While going through my photo archive, I came across these photos and finally decided to find out what kind of parrot I had taken a picture of all those years ago. A little digging into its history turned up something rather curious.
This is an Eastern Rosella(Platycercus eximius), an Australian parrot species. Normally, it is a striking bird: a red head and breast, white cheek patches, a yellow-green body, and blue patches on the wings. Eastern Rosellas are native to southeastern Australia, where they can be found in woodlands, open country and farmland, and occasionally in city parks and gardens.
But the parrot in my photos is no ordinary one.
It is a rare red form of the Eastern Rosella. In these birds, the normally yellow and green parts of the plumage turn red, while the distinctive white cheek patches remain. The result is a parrot that ended up with considerably more red than the original design called for.
And this red form has a history of its own.
In 1837, the English ornithologist John Leadbeater described such a bird as a separate species and named it Platycercus ignitus. It became known as the Fiery Parakeet. Eventually, it became clear that it was not a separate species at all, but an unusual red form of the Eastern Rosella.
So how did an Australian Fiery Parakeet end up in my photo archive when I have never even been to Australia? Well, I have been to Greece many times — and it was there, in 2018, that I photographed this bird on the grounds of Faneromeni Monastery on the island of Lefkada. As it turns out, the monastery has a small aviary where several species of parrots are kept.
So that day, I simply took a picture of a beautiful red bird and thought nothing much of it. And today I discovered that it has not only a name, but a history almost two centuries old.
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