Green Cheek Conure

Overview

Green cheek conures are small parrots native to the forests of Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, where they live in noisy flocks in the forest canopy. They are among the quietest of the conure species - making them more apartment-friendly than larger parrots - and have a reputation for playfulness and deep affection. They bond closely with their keepers, and that bond is built on time: a conure needs three to four hours of supervised time out of the cage every day.

Quick Facts

History

Massena and Souance described the species in 1854 and named it for Juan Ignacio Molina, the Chilean Jesuit naturalist. It stayed on the margins of aviculture for more than a century. Large shipments reached the United States in the 1980s, and among the wild-caught birds were odd individuals sold as a separate species, the yellow-sided conure; breeders later showed that yellow-sided was a sex-linked opaline mutation of the green cheek, the first color mutation established in American aviculture for this bird. A cinnamon form arrived about the same time, filed at first as fallow, and the California breeder Steve Garvin crossed the two to produce the pineapple. American opalines went out to Europe and South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s.