WHAT A GLORIOUS RACKET IT MUST HAVE BEEN. What an incredible clamor filled a Chiricahua Mountains forest one August day in 1904, when a flock of as many as 1,000 thick-billed parrots (Rhynchopsitta pachyrhyncha) descended on Bonita Canyon near Cochise Head.

These birds, one of only two parrot species native to the United States, are not the retiring kind. They chatter and call, sometimes in single, high-pitched squawks audible more than a mile away, other times with staccato bursts that many people liken to human laughter. It’s a fair bet that the miners in the area where the parrots appeared had never heard a bird make a sound like that. Nor had they seen one so exotic: brilliant green, with scarlet

across the forehead, above the eyes and on the shoulders. Boomerang-shaped yellow stripes on the underside of the parrots’ wings flashed in the forest when the birds took flight.

Even then, more than 30 years before the last Arizona sighting of wild thick-billed parrots in 1938, the birds were not common in these mountains. So the miners considered the...