Psittaciformes - Touit - Lilac Tailed Parrotlet

Lilac Tailed Parrotlet - Touit Batavicus - Least Concern

The lilac-tailed parrotlet (Touit batavicus) is a species of parrot in the family Psittacidae. It is found in Colombia, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forest and subtropical or tropical moist montane forest.

Taxonomy

The lilac-tailed parrotlet was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Psittaca batavica in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. Buffon believed that his specimen had come from Batavia (modern Jakarta) but the German ornithologist Hans von Berlepsch realised this was an error and in 1908 substituted Venezuela as the type locality. The lilac-tailed parrotlet is now placed in the genus Touit that was introduced by the English zoologist George Robert Gray in 1855. The species is monotypic. The genus name is derived from the extinct Tupi language that was spoken by native people in Brazil: Tuí eté means "really little parrot".