Guadeloupe amazons
| Guadeloupe amazon | |
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| Du Tetre's 1667 illustration of three Guadeloupe amazons (8) and one Lesser Antillean macaw (7) | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Psittaciformes |
| Superfamily: | Psittacoidea |
| Family: | Psittacidae |
| Subfamily: | Arinae |
| Tribe: | Androglossini |
| Genus: | Amazona |
| Species: | † A. violacea |
| Binomial name | |
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† Amazona violacea (Gmelin, 1789) |
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| Location of Guadeloupe | |
| Synonyms | |
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The Guadeloupe amazon or Guadeloupe parrot (Amazona violacea) is a hypothetical extinct species of parrot in the family Psittacidae. It was endemic to Guadeloupe. It was hunted, and by 1779 was already rare. Today it is extinct.
The Guadeloupe amazon was first mentioned by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre in 1664 and Jean-Baptiste Labat.
The description has led to restorations – mostly based on literal interpretation of the old descriptions – but altogether the sources indicate a bird with the general color pattern of the imperial amazon (A. imperialis) of Dominica, the next major island south of Guadeloupe.Storrs Olson and Edgar Maíz consider "A. violacea" as probably identical to the living species.
A bone found on Marie-Galante – between Dominica and Guadeloupe – has been assigned to A. violacea; this may be taken to suggest that A. imperialis inhabited and/or was traded between all three islands in prehistoric times.
The violet macaw (Anodorhynchus purpurascens) was described by Rothschild and featured in his book, Extinct Birds published in 1907. Its native name was supposedly oné couli. Rothschild named the species because uniform bluish coloured macaws were said to have inhabited the island of Guadeloupe, but the recent tracing of the sources used by Rothschild has evidenced the author based on a poor depiction of the Guadeloupe Amazon by Raymond Breton, a French missionary present in Guadeloupe during the first years of the French colonization. Only the genus Ara is thus known to have colonised the West Indies.
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