Critically Endangered
Blue-winged Racket-tail
Prioniturus verticalis
Blue-winged Racket-tail is a parrot in the family Psittacidae (order Psittaciformes) — Prioniturus verticalis, recorded as Critically Endangered and tied to Philippines.
Appearance
It has mainly dark green plumage on back, an olive/green on its breast and belly. The primary feathers blue on outer webs while the middle tail feathers green. Racquet feathers black tinged with blue.
Range and habitat
It is endemic to Tawi-Tawi island in the Philippines and is one of the most endangered parrots in the world. It is threatened by habitat loss and the poaching for the cage-bird trade.
Once prevalent throughout all the islands of the Sulu Archipelago, the blue-winged racket-tail is now only found on isolated places on Tawi-Tawi due to rapid habitat destruction during the past 200 years.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
It is presumed to have a similar diet as all other racquet-tails, feeding on fruit, particularly bananas, flowers and seeds of growing corn, and rice. Its breeding season is believed to be from September to January.
A single nest was recorded in a large broken off palm tree in a grove of palms beside a forest.
In crisis
It is now assessed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN Red List with population estimates being just 50 - 249 mature individuals. Its main threat is habitat loss and trapping. One of this bird's threats is its own tame behavior.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Blue-winged Racket-tail is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Blue-winged Racket-tail, Wikidata item Q1191230. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
