Jamaica has indigenous parrots – the yellow and black billed parrot. As far as I know, the Black Billed Parrot can be found no where else is the world except Jamaica. Like most developing countries, Jamaica does a pretty good job of exploiting their wildlife, especially parrots. Thanks to their pretty feathers and uncanny ability to mimic humans’ form of communication, their demand in the pet trade is quite high, pretty much ensuring that they will eventually be captured into extinction. For whatever reason evolution made them so colorful and smart, or God made them so irreducibly complex, if they are to survive the environment of the future then they’re going to have to 1) change their diet to human babies or 2) get a lot uglier and stupider. If I were a parrot I would be doing the down and dirty with as many ugly, stupid females as possible, but unfortunately they are all pretty and smart – a surprisingly poor defensive mechanism in a world where the number of humans is growing exponentially.
There are quite a few parrots in captivity in Maroon-Town. This of course is illegal, but Maroons don’t seem to be too concerned with this little law. They have bigger fish to fry with all the drug trafficking and illegal firearms to worry about Babylon coming to confiscate their parrots. After about a year and half here, I can now say with utter confidence that I know the name of every parrot in the Cockpit Country. I could know the name of every parrot in Jamaica, but I am sure that there is some Kingstonian hippy out there who thought they were better than everyone else and named their parrot Rainbow. Still, I have never met a captive parrot who has not been given the name Pretty. Indeed, for such a beautiful bird, I guess it fits right in with Jamaican pet naming- every cat is Puss, every bird is Pretty, and every dog is…you guessed it – Dog.
