A new parrot species has been discovered in Mexico; meet the blue-winged Amazon (Amazona gomezgarzai)

Finding new bird species is pretty uncommon these days, despite many skilled ornithologists that are constantly keeping their eyes and ears out for anything out of the ordinary. Despite the fact that most bird species are expected to have been found and described, a completely new Amazon parrot was found in Mexico, living in the rainforest of the Yucatán Peninsula.

The new parrot got named the blue-winged Amazon in English, with a scientific name of Amazona gomezgarzai. The name (obviously) comes from having a blue shade under its wings, which separate this species from other Amazon parrots that live in the same area.

Image by Silva et al. 2017.

The blue-winged Amazon was found by Miguel Gómez Garza, who was on an expedition in the Yucatán Peninsula. He was looking for parrots for information to his upcoming parrot book, but had not expected to find an entirely new species. He first heard an unknown bird call, and immediately figured it must be some kind of hawk due to the sound, but once he got close enough to observe the bird he realized that it was in fact a parrot.

What we know of the blue-winged Amazon

We don’t really know a whole lot about the biology of the blue-winged Amazon so far due to the fact that it just got discovered, but we have some information. This parrot lives in small flocks of around 12 birds per flock, and researchers think these are family groups where offspring stick with their parents in the same flock. Like all other Amazon parrots they eat fruit, flowers or leaves, meaning they are strictly herbivores.

Morphologically the species looks a whole lot like the White-fronted Amazon parrot (Amazona albifrons), but the latter one does have a blue crown on the top of its head, making them easy to tell apart.

White-fronted Amazon parrot (Amazona albifrons). You can clearly see the blue crown in this picture. Image by Christoph Anton Mitterer, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Estimations of the blue-winged Amazon population puts its entire population count at only 100 individuals, which mean that this new species is in dire need of conservation efforts if we want to keep it extant!

It's pretty sad that the newly found species is in such need of conservation efforts just as its found, and if we had not found it this year we might actually have made it go extinct before ever discovering it. It makes me wonder how many species that that died because of humans, yet were never directly discovered and described by us..

Thanks for reading

I hope you enjoyed this short post about the new parrot species from Mexico. If you want to learn more, check out the paper published about the discovery by clicking here. The paper is free to read, so take a look!

If you got any questions or comments, make sure to leave them below! I'm not a parrot expert, but I'll do my best to answer everything :)