feeds her, and the young are brooded by the female. Not all pairs are strictly monogamous, as breeding between females and "auxiliary males" is known to occur. The echo parakeet mainly feeds on the fruits and leaves of native plants, though it has been observed to feed on introduced plants. The Réunion parakeet probably went extinct due to hunting and deforestation, and was last reported in 1732. The echo parakeet was also hunted by early visitors to Mauritius and due to destruction and alteration of its native habitat, its numbers declined throughout the 20th century, reaching as few as eight to 12 in the 1980s, when it was referred to as "the world's rarest parrot". An intensive effort of captive breeding beginning in the 1990s saved the bird from extinction; the species was downgraded from critically endangered to endangered in 2007, and the population had reached 750 birds by 2019, whereafter it was classified as vulnerable. Taxonomy Green parakeets were mentioned in the accounts of early travelers to the Mascarene Islands of Réunion and Mauritius. They were first recorded on Réunion in 1674 by the French traveler Sieur Dubois, and on Mauritius in 1732 by the French engineer Jean-François Charpentier de Cossigny. The green parakeets of Réunion were referred to as perruche à double collier ("double-collared parakeet") by the French naturalists Mathurin Jacques Brisson, in 1760, Comte de Buffon, in 1770–1783, and François Levaillant, in 1801–1805, who described them from specimens that reached France. In 1783, the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the scientific name Psittacus eques, based on a plate by the French artist François-Nicolas Martinet, which accompanied Buffon's account of the Réunion bird in his work Histoire Naturelle. The specific name eques is Latin for "horseman", and refers to the military colours of a French cavalryman. Martinet's plate was drawn after a specimen that was part of the collection in the Cabinet Aubry in Paris, and the plate is the type illustration. Whether the contemporary illustrations were based on live or stuffed specimens is unknown; though as all show different poses, this suggests several specimens existed if they were mounted. Neither is it clear if the descriptions from France were based on different or the same imported specimens nor how many reached Europe. Levaillant knew of two specimens, and as many as five may have existed. The green parakeets of Mauritius and Réunion were usually treated together in