Carolina Parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis), Volume 1, Plate 26

Painting completed in Louisiana in 1825.

Audubon shows the parakeets enjoying themselves, stretching their wings, squawking, and feeding. Audubon gives the viewer an almost cinematic impression of the birds’ activities: the lower bird is shown full face, its tail fanned as if it were about to fly off. What seems like a random assemblage of birds is in fact the result of a carefully concealed artistic strategy: the parrots, looking both lifelike and posed, are arranged in a reversed S-curve. As the birds turn and twist their heads, the viewer is turning his or her head, too, thus participating in the field of force Audubon has created. Note the immature bird depicted in the middle of the bottom row of parakeets. The botanical background is an ironic echo of the grid Audubon would have used to create his composition from the dead bodies of the parakeets he had collected. The pendant, withered leaves of the cocklebur parallel (and contrast with) the luminous bodies of the birds. Given that farmers shot these birds by the basketful, Audubon’s decision to show them feeding on the common cocklebur tree (a plant apt to annoy the farmer) was not an innocent one. Audubon’s pleading on behalf of the Carolina Parakeet did not work: the last known representative of the species perished in 1918.

From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography

The Parakeets are destroyed in great numbers, for whilst busily engaged in plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain from the stacks, the husbandman approaches them with perfect ease, and commits great slaughter among them. All the survivors rise, shriek, fly round about for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty, are killed at every discharge. The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies, screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition. I have seen several hundreds destroyed in this manner in the course of a few hours, and have procured a basketful of these birds at a few shots, in order to make choice of good specimens for drawing the figures by which this species is represented in the plate now under your consideration.