40 Fun Facts About Macaws

A macaw's dry, scaly tongue makes a handy tool for opening fruit because it contains what?

A bone runs inside the tongue, stiffening it enough to tap into fruit and to shift a nut into just the right spot in the beak for cracking.

Blu, the pet macaw at the heart of the 2011 animated film Rio, grows up in which US state?

Minnesota is where the smuggled chick falls from a truck in the snowy town of Moose Lake. A girl named Linda finds him, names him and raises him as a pet.

The scarlet macaw, a red, yellow and blue rainforest parrot, is the national bird of which country?

Honduras names the scarlet macaw its national bird, though the species ranges across the tropics as far south as Brazil.

The hyacinth macaw is the longest parrot, but which flightless New Zealand bird is the heaviest?

Kākāpō weigh about 400 grams more on average, but they never leave the ground. That makes the hyacinth macaw the largest parrot that can fly.

What do hundreds of macaws gather to eat from exposed riverbanks in the western Amazon?

Clay from these banks is rich in sodium, a mineral that is scarce so far from the sea. The birds turn up almost daily and skip the visit only when it rains.

Which writer of nonsense verse, also a gifted painter of parrots, lends his name to a blue macaw?

Edward Lear painted the bird for his book of parrot plates and labelled it a hyacinth macaw. A quarter of a century later it was described as a species of its own and named for him.

Which bird spreads the seeds of the hyacinth macaw's favourite nesting tree yet also eats its eggs?

Toco toucan visits spread most of the seeds of the manduvi tree, whose hollows hold the macaws' nests. The same bird takes about half of the eggs lost to predators.

The hyacinth macaw is one of the few birds with the jaw strength to crack which famously tough nut?

Macadamia shells take about 300 psi of pressure to crack. Keepers offer the Australian nut when the palm nuts the birds eat in Brazil are hard to come by.

Which feature of most macaws starts out grey or black in chicks and turns brown or yellow with age?

The eyes of a newly hatched chick stay shut for several days, and the bird needs its parents' care for about ten weeks while its plumage grows in.

How are the four toes on each foot of a macaw arranged, a layout shared with woodpeckers?

Two forward, two back is the layout, known as zygodactyl. It lets a macaw clamp onto a branch with one foot and use the other like a hand to grasp things.

The beak of a big macaw can bite with a force close to that of which familiar animal?

A large dog is the usual yardstick for a big macaw's bite of about 500 pounds per square inch. The lower half of the beak works against the upper half like a blade on an anvil.

Macaw pairs fly with wings almost touching; how long does such a pair usually stay together?

For life is the rule: a pair usually parts only when one bird dies. The two keep the bond strong by preening each other, sharing meals and roosting side by side.

With few big trees in its dry mountain valleys, where does the red-fronted macaw make its nest?

Cliff crevices stand in for tree hollows across the bird's small semi-desert range, where cactus and thorny scrub make up most of the vegetation.

The blue-throated macaw lives only on the palm-dotted plains of Beni in which country?

Bolivia made the bird a natural patrimony by law in 2014. Dancers there once wore its plumes in ritual headdresses, and a conservation group now offers hand-painted palm fronds instead.

A red macaw now known mainly from 19 museum skins died out in the 1800s on which Caribbean island?

Cuba lost its red macaw to hunting, the cage-bird trade and habitat destruction. The last reliable reports came from the Zapata Swamp in the 1850s and a smaller island nearby in 1864.

Macaws crowd the riverbanks of Tambopata National Reserve, a birdwatching draw in which country?

Peru set the reserve in its south-eastern Madre de Dios region, where scarlet, blue-and-yellow and red-and-green macaws all turn up on the same banks.

Hyacinth macaws remain common in which vast South American wetland, where landowners protect them?

The Pantanal is the species' stronghold, and nine in ten nests there sit in one kind of tree, the manduvi. Many ranch owners no longer let trappers onto their land.

Before Columbus, people at Paquimé bred scarlet macaws in rows of pens in which modern country?

Mexico's northern site lay far from the birds' rainforest home, so the first breeding stock was brought up from the tropics. The plumes were sacred and used in rituals.

What do a macaw's bold reds, yellows and blues do for the bird among rainforest leaves and fruit?

Help it blend in, surprisingly: plumage that looks gaudy to us merges with green leaves, ripe fruit and the bluish shadows of the forest canopy.

The blue in a macaw's plumage is not made by any pigment; what produces the colour instead?

Feather structure scatters light to make the blue, and the green patches are that same blue seen through yellow pigment. Only the reds, oranges and yellows are true pigments.

