Parrotlet

🌍 Overview

The Pacific parrotlet is the most popular of the nine parrotlet species and, at well under six inches, the smallest true parrot commonly kept as a pet - smaller even than a budgie. What it lacks in size it makes up for in personality: parrotlets are famously bold and feisty, often described as a large parrot's attitude packed into a tiny body. Wild parrotlets are native to the dry forests and scrubland of coastal Ecuador and Peru, where they travel in flocks of 40 to 50 birds. Unlike a zebra finch, a parrotlet can learn to say a handful of words and, when hand-raised and consistently handled, bonds intensely to one person, though an under-socialized bird can turn sharp and nippy well out of proportion to its size.

📋 Quick Facts

📜 History

Rene Lesson described Forpus coelestis in 1847, but the bird was slow to reach keepers. The United States has held an established captive breeding population since 1930, and even so parrotlets stayed obscure in American aviculture until the mid-1980s; a 1996 article in the AFA Watchbird noted that they had been little known ten years earlier and were only then becoming popular. The Wild Bird Conservation Act, signed on October 23, 1992, ended commercial imports of wild-caught parrots into the United States. The surge in parrotlet keeping that followed therefore ran entirely on birds already in captivity.

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