Eclectus Parrot
| Eclectus Parrot Conservation status: Lower risk (lc) | ||||||||||||||
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| Eclectus roratus (Statius Muller, 1776) |
The Eclectus Parrot (Eclectus roratus) is a parrot native to the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, northeastern Australia and the Maluku Islands (Moluccas). It is unusual in the parrot family for their extreme sexual dimorphism; the males are bright green, with bright orange beaks and blue or red tail and wing feathers, and the females red headed and blue-breasted, with black beaks. Joseph Forshaw, in his book Parrots of the World, noted that the first European ornithologists to see Eclectus parrots thought that they were of two distinct species.
Ornithologists usually classify the Eclectus Parrot as members of tribe Psittaculini in the Psittacidae family of order Psittaciformes. However, some recent thought indicates that there is a great deal of commonality between the Eclectus Parrot and the Loriinae tribe. It is thought that there are six subspecies of Eclectus Parrots in the wild, each with differences in size, coloring or habitat.
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Categories: Parrots