Johann Baptist von Spix, who collected the first Spix's macaw in 1819, came from which country?

Germany was home to both Spix, whose name for the bird clashed with one already given to the hyacinth macaw, and Johann Wagler, who spotted the problem in 1832 and renamed the species after him.

The director of Rio first imagined which bird washing up on Ipanema beach before choosing macaws?

A penguin was the original castaway, but Carlos Saldanha changed the story after learning that Happy Feet and Surf's Up were already being made.

In the film Rio, the macaws Blu and Jewel are hunted by Nigel, who is what kind of bird?

A cockatoo with a grudge, Nigel despises pretty birds because a parakeet once replaced him on a television series. Jemaine Clement provides his voice.

Four macaws named José, Michael, Pierre and Fritz host which Disneyland show, opened in 1963?

Enchanted Tiki Room was the first attraction to use Audio-Animatronics. Each host's plumage matches the flag of the country his accent suggests.

Which macaw, no bigger than some parakeets, is the smallest of all the species?

Red-shouldered macaws are about 30 centimetres long, less than a third the length of a hyacinth macaw. Pet keepers know one of the subspecies as Hahn's macaw.

A flock of introduced blue-and-yellow macaws has flown free since the 1980s around which US city?

Miami and its surrounding county have hosted the birds since the mid-1980s. Another small breeding population, also descended from introduced birds, lives in Puerto Rico.

The Catalina macaw, a scarlet and blue-and-yellow cross, is named for an island off which US state?

California's Santa Catalina Island once had a bird park, where the cross was first bred in captivity in 1940. As a hybrid, it has no true scientific name.

The macaw genus name Ara comes from the word for the birds in which Indigenous language of Brazil?

Tupi speakers called the birds ará. The same language supplied the second half of the blue-and-yellow macaw's scientific name, Ara ararauna.

Which Swedish naturalist gave the scarlet macaw its first scientific name in his 1758 catalogue?

Carl Linnaeus listed it as Psittacus macao, placing every parrot he knew in a single genus. The scarlet macaw has since been moved to the genus Ara.

Which part of a macaw carries a pattern of tiny feathers as unique to each bird as a fingerprint?

The face of a macaw is largely bare, pale skin, a trait that sets macaws apart from other parrots. No two birds share the same lines of feathers across it.

Only the mother macaw incubates the eggs; what is the father's job during those weeks?

Feeding his mate is the male's task until the chicks hatch. After that both parents carry meals to the nest, and the young first fly at about three months old.

After years of fruitless searches in Brazil, which status did the IUCN give Spix's macaw in 2019?

Extinct in the wild meant the species survived only in aviaries. Captive breeding rebuilt its numbers, and birds were released into their old range in Bahia in June 2022.

Hyacinth macaws have been seen holding a chewed leaf or scrap of wood in the beak for what purpose?

To stop food slipping, the bird packs the scrap against a hard nut so that it stays in position while being gnawed. Reports of parrots using tools date from as early as 1863.

In Costa Rica, the great green macaw nests and feeds mostly in which giant rainforest tree?

Almendro trees held 87 percent of the nests in one study, and their nuts are the bird's main meal in the breeding season. Felling them is now prohibited nationwide.

The red-bellied macaw roosts, nests and feeds almost entirely on which swamp-loving palm?

Moriche palm fruit is so central to its diet that the bird is hard to keep in captivity, where shelled unsalted peanuts have to stand in as the staple.

Most captive Spix's macaws once lived at Al Wabra, a sheikh's wildlife preserve in which country?

Qatar's Sheikh Saud Al Thani bought most of two big private collections in the early 2000s. After he died in 2014, 120 of the birds were transferred to a conservation group in Europe.

Blue-and-yellow macaws were moved from Guyana to restock the Nariva Swamp on which island?

Trinidad had almost lost the species to human activity by the 1970s. Birds caught in Guyana were brought over between 1999 and 2003 to rebuild the flock in a protected area.

Which naturalist, remarking on Henry Bates's account, called the hyacinth macaw a splendid bird?

Charles Darwin singled out its enormous beak after Bates described the bird feeding on hard palm nuts in his 1863 book about the Amazon.

Presley, a Spix's macaw unknown to conservationists until 2002, was discovered in which US state?

Colorado was an unlikely home for one of the rarest birds on Earth. Presley was returned to Brazil and died there in 2014 at about 40 years old.

Which actor voiced Blu, the pet macaw who never learned to fly, in the 2011 animated film Rio?

Jesse Eisenberg recorded the part on weekends while filming The Social Network. He said the cheerful role was a relief from the severe character he was playing in that film.