The bodies of the adult birds were emerald green, with bright blue reflections.  The heads were yellow, excepting the forehead and cheeks, which were scarlet.  The large, thick, and hooked bill was white, as well as the bare orbital space around the eye.  The feet were a light flesh-color.  The length from tip of bill to end of tail was about fourteen inches.  The young birds could be easily distinguished from the adults by their short tails and the uniform coat of green, while in some cases the frontlet of scarlet was just beginning to show itself.  The adult males were longer than the females.

The Carolina Parrot does not put on its bright-yellow hues until the second season, and its most brilliant tints do not come to perfection until the bird is fully two years old.  They feed upon the seeds of the cockle-burrs, which grow in abandoned fields of the planter, as well as upon fruits of all kinds, much of which they waste in their uneconomical method of eating.  The low alluvial bottom-lands of the river, where pecan and beech nuts abound, are their favorite hunting-grounds.

It is singular that Alexander Wilson, and, in fact, all the naturalists, except Audubon, who have written about this interesting bird, have failed to examine its nest and eggs.  By the unsatisfactory manner in which Audubon refers to the nidification of this parakeet, one is led to believe that even he did not become personally acquainted with its breeding habits.

The offer by Mr. Maynard of one dollar for every parrot’s egg delivered to him, induced a Florida cracker to cut a path into a dense cypress swamp at Dunn’s Lake, about the middle of the month of June.  The hunter was occupied three days in the enterprise, and returned much disgusted with the job.  He had found the nests of the parakeets in the hollow cypress-trees of the swamp, but he was too late to secure the eggs, as they were hatched, and the nests filled with young birds.  The number of young in each nest seemed to leave no doubt of the fact of several adults nesting in one hole.  Probably the eggs are laid about the last of May.

These birds are extremely gregarious, and have been seen at sunset to cluster upon the trunk of a gigantic cypress like a swarm of bees.  One after another slowly crawls through a hole into the cavity until it is filled up, while those who are not so fortunate as to obtain entrance, or reserved seats, cling to the outside of the trunk with their claws, and keep their position through the night chiefly by hooking the tip of the upper mandible of the beak into the bark of the tree.  The backwoodsmen confidently assert that they have found as many as twenty eggs of a greenish white in a single hollow of a cypress-tree; and as it is generally supposed, judging from the known habits of other species of this genus, that the Carolina Parrot lays only two eggs, but few naturalists doubt that these birds nest in companies.  It is a very difficult task to find the nests of parrots in the West Indies, some of them building in the hollowed top of the dead trunk of a royal palm which has been denuded of its branches; and there, upon the unprotected summit of a single column eighty feet in height, without any shelter from tropical storms, the Cuban Parrot rears its young.