Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, together with colleagues from the University of Freiburg and the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology, Viena, have found that the ancestral population of the Burrowing Parrot occupied what is today Chile, and from there only a single crossing of the Andes was successful.

They are studying Burrowing Parrots because they offer good possibilities to study how animal species expand to suitable habitats overcoming natural barriers, as they are tied to specific places for breeding, thus restricting the number of breeding sites.

These colourful parrots breed in colonies located in cliffs of sandstone or limestone. The ravines with the colonies are usually located along rivers, in the valleys at both sides of the Andes, and along the cliffs of the Atlantic coast.

The researchers conducted two surveys of more than 13,000 kilometres, discovering 66 colonies of Burrowing Parrots where they collected naturally moulted feathers.

The researchers were able to decode relationships among individual colonies using genetic material extracted from these feathers.

“The results are fascinating”, Juan F. Masello explained.

“Contrary to our expectations, the ancestral population originated on the Pacific side of the Andes, where Chile is now, and where there are only small colonies at present. From there, this species managed to successfully cross the Andes on a single occasion. The two Argentinean sub-species originated from this starting population. One of them successfully expanded along rivers until reaching the Atlantic Ocean, where the largest colonies of the species can presently be found. In El Cóndor, this species forms the largest parrot colony in the world, with more than 35,000 breeding pairs,” he added.

“The genetic data were brought into a timeframe using the age of fossils” added Petra Quillfeldt.

“This way, we were able to estimate that the crossing of the Andes occurred more than 120,000 years ago,” she added.

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