Extinct Animal : Carolina Parakeet

With the spread of agriculture, this brilliantly coloured bird developed a liking for the seeds of many kinds of fruit and grain crops. For this, and its habit of gathering in great destructive flocks, it was condemned as a pest and subjected to wholesale slaughter. Many were also sold as pets.

Once common in the southeastern United States, the Carolina parakeet became increasingly scarce as deforestation reduced its habitat. Already rare by the mid 1880s, its last stand was in Florida, where, in 1920, a flock of 30 birds was the last ever seen of the only native parrot of the United States.