A Pollinator Named Polly

Not so long ago, a friend was preparing some materials for Pollinator Week with any number of activities intended to raise public awareness of pollinators. This year, the week ran from June 21-27, and it was an important event because flowering plants tend to be indolent beings.

Quite frankly, our flowering friends might never trouble to reproduce themselves at all if not for the dedicated efforts of various insects, birds, and other creatures who helpfully spread their pollen around. The Pollinator Partnership says:

“Pollinators provide 1 in every 3 bites of food we eat.”

Bees, especially the European honeybee, are the most famous pollinators, but plenty of other species get in on the fun.

Anyway, my friend nudged me. “Did you know the Yellow-naped Amazon is a pollinator?” The Oakland Zoo agrees:

“The Yellow-naped Amazon is a pollinator because during the summer it eats fresh flowers and the pollen gets on its feathers as it visits flower to flower.”

Well, what do you know? A bee could do no better.

How A Green Parrot Taught People to Grow Maize

I do not actually own a Yellow-nape. My older bird is a close cousin, the Yellow-crowned Amazon. Almost fifty, he’s sedentary enough to count as plant life himself.

Still, it seems possible there are younger, more athletic Yellow-crowns out there happily spreading pollen. Perhaps one reason I like to think so is because of a certain Chachi (Cayapa) legend reported by Jonathan E. Reyman.

The short version: A starving man trapped an Amazon parrot to eat. These birds like to talk, not fight, their way out of trouble, and this bird wasted no time in speaking up:

“If you kill me, you will have but one meal; but if you let me live and help you, you will eat forever.”

The bird then gives the man several of its feathers, which include the colors green, red, yellow, blue, and black — all the colors of maize — before instructing him in the arts of agriculture.

I read the story long ago in the July/August 1997 issue of the A.F.A. Watchbird. Over the years, my creative memory put a little spin on the tale. Fortunately, the A.F.A. now hosts the issue online, so you can read this charming legend in the original.

From his photo, the Amazons in the area where Dr. Reyman collected his legends were Yellow-heads. However, Yellow-crowns and Yellow-napes have all those colors too. And they are all fine talkers, so it’s easy to imagine any of them in the starring role.

So. If Amazon parrots were busily spreading the knowledge of how to raise corn and plantain, they were probably busily spreading a little flower pollen too. I mean, the true gardener is always going to sneak in a few flowers.

The logic can’t be escaped. My Amazon is a pollinator.

Or, at least, he knows a bird who knows a bird who sometimes does a little pollinating.

100,000 pollinators

Humor aside, there are an amazing number of species that work as pollinators. According to the US Fish & Wildlife Service, over 100,000 animals help pollinate a quarter-million flowering plant species, and up to 1,500 are vertebrates, “including hummingbirds, perching birds, flying foxes, fruit bats, possums, lemurs and even a lizard.”

Even the Wildlife Service forgot to add parrots to that list. Sure, they can perch, but parrots aren’t classed as perching birds (passerines). They are psittacines.

It’s a bigger omission than it looks like. There’s an entire “tribe” of Australasian brush-tongued parrot species, the lories and lorikeets, who flit from flower to flower dining on nectar and spreading pollen.

Bees are good people, but they don’t work alone. Unexpected pollinators contribute their share.

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Photo Credits: Yellow-naped Amazon by Just chaos under CC-By-2.0 License. Background of foliage in Belize by the Author. Photo composite by the Author.