Edible

[asterroc]

I bought a couple cornish game hens to make a small chicken soup with. They're about the size of, oh, a nanday or mitred conure. Bigger than a cockatiel, smaller than a gray.

I wonder, when the Carolina parakeet was hunted to extinction, I wonder how they tasted? There was no reason at all for their hunters to not eat them.

How sad, Wikipedia says the Carolina parakeets tended to flock around their dead.

Also sad, the binomial name for Carolina parakeets is conuropsis carolinensis, and the genus conuropsis is today called aratinga Kappa is an aratinga weddellii (Dusky conure). Aratinga solstitialii (sun conures) were just proclaimed an endangered species within the last 2 years or so.

η: Link to some up-close photos of a Carolina parakeet and a passenger pigeon in the Duke University collection. Don't click that link if images of dead birds squick you out.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

the genus conuropsis is today called aratinga

going by wikispecies, that doesn't look like it's entirely right. it looks like the two genera are still distinguished, with Conuropsis being monotypic for C. carolinensis.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Does the dagger symbol in Wikispecies mean it's the nominate species?

[q10.livejournal.com]

i think the dagger means a taxon is extinct, but if a genus has only one species, but if a genus has only one described species, it seems like that would prettymuch have to be the type species by default.

it also looks like Aratinga was described well before Conuropsis (1824 vs 1891).

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

So either one or the other wiki (~pedia or ~species) is incorrect. Usually I'm inclined to think ~pedia is the less reliable. Thanks for the information.

Relatedly, it's my understanding that species and genus names are in flux in many cases as DNA evidence comes in better allowing biologists to know how species are related to each other. See the brontosaurus for example. So who knows, they may change their minds.

[q10.livejournal.com]

my non-expert understanding is as follows:

new evidence (including, recently, lots and lots of new genetic evidence) is more or less constantly realigning our position on which individuals belong to the same species, and which species belong to the same genus, and so on. the community has a bunch of regulations to maximize name stability. my sense is that the general gist is that every species has a type specimen, and every genus has a type species, and so on (which handles splits), and that for merges seniority usually trumps. (this is what happened with Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus - the two genera were described separately, and sometime later were recognized as synonyms, so the one described first (Apatosaurus) gets priority.)

[l0stmyrel1g10n.livejournal.com]

Are Cornish game hens a kind of chicken? I thought they were a completely different species, but then I've never paid all that much attention. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever eaten one, which is odd because I've eaten a lot of things.

[bobdeloyd.livejournal.com]

I learned of the passenger pigeon extermination a few month ago from a book I was reading and decided to look it up; so sad what we humans do :(