Cordilleran Parakeet Psittacara frontatus is split from Scarlet-fronted Parakeet P. wagleri (Clements 2007:143)

Summary: The Cordilleran Parakeet of drier habitats from southwestern Ecuador through Peru is now considered a separate species from the Scarlet-fronted Parakeet of northern Venezuela and western Colombia.

Details: Psittacara frontatus was first described as a full species by Cabanis (1846), although there it was explicitly compared only to P. mitratus, which also occurs in Peru (the region being covered in Cabanis’ monograph), rather than P. wagleri of Venezuela and Colombia, with which it has long since been united (e.g., Peters 1937), although Ridgely and Greenfield (2001) suggested full species status may be warranted. There are several morphological differences between forms of P. frontatus and those of P. wagleri, enumerated by del Hoyo and Collar (2014) and confirmed by Donegan et al. (2016), and these seem consistent with species limits among other Psittacara. Published genetic data comparing frontatus and wagleri appear to be lacking but they might not even be sister taxa. Thus WGAC and Clements et al. (2023) join HBW and BirdLife International (2022) and Gill and Donsker (2017, IOC v.7.2) in considering P. frontatus an independent species.

English names: The English names used align with HBW and BirdLife International (2022) and Gill and Donsker (2017, IOC v.7.2).