Although this beautiful Amazon has a huge range in central and southeastern South America, it has a Near Threatened status because it is so highly prized in the pet trade. It is easy to see why as it is one of the most stunning species. We saw this one and others on our trip to the Pantanal.
The Blue-headed Parrot is one of the most prevalent and wide-ranging of the Pionus parrots with a large range in Central and South America. We saw them in my first and second trips to Colombia in totally different regions. The trademark for all the Pionus parrots is the red under tail coverts, although some of the other parrots and parakeets have this too.
Some taxonomies have split this high elevation parrot species into two, but for now I am keeping this as one bird. I saw this species on my second trip to Colombia near Bogota. If eBird updates the taxonomy per the split, it will now be Plum-crowned Parrot with the other half of the split being the White-capped Parrot.
I hate that the only picture I have of this species is a out of focus flight shot, but who knows when I will get back to this area of Brazil. They prefer dry gallery forest or what is locally known as Caatinga or Chaco habitat. Many times the only chance you get for parrots is a noisy fly-over.
We saw this species a couple times flying over head on my first trip to Colombia so it was good to finally catch them feeding in a tree even through they were quite far off. The sister species is the Scaly-headed Parrot which we got on my trip to Brazil in 2022. Its strange that finding these birds in a tree when you hear them is way harder than it should be for a colorful and loud bird.
These parakeets have a pretty broad range in central South American mostly south of the Amazon River basin. They are fairly common in their range and we saw them many times on our trip to the Pantanal. There are several self-sustaining populations in the US including in south Florida where I have seen them before but nothing beats seeing a bird in its native range.
