite right button eyes staring at us. It is a visit to emptiness.
The Carolina Parakeet’s last flocks were found in the swamps of southern Florida. They seemed stable until they just disappeared. Comparing the parakeet’s full range with its last range matches the image in the article linked above to the forest left in 1920. In 2019, researchers sequenced the genome of a stuffed specimen in Spain and found no signs of inbreeding or population decline, suggesting that its extinction was abrupt.
It’s easy to say we should have known better, but the truth is we do have a responsibility to the land, the ocean, and the animals that live here. Unfortunately, the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet is an all too common tale. We must learn from this (and other extinctions in the Anthropocene) or one day we’ll find ourselves on the list of Lamentations.
Lamentations: Carolina Parakeet
