I’ve been watching the Netflix show “House of Cards” (great show, btw) and there’s an episode where the main character Frank Underwood visits a billionaire who happens to own a parrot. The parrot, you eventually see, is a sun conure. Which of course I point out to Stewie, who is sitting behind me. The screen has caught his interest because the sun conure is chirping away (cute little chirps, not Stewie-level squawking… because if the TV bird sounded like Stewie, everyone would just turn the show off. Seriously.)

In one scene, Underwood picks up an ornithology book, flips through it, looks at the caged bird and says “Carolina parakeet”. I kid you not, I turn around and say out loud to Stewie (with a tone dripping of condescension), “The Carolina Parakeet is extinct”, implying “duuuh”. As soon as that leaves my mouth, the billionaire says (voice dripping with condescension), “The Carolina Parakeet is extinct.”

Obviously I don’t expect everyone to be able to identify a sun conure after flipping through an ornithology book for 3 seconds — and it wouldn’t have been a terrible guess — but I’m sure that the very first thing a bird book would say about the Carolina Parakeet is that it is, sadly, an ex-parrot.

What do you think?  Do they look alike?

carolinaparakeet-v-sunconure

The attention to detail to that show is pretty impressive. House of Cards has nothing to do with parrots and I think the whole point of the bird in that episode (minor spoiler alert!) is only to set up a scene where Underwood is wrong about something, so there’s no real point to quibbling about the lack of enrichment activities in the parrot’s cage or that the kitchen might not be the best place for an animal with a very delicate respiratory system. I just thought it’d be fun to point out what I bird nerd I am. Aside from that, House of Cards is a really great show and you should go watch it.