Conures come from Central and South America. “Conure” is not a species at all — it is a loose grouping of small to medium New World parrots spread across several genera, and the bird in your living room descends from flocks in Brazilian woodland, Bolivian cloud forest or the savannas of the Guiana Shield.
That matters more than it sounds. Almost every behavior owners find difficult is a wild adaptation showing up in a flat.
“Conure” is a nickname, not a taxonomic group
Ornithologists do not really use the word. It survives in aviculture as a convenient label for a set of long-tailed Neotropical parakeets, and the birds it covers are not each other’s closest relatives.
The two you are most likely to meet sit in different genera. The green-cheeked conure is Pyrrhura molinae; the sun conure is Aratinga solstitialis. They differ in size, voice and temperament, and lumping them together is how people end up with a much louder bird than they planned for.
So the useful question is never “where are conures from”. It is which conure do you have, and where is that one from.
The green-cheeked conure: Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina
The green-cheek occupies a band of south-central South America — western and southern Mato Grosso in Brazil, through northern and eastern highland Bolivia, into northwestern Argentina, and across parts of Paraguay.
The habitat is more varied than “jungle” suggests. It includes dense low forest and woodland with clearings, the deciduous and gallery woodland fringing the Pantanal, and mossy cloud forest on the eastern slopes of the Andes at altitude.
According to the World Parrot Trust, the species runs to about 26 cm (10 in) and 60–80 g, across six recognised subspecies. It nests in hollows in mature trees.
Hold onto that last detail. A bird evolved to raise young inside a dark cavity is a bird that will investigate every dark cavity you own, which is why green-cheeks are famous for burrowing into sleeves, cushions and the gap behind the sofa.
The sun conure: the Guiana Shield
Sun conures come from a much smaller area in northeastern South America — northern Brazil, Guyana, and the border regions around Venezuela and Suriname. They live in dry savanna woodland and palm groves rather than deep forest.
Open, sparse habitat selects for a voice that carries across it. That is the whole explanation for the sun conure’s reputation, and it is not a training problem you can undo — the routine that calms predictable evening noise manages the pattern, but it does not change the species.
The sun conure is also the cautionary tale of the group. It is listed as Endangered by the IUCN after decades of trapping for the pet trade, and wild numbers fell sharply while captive numbers rose.
What the wild range tells you about the bird in your cage
Three behaviors stop looking like problems once you know the origin.
Chewing. Cavity-nesting parrots excavate and maintain their own nest holes. Destructive chewing is not boredom alone — it is a hardwired job with nowhere to go, and the fix is supplying soft wood and cardboard rather than trying to suppress it.
Contact calling. Flock birds in dense cover keep track of each other by voice. When your conure shrieks the moment you leave the room, it is doing exactly what keeps a bird alive in Bolivian woodland, and going quiet in reply teaches it to escalate.
Constant physical contact. Green-cheeks roost in company and preen socially. A single conure with no flock will make you the flock, which is a big part of why the question of keeping parrots alone is so contested.
Almost every pet conure was born in captivity
This is worth stating plainly, because “where are conures from” sometimes carries an unspoken worry about wild capture.
Green-cheeks available as pets are overwhelmingly captive-bred and have been for generations. The IUCN lists the species as Least Concern, though it notes wild populations are declining with deforestation.
The sun conure’s Endangered status makes provenance a fair question to ask a breeder. In the US, the Wild Bird Conservation Act has restricted commercial import of wild-caught parrots since 1992, and international trade sits under CITES.
Temperature, humidity and the gap you cannot close
Cloud forest and Pantanal woodland are humid. Centrally heated homes in the US, UK and Canada are not, particularly in winter, and dry air is hard on feather condition and respiratory health.
You do not need to recreate Bolivia. You do need to stop your home being a desert — regular bathing opportunities, and attention to indoor humidity when the heating runs. That same dryness is part of why molting behaves so strangely in indoor birds compared with wild ones.
Where this leaves you
If you are choosing a conure, the range map is a spec sheet. A bird from open savanna will be louder than a bird from dense forest, and no amount of good intentions changes that.
If you already have one, the origin explains rather than excuses. Give the cavity-nester something to excavate, answer the contact call instead of waiting it out, and treat the need for company as a requirement rather than a preference.
For the ranges, subspecies and measurements behind this piece, the World Parrot Trust encyclopedia is the reference worth bookmarking, and the University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web covers Pyrrhura molinae in more depth.