Hyacinth Macaw, Blue Wings above Pantanal

The paradise of parrots in Barranco Alto

I keep walking around a massive old tree and I can´t believe, that there is a hollow with nesting macaws only 200 meters from the place, which became our home for the following two weeks. When I was arranging our short stay in Brazilian Pantanal, I felt, that Barranco Alto and its surroundings could be the right place to watch hyacinth macaws in the wild. However, my expectations were surpassed by reality. A nest within view!

As it turned out 200 kilometres to the northwest from Campo Grande after two weeks, there were up to five pairs of these blue dishy guys living in the surroundings. In fact, there wasn´t any day when I didn´t meet any hyacinth macaw on my rambles in the Brazilian countryside. After a few days I even made a sophisticated way of walking around those places, where the birds were staying during the day. They went to drink at some of the places, to frolic early in the morning; they ate nuts in the palm trees. I recorded four nests and I knew the place, where the birds gathered into a bigger group every evening.

Despite the fact, that Brazilian Pantanal is a perfect place for capturing and watching animals, where it is really difficult to decide immediately, what to focus on at one moment, I always preferred to watch a hyacinth macaw, if there was one in sight. Hyacinth macaws prefer open flat landscape with lonely trees to deep primeval forests. Not because they wouldn´t like the original primeval forests, but because they had to adapt themselves as there weren´t many of the primeval forests left. Pantanal with its meadows, flooded areas, pastures and islands of woods is an ideal place for the hyacinth macaws to live. You can find them near palm groves, in savannahs and dry sparse woods.
Unfortunately, although hyacinth macaws were originally widespread on a large territory of South America, nowadays they can be found only within three little areas. Two of them are in the southern part of the Brazilian Amazon basin and the last one is in the southern part of Brazil near the east border towards Bolivia and the northeast border of Paraguay. This is where hyacinth macaws were explored by me.

Waking up in the first sunrays

Macaw parrots definitely belong to the noisiest animals in Pantanal. Already half an hour before sunrise, when the day is slowly breaking, they start to be more active on the high rotten tree trunks. They keep shouting at each other and wrestling having their beaks hooked into each other and extending their wings, to fly several meters away and sit down on a place, where they won´t be attacked for a while.
As soon as the low orange-red sun begins gently to colour the tops of the trees, birds rise and fly away to find some food, for instance to some palm groves. After several early morning meetings, I have the feeling, that they spent the night on the same places I found them in the morning. The birds gather every night, but according to my viewing they in fact never spend the night here.
It may occur to you, that it is easy to find them, as they are so noisy. It really is, however at the beginning it wasn´t for one simple reason. In addition to hyacinth macaws there are several large groups of macaw parrots in the area like the blue-and-yellow macaw (ara ararauna) and the red-and-green macaw (ara chloropterus) all of them screaming in a similar way. It took me about five days to be able to distinguish their different types by screaming. I didn´t focus myself on hyacinth macaws because I wouldn´t be interested in the other kinds of macaw parrots, but simply because the others weren´t as easy to capture, because they mostly flew away from a distance of 150 metres. If I heard the hyacinth macaws, it was quite easy to find the right direction and set out to walk. I often found the birds on the place, where I had heard them in the distance for the first time, maybe because they are so big and you can´t miss their stunning blue colour. Although I told myself to slow down in the heat approaching 40 C, to hide into shade and not to run after animals all the time, I was unable to keep this up. When I was sitting on the terrace deleting the unwanted shots in my computer I had taken in the morning, a short scream of hyacinth macaw near the nest was enough for me. My rest was over.
I knew that the parrot was just leaving its nest ready to drink in the river Rio Negro not far away. As soon as I had run to the tree, the parrot had got already fully used to the light in the shade of the tree and flew over low to the riverbank as far as the water surface to refresh itself in the hot Brazilian midday. It had three short drinks, turned round to the tree and returned to the tree hollow. Although similar refreshment repeated several times every day, I never left out the opportunity to be nearby, if it was possible. Now, when I´m looking back at the behaviour of the hyacinth macaws, it occurs to me, that just drinking may have been the only activity when the birds were at rest. I even can remember, that a numerous group of macaws gathered on a big water trough of a massive tree trunk on the edge of a pasture. There were six hyacinth macaws drinking next to each other at one moment!

A huge beak as the third leg

Taking into consideration, that you might not meet similar parrots in the wild, it can be said, the hyacinth macaw can´t in fact be mistaken for another bird. The biggest of these parrots has about 90 – 100 cm and it has a weight of 1200 – 1700g. Its wingspan is 120cm. However, the most typical feature are their blue shiny feathers, they only don´t have any feathers around their eyes. So they have areas of yellow skin on their heads. Unfortunately male and female macaws are quite the same at first sight, so I being a non-professional bird watcher wasn´t able to distinguish them in terrain.
The hyacinth macaws have a typical huge beak, which is much bigger than that of the other related macaws and apart from crushing nuts it is used as the third leg. I often noticed how the macaws (the same as the other kinds of parrots) help themselves with their bent beak to climb the trees and their branches. Their short sturdy legs are adapted not only for climbing but also for hanging upside down.

Joint feast in the palms

During the time spent in Pantanal I couldn´t fail to notice how sociable the macaws are. When I found a single bird it was always near the nest or when it left the nest for a short moment. The view of a couple hidden in the branches of the tree, an overflight of a flock of 3 – 6 birds or small groups feasting on the palms was much more frequent. The macaws depend on palm nuts (such as Acrocomia iasiopatha and Astryocaryun tucuma) , which represent the main component of their food. They usually have eight kinds of nuts on the menu, which are rich in nutrients and fat and the macaws use their strong beaks to crack them. Except palm nuts the macaws don´t refuse various sprouts or even snails. They feed themselves on the ground or in the trees, because their anatomy is perfectly adopted for climbing. Their way of feeding plays an important part in the ecosystem, because they disperse nuts and seeds on their territory.

