Summer officially begins with the summer solstice, and in France, it occurs on Friday 21 June at just before five o’clock in the morning. As summer rolls in across the northern hemisphere, so comes the sun, and I say … everything will be all right. Enter the Sun Parakeet – also known as Sun Conure. I love this bird because it looks like a Renaissance painter’s palette: a yellow-gold body, fiery orange cheeks, green wings like jungle leaves, and inky tail tips. I met this sunburst of a creature at the Zoo de Lille in northern France on a cloudy afternoon. It quite literally stole the sunlight. Here comes the Sun Parakeet. Native to the forests of northeastern South America, such as Brazil, Guyana, and Suriname, the Sun Parakeet (Aratinga solstitialis) is social and highly intelligent. The sobering bit is that the Sun Parakeet is endangered in the wild, primarily due to deforestation and illegal trapping for the pet trade. At the compact Zoo de Lille nestled within a city park, the bird I saw was part of a collaborative conservation breeding and preservation program to help safeguard endangered species. Living in Paris, it’s hard not to think of Louis XIV, the original Sun King, who well understood the power of the sun and the spectacle. If he wanted a bird to match his golden aesthetic, the Sun Parakeet would’ve been summoned to Versailles in an instant. Like Louis, this little parrot knows how to hold court: radiant, a touch dramatic, and impossible to ignore. Let the sunshine in Photographer: Martina Nicolls
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