The last Carolina parakeet ever, lost in memory and now just lost

Incas the Carolina parakeet died alone.

When he quietly passed away at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden 100 years ago this month, Incas was the last of his kind. He'd lost his mate, Lady Jane, a year earlier. No chicks survived them.

That's not to say they didn't try, however. The pair had produced plenty of eggs over the years. But instead of allowing them to hatch, they just shoved them out of their nest.

This didn't just doom their offspring – it doomed their species.

The Carolina parakeet was the only parrot species native to the eastern United States, where its orange, green and yellow plumage lit up old forests along rivers from southern New York to the Gulf of Mexico.

Like today's parakeets, Carolina parakeets were kept as pets and could be bred easily in captivity. But more often than not, the colorful birds were viewed by farmers as pests and by women as hat decorations, which are believed to have factored into the species' decline in the late 1800s.

Another factor could have been the birds themselves; specifically, Incas and Lady Jane.

The pair was among 16 birds purchased for $40 – about $920 today – by the Cincinnati Zoo around 1885 in an effort to stabilize the population.

Instead, for 32 blissful years, the pair had rebelled against the zoo's conservation efforts by throwing their eggs out of the cage's nest, according to Christopher Cokinos, author of "Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds."

This behavior isn't uncharacteristic of parrots and parrot relatives, however. According to The Parrot Society UK, inexperience at nesting, improper nest depth, infertility and stress are all factors in egg breakage. Sometimes, the birds just find it enjoyable.

But while the behavior may have been normal, Cokinos never found any evidence the zookeepers tried to save the eggs and incubate, hatch and raise them.

In 1917, Lady Jane rolled her last egg, leaving Incas alone and childless. He died one year later in 1918 as the last known captive Carolina parakeet, and in the same cage the country's last passenger pigeon, Martha, had died nearly four years earlier.

Whether his death was because of heartbreak, loneliness or old age is up in the air.

But one thing is for certain: Almost immediately after he died, Incas was forgotten.

Thanks to the coincidental location of Incas' death, any semblance of a legacy he could have left was suddenly part of a life he never knew. For a long time, his death was (and still is) misreported as Sept. 1, 1914, which was the death of the famed Martha.

Incas' body was also promised to the Smithsonian Museum, where Martha's body was sent immediately following her death and where it has been on display ever since.

But unlike Martha, Incas never arrived at the Smithsonian.

No one seems to know why. The theory is that his body lies untagged at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History. Or maybe he went missing on his way to the Smithsonian.

All that's certain is Incas is lost, just like the rest of his kind.