Australian king parrot
species of bird
The Australian king parrot (Alisterus scapularis) is a species of parrot endemic to eastern Australia ranging from Cooktown in Queensland to Port Campbell in Victoria. Found in humid and heavily forested upland regions of the eastern portion of the continent, including eucalyptus wooded areas in and directly adjacent to subtropical and temperate rainforest. They feed on fruits and seeds gathered from trees or on the ground.
Taxonomy
The Australian king parrot was first described by the German naturalist Martin Lichtenstein in 1816 as Psittacus scapularis. The species belongs to the genus Alisterus, whose three members are also known as king parrots. The species are sometimes allied to the genus Aprosmictus.
Two subspecies are recognised, which are differentiated by size:
A. s. minor (Mathews, 1911)
A. s. scapularis (Lichtenstein, 1816)
Naturally occurring hybrids with the red-winged parrot (Aprosmictus erythropterus) have been recorded from Bell in southeastern Queensland.
"Australian king parrot" has been designated the official name by the International Ornithologists' Union (IOC).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Australian king parrot” is species of bird. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Australian, king and parrot, not as a finished interpretation.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q114477. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1816 and 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “Australian king parrot” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.