The difficulty in accurate species assignments was confounded when only one reference sequence was available; in addition to only a few sequences for closely related species for comparative inter-species purposes. It would be difficult to argue, in a legal context, with any degree of certainty that a sample be assigned to a species without the knowledge of the genetic variability of closely related taxa. Therefore, species level identification was only assigned to those samples when more than one published reference sequence was available for at least one of the two chosen genes for this study, or alternatively, when at least one published sequence was available for both 12S and Cytb genes. We chose a sequence similarity value of >98% for both genes as a requirement for assigning species identity, but acknowledge that more research needs to occur to generate gene specific cut-off values that are appropriate to the Psittaciformes. In cases where only one species reference sequence was available on GenBank, regardless of whether the sequence similarity was >98%, species level identification was not assigned, due primarily to the effects that nuclear copies of mtDNA (numts) might have. Additionally, if the only reference sequence available was from an unpublished source, species identification was not assigned, as we believe they were not deemed fit for this purpose. Genus and family level identification was allocated when search results showed close matches (