The Guadeloupe amazon or Guadeloupe parrot (Amazona violacea) is a hypothetical extinct species of parrot that is thought to have been endemic to the Lesser Antillean island region of Guadeloupe. Mentioned and described by 17th- and 18th-century writers, it received a scientific name in 1789. It was moved to the genus Amazona in 1905, and is thought to have been related to, or possibly the same as, the extant imperial amazon. A tibiotarsus (a lower leg bone) and an ulna (a lower arm bone) from the island of Marie-Galante may belong to the Guadeloupe amazon. In 1905, a species of extinct violet macaw was also claimed to have lived on Guadeloupe, but in 2015, it was suggested to have been based on a description of the Guadeloupe amazon. According to contemporary descriptions, the head, neck and underparts of the Guadeloupe amazon were mainly violet or slate, mixed with green and black; the back was brownish green; and the wings were green, yellow and red. It had iridescent feathers, and was able to raise a "ruff" of feathers around its neck. The bird fed on fruits and nuts, and the male and female took turns sitting on the nest. It was eaten by French settlers, who also destroyed its habitat. Rare by 1779, it appears to have become extinct by the end of the 18th century.
Taxonomy The Guadeloupe amazon was first described in 1664 by the French botanist Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, who also wrote about and illustrated the bird in 1667. The French clergyman Jean-Baptiste Labat described the bird in 1742, and it was mentioned in later natural history works by writers such as Mathurin Jacques Brisson, Comte de Buffon, and John Latham; the latter gave it the name "ruff-necked parrot". The German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin coined the scientific name Psittacus violaceus for the bird in his 1789 edition of Systema Naturae, based on the writings of Du Tertre, Brisson, and Buffon. The specific name violaceus means "violet".
In 1891, the Italian zoologist Tommaso Salvadori included Psittacus violaceus in a list of synonyms of the red-fan parrot (Deroptyus accipitrinus), a South American species. In 1905, the American zoologist Austin Hobart Clark pointed out that the colouration of the two species was dissimilar (their main similarity being a frill on the neck), and that Buffon stated that the parrot of Guadeloupe was not found in Cayenne where the red-fan parrot lives. Clark instead suggested that the Guadeloupe species was most closely related to the extant, similarly coloured imperial amazon (Amazona imperialis) of Dominica. He therefore placed the Guadeloupe bird in the same genus, with the new combination Amazona violacea, and referred to it by the common name "Guadeloupe parrot". The name Amazona comes from the French word "Amazone", which Buffon had used to refer to parrots from the Amazonian rainforest. In 1967, the American ornithologist James Greenway suggested that the amazon of Guadeloupe may have formed a superspecies with the imperial amazon and the extinct Martinique amazon (Amazona martinicana), and was perhaps a subspecies of the former. He considered it a hypothetical extinct species since it was only known from old accounts. The American ornithologist Storrs L. Olson considered the supposed amazons of Guadeloupe and Martinique valid in 1978, since species of the genus inhabit other islands in the region. In 2001, the American ornithologists Matthew Williams and David Steadman argued in favor of the idea that the early accounts were a solid basis for the Guadeloupe amazon's existence. They also reported a tibiotarsus (a lower leg bone) found on the Folle Anse archaeological site on Marie-Galante, an island in the Guadeloupe region, which they found similar to that of the imperial amazon, but slightly shorter. Since Marie-Galante shares many modern bird species with Guadeloupe, they suggested that the bone belonged to the Guadeloupe amazon, and assigned it to A. cf. violacea (which implies the classification is uncertain). In 2004, the American biologist Patricia Ottens-Wainright and colleagues pointed out that the early descriptions of the Guadeloupe amazon did not clearly determine whether it was a unique species or the same species as the imperial amazon. Olson and the Puerto Rican ornithologist Edgar J. Maíz López stated in 2008 that the Guadeloupe amazon was probably the same as the imperial amazon. In contrast the English ornithologists Julian P. Hume and Michael Walters wrote in 2012 that though the amazon species of Guadeloupe and Martinique were based on accounts rather than physical remains, he found it likely they once existed, having been mentioned by trusted observers, and on zoogeographical grounds. In 2015, the ecologists Monica Gala and Arnaud Lenoble stated that an ulna (a lower arm bone) from Marie-Galante, which had been assigned to the extinct Lesser Antillean macaw (Ara guadeloupensis) by Williams and Steadman in 2001 and to the imperial amazon by Olson and Maiz in 2008, instead belonged to the Guadeloupe amazon.
The "violet macaw"
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