Where Do Parrots Come From?

The oldest undisputed parrot fossil is a humerus bone found in Denmark, roughly 55 million years old. Denmark is not where parrots live today. That gap - between the bird you know and the continent where its ancestors turned up in rock - is the real story.

Most people who keep parrots assume they are a South American invention. The Amazon basin, the macaw, the screaming flocks of conures above the canopy - these images stick. They are accurate as far as they go. But the molecular evidence points to an older and more southerly origin, and the fossil record is stranger than either account.

Australasia, not South America

A 2008 multilocus molecular phylogeny study, published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, tested parrot origins across five biogeographic regions. Australasia scored the highest gain-to-loss ratio by a clear margin. The most pointed evidence: 32 of the 69 parrot genera examined are restricted to Australasia. No other region comes close. Britannica’s ornithology entry states plainly that parrots “probably originated in the Australian region.” The New World tropics hold the largest count of species today, but they are a later radiation, not the source.

The order Psittaciformes contains roughly 400 species across four families. The family relationships confirm Australasia’s primacy in a specific way: the most ancient surviving branch of the parrot family tree lives in New Zealand, not the Amazon.

The New Zealand parrots: the oldest branch

Strigopidae - the New Zealand parrots - separated from all other parrots between 33 and 44 million years ago. The family holds four species across two genera: the kakapo (Strigops habroptilus), the North Island kaka (Nestor meridionalis septentrionalis), the South Island kaka (Nestor meridionalis meridionalis), and the kea (Nestor notabilis). All four are endemic to New Zealand and carry Maori names.

The kakapo is worth pausing on. It weighs up to four kilograms, cannot fly, forages at night, and as of recent conservation counts had only 248 individuals alive - all on predator-free islands under active management by New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. It is critically endangered on the IUCN Red List. The kea, by contrast, is described by the Birds of the World as “one of the most intelligent birds” and is known for tool use and problem-solving. The kaka, gregarious and forest-dwelling, is hanging on in protected remnants.

This is what the most ancient living branch of the parrot family looks like: three species on managed islands, one in alpine scrub, all under conservation pressure.

A warm window, then retreat

Molecular dating in the 2008 study offered two scenarios for the deeper history. Under the Cretaceous hypothesis, the basal New Zealand split happened around 82 million years ago, before the end of the non-avian dinosaurs. Under the Tertiary hypothesis, the split sits closer to 50 million years ago. Both place the origin in the Southern Hemisphere, during the fragmentation of Gondwana.

What happened afterward is mapped partly through fossils. A 2016 paper in Biology Letters reported on the first parrot fossil found in Siberia, dated to roughly 16 to 18 million years ago during the Early Miocene. At the same time, parrot remains existed in Western Europe, North America, and Australia. The driver was the Miocene Climatic Optimum - a warm interval that peaked around 17 to 15 million years ago and pushed tropical birds into latitudes where no wild parrot survives today.

The Biology Letters authors proposed that parrots crossed from North America into Asia via the Bering land bridge around 16 to 18 million years ago, then retreated south when the climate cooled. The range we think of as natural - tropical and subtropical belts across the Americas, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Australasia - is a remnant of something considerably wider.

The parrot family’s current range is not its natural range. It is the range that survived the retreat from a warmer world. The 248 kakapos on predator-free islands are an extreme version of a compression that has been happening for millions of years.

Two centres, different kinds of diversity

The greatest number of parrot species today lives in the New World tropics. The neotropical tribe Arini - macaws, Amazons, conures, caiques, and their relatives - extends from northern Mexico and the Bahamas to Tierra del Fuego. Amazon parrots of the genus Amazona inhabit lowland rainforest, dry woodland, and highland forest across this span, reaching into Argentina’s interior provinces.

The greatest structural diversity sits in the Australo-Papuan region. Lories and lorikeets, which feed on pollen and nectar rather than seeds, reach their maximum variety in and around New Guinea. Cockatoos spread across Australia, New Guinea, and the Philippine Islands.

Africa holds a smaller, distinct assemblage. The African grey (Psittacus erithacus), lovebirds (Agapornis spp.), and the Poicephalus group arrived via dispersal from Eurasia, not directly from Gondwana. A 2008 paper by Wright and colleagues suggests ancestors of modern African genera may have reached Africa from Eurasian populations rather than by trans-oceanic dispersal across the early Atlantic.

An order in trouble

The IUCN’s Wild Parrot Specialist Group, established in May 2024, puts the conservation picture in plain terms: one in three parrot species is now listed as threatened - vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered. Of roughly 400 species, 235 have declining populations. South America accounts for 91 declining species, South and Southeast Asia for another 68. According to IUCN data, 19 parrot species have gone extinct since 1500. Nearly all surviving parrots - threatened or not - are listed under at least one CITES appendix because of pressure from trade.

In the United States, where parrots have no native populations in the lower 48 states outside a narrow stretch of the south Texas borderlands, feral colonies now exist across 43 states. Audubon researchers and eBird volunteers recorded almost 120,000 parrot sightings between 2002 and 2016, covering 56 non-native species, 25 of which breed actively. Three species account for 61% of all sightings. The largest feral population overall is the monk parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus) from South America, which nests communally on power infrastructure in cities including Chicago and New York.

In Southern California, up to 2,000 red-crowned Amazons (Amazona viridigenalis) - descended from pet-trade escapees that began arriving in the 1970s - now exceed the wild population remaining in their native Mexico, where habitat clearance has pushed the species toward regional extinction. The California birds were denied Endangered Species Act protection in 2019, on the grounds that introduced populations do not qualify. Texas wildlife authorities take a different view, treating the red-crowned Amazon as functionally native along the Rio Grande valley where birds cross from Mexico.

What this means for a parrot in your home

An African grey kept as a pet is carrying 60 million years of African forest intelligence into a flat. A cockatiel bred in captivity carries the social wiring of an Australian grassland bird that travels in large flocks and forages widely. The behaviours that read as demanding - contact-calling, the need to shred things, refusal to eat from a bowl without investigation - were shaped by a world that existed long before ours did.

Understanding where parrots come from is the beginning of understanding what they need. For detail on feeding, see what parrots can eat. For enrichment matched to a bird’s age and species, how to choose age-appropriate bird toys is the practical starting point.

The birds that are doing best in a changed world - monk parakeets on Chicago pylons, Amazons in Los Angeles eucalyptus - are generalists with dietary flexibility. The ones in most danger are the specialists: the kakapo on its managed island, the hyacinth macaw in river-edge palm forest, every species whose survival depends on one forest type or one seed tree still being there. They have been compressing their range for 16 million years. The current compression is faster than any that came before.