Abstract
This colorful little parrot, the yellowshouldered Amazon parrot, often mistaken for a small double-yellow head, may owe its current popularity to Rosemary Low. She has written extensively on this bird and done in-the-field research of its Netherland Antilles habitat. It was due to her inspiring and informative discourse on barbadensis at the 1979 A.F.A. Convention that prompted my young assistant Greg Moss to begin to seek out specimens in the fall of that year for our captive breeding program. After many phone calls, flights to Texas and a lot of cash expended, we came up with ten longterm pets. All sexed out as males with the exception of one. Two of the males are on loan to us from the Ellen Trout Zoo (Texas) and San Diego Zoo. One was brought back from Venezuela by a well-known baseball professional. Most came to the U.S. by missionaries and merchant marines. By meeting the former owners we obtained a detailed history of each bird's place of origin. The old hen and two of the males had come from the Island of Bonaire, the rest from the coast of Venezuela. These additions gave us a total of three females and eleven males.
We paired the old hen with a like subspecies male. The two young females were paired with like nominate species. It might be mentioned here that, like Rosemary Low, I see little difference between the two races except that in most specimens the nominate is larger, in some specimens quite large, and has a darker green body and more golden yellow on the head. The yellow on the shoulders is more extensive. With so few examples it is difficult to make a judgment as many differences can be attributed to individualism.
In 1981 the rothschildsi pair produced two clutches, one in May and the other in July, consisting of three eggs each. One chick hatched from the first and two chicks from the second but the parents failed to rear them. In 1982 the pair again nested and three eggs were deposited on May 22, 25, and 28. Due to the previous bad experience we placed one of the eggs under a nesting pair of Cayman Brae Amazons (A. leucocepbala hesterna). It hatched June 16th and was well cared for by its foster parents until removed for hand rearing at ten days of age. In the meantime the two remaining eggs had become quite soiled by the hen's bad nest habits and failed to hatch though both were fertile. Prior to this, one of the two nominate race pairs deposited three eggs on May 13, 16 and 19. The inexperienced young female was so often out of the nest box that we decided to move the eggs to a pair of Jamaican yellow-bill Amazons (A. collaria). The three eggs, being fertile, hatched June 9, 10 and 12. The foster parents gave excellent care to the chicks which became very fat in appearance. They were removed between ten days and two weeks of age and hand reared.
All four chicks at time of writing (Dec. '82) are fully on their own in an outside aviary. They are, in size, nearly as large as their parents which means when they reach full size in four years they will prove larger than the two parent pairs. I have noticed this in our second and third generation leucocepbala. This limited experience shows captive bred offspring in a few generations may show an increase in size. The grandparent leucocephala are approximately a third smaller than their grandchildren. The young Cuban Amazons bred and hand reared by Velema Hart in the sixties, from the Herb Melvin pair which Herb obtained from Edward J. Boosey who had bred them in 1956 in England, proved very large birds also. Likewise...