The Orange-winged Amazon parrot

Oct 23, 2022 Interesting Creatures in Guyana, News

Interesting creature…

By Shervin Belgrave

Kaieteur News – This week’s interesting creature is the orange-winged Amazon parrot and I was privileged to meet three of them recently while hanging out at a home in Kitty, Georgetown.

Mario and Maria (orange-winged amazon parrots) posing for a photo.

An angry Sony reluctant to take a photo.

They were introduced to me as “Mario”, “Maria” and “Sony”. They were quite chatty too.
As I took some shots of them, they began to curse “mudda s…t mudda s…t, murder murder”.

I don’t know who they learned that type of vocabulary from, but according to their owner, Nalini, Maria, Mario and Sony have been keeping her company for over a year now.

She had bought them as pets for her daughter’s birthday. Sadly, Covid-19 took her daughter’s life and although she still mourns the loss of her beloved daughter, these three amazing birds have found a way to comfort and cheer her up every day.

They are only birds with a brain smaller than the size of a walnut, but appeared intelligent and acted like children, so I decided to find out more about these wonderful creatures.

They are commonly known as orange-winged amazon parrots, but their scientific name is Amazona Amazonica.

As the name suggests the bird is native to the Amazon rainforest, and can be found in Guyana, Peru, Venezuela, Central Brazil and Colombia.

These birds are considered tropical animals and can be reared as pets. They are less talkative than the other species of Amazon parrots, and their big cousin, the Macaw but are still capable of mimicking sounds and voices if properly trained.

The orange-winged amazon is a mainly green parrot about 33 cm long, and weighing about 340 g. It has blue and yellow feathers on its head which varies in extent between individual birds. The upper mandible is partly horn coloured gray and partly dark gray. It has orange feathers in the wings and tail, which can be seen when in flight. The male and female are identical in external appearance. The orange-winged amazons can have a life span from 15 to 30 years and are known for being noisy birds making loud, high-pitched screams.

Its main diet consists of fruit, seeds, nuts, blossoms, leaf buds, and berries, including the fruit of palm trees and sometimes cocoa, mangoes, and oranges. In the wild, they can be found nesting in tree cavities. Female birds incubate their eggs for 26 days and when they are hatched, the chicks will leave the nest and find their own home after 60 days. They are one of the most sought after birds to have as pets and would oftentimes become entangled in the traps of pet traders. If you are lucky to have an orange-winged Amazon parrot as a pet then I am sure that they are spunky and outgoing.

Source of information (Orange-winged amazon – Wikipedia)