The couple always stays together and maybe because of their sociability they mate in the course of the whole year. As I have mentioned in the introduction the birds are most active in the morning and their activity is declining with growing heat till the late afternoon, when they don´t make a sound (even when they are feasting in the palm together).
During the day the birds fly in bigger groups to feed themselves. It is never far away if there are some palms nearby, the birds always stay only a few kilometres from their homes. However, if they lose their source of food, they must look for another one and then they are able to fly very far away, because they depend on the food.
Although the hyacinth macaw can be nesting during the whole year, in fact only about 7 – 25 pairs out of 100 really nest. This is probably caused by their longevity, they simply don´t need to nest often. The birds can live up to 50 years, unfortunately this hasn´t been studied in detail. Unlike the captive hyacinth macaw, which can live as long as 80 years, a wild macaw hasn´t been studied so long by anybody so far. The birds are monogamous, they stay the whole life with the same partner and they usually don´t have the brood until the last ten years of their life.

Visiting an occupied nest

The parrots choose their nests in tree hollows either of living trees or of old rotten trees, or in cavities of clayey slopes. It is stated, that the nests are usually in a height of 4 – 14 metres, however most of the photographs presented here were taken near a nest, which wasn´t higher than two metres. Although the birds mate in the course of the whole year, they mostly nest in the rainy season, which is in Pantanal from November till April. Nearly 80% of the land is flooded by water during this period. Although the macaw can have up to two eggs, it mostly takes care only of one of its youngs. The incubation period, during which the female spends up to 70% on her eggs, is between 25 – 28 days and she is being fed by the male. This was the “case” of my nest, when the female left the hollow only when she flew to the near river or when the male brought the food.
Although the eggs or little birds are sometimes stolen by predators from the cavity, the success rate of nesting is very nice 90%. The young birds become fully feathered as late as when they are 13 weeks, they stay with their mum even as late as 18 months. If we take into consideration their longevity, it is not any surprise that the birds mature sexually as late as at the age of 8 – 10 years.

A perfectly successful project of help

It occurs to everybody who has a longer look at the wonderful feathers of the birds why there are so little hyacinth macaws in the wild. Bird fanciers are able to make a big sacrifice to have the hyacinth macaws in their birdcage. Contemporary price of macaws bred in captivity is between 200 – 250 thousand crowns and the female macaws are a few tens of crowns more expensive. Unfortunately, there are still many cases when a bird fancier gets a macaw from the wild on the black market.
Not many nature lovers remember, that there used to be four kinds of the big blue macaw parrots in the recent past. Unfortunately only two of them (and the one perhaps not very long time) can keep flying over the countryside. The glaucous macaw (Anodorhynchus glaucus) died out around 1950, there are only about 60 spix's macaws (Cyanopsitta spixii) kept in captivity and you can find only about 450 lear's macaw (Anodorhynchus leari) in the wild. It is no exception that the last one is found by the customs officers after an illegal transport to the Czech Republic (the price of a lear´s macaw is 3 million crowns in the black market).
The worst situation of the hyacinth macaws was around the year 1980, when the market with birds was flourishing without any punishment and every year thousands of macaws disappeared from Brazil. Then the situation started to improve and only in Pantanal, where there were just 1500 birds in the worst times, the number of birds doubled up to 3000 wild living macaws in the course of ten years! How was this positive process possible?

It may sound like a fairy tale but I have this information from two sources so I hope it is the truth. In 1980 a young student Nieva Guedes learned from her teacher while she was watching a group of flying over macaws that these amazing macaws are going to live out during her life. The enthusiastic student of biology was shaken and this terrifying information changed her life for many years. She decided that she doesn´t want such a fate for the hyacinth macaws. She didn´t accept the horrifying prediction and started a project to save the wonderful parrots.
I met the signs of the saving programme in Brazil in September 2011. When I was walking in the countryside towards the screams of the hyacinth macaws one morning I came to a tree with a big nest box with a hole just for nesting macaws. One of the tasks of the project was to increase nesting possibilities. The number of natural nesting places is decreasing with the changes in Brazilian landscape where the areas of pastures and agricultural land rapidly increase.
Thanks to Nieva Guedes who intensively raises the awareness of the hyacinth macaws the farmers sometimes protect a massive tree which has for years been occupied by parrots. Then it is good to make the hole of the nest box smaller just for the body of a macaw so that no predator (coatimundies, toucans, jays, crows) gets in.

Within the project there was an intensive collection of data in the terrain, which lead besides other things to protection of palms where the macaws regularly look for their food.
This isn´t certainly the end of the protection. In my opinion it is very important that thanks to Nieva Guedes and her project the hyacinth macaws were more publicized as a jewel every Brazilian is proud of and especially the farmers who have the nests of the macaws on their land. They realized that the so popular ecotourism may bring them some more money to their farming. In this way the threat of illegal business certainly decreases.
I am really delighted that I can give you with these lines and all the shown photographs better news than those which learned the scientist and fighter for the hyacinth macaws Nieva Guedes from her teacher 30 years ago. I made sure with my own eyes, that these wonderful parrots are flourishing, have enough place to nest and to get food and their number has been slowly increasing for several years. I believe that if you set off to this area in some following years you will find these amazing birds exactly the same as I have found them.