Details
Ara macao
A large Neotropical parrot of brilliant scarlet, splashed with yellow and blue. It mates for life and sweeps through the rainforest canopy in screeching, fast-flying pairs.
Map: Ecoregions 2017 © RESOLVE (CC BY 4.0) · Natural Earth (PD)
It ranges across the Neotropics from southeastern Mexico to the Amazon basin, favouring humid evergreen and lowland rainforests. It also turns up along river edges, in open woodland and at the margins of savanna.
A big macaw spanning 100–120 cm across the wings and weighing 900–1,500 g. The body is vivid scarlet, set off by yellow wing coverts and deep-blue flight and tail feathers, with bare white skin around the eye and toward the bill, and a long, pointed tail.
Active by day, it spends most of its time high in the canopy, usually more than 10 m up. Pairs bond for life and often travel in small flocks, calling to one another with loud, throaty squawks and screams.
A plant-eater, it takes fruit, nuts, seeds, flowers and nectar, cracking hard shells and seeds with its powerful bill. Birds gather at clay licks along riverbanks to eat mineral-rich soil, thought to neutralise toxins in the seeds they consume.
The female lays two or three white eggs in a large tree cavity and incubates them for about five weeks. Chicks fledge roughly 90 days after hatching and stay with their parents for around a year, reaching maturity at about five years old.
Wild birds can live for decades, and captives sometimes pass 50 years. Still fairly common across much of its South American range, it is locally threatened by deforestation and illegal capture for the pet trade, fuelled by its dazzling plumage.
