Blue-and-yellow macaws blush when they interact with people
The blue-and-yellow macaw can flush the bare white skin of its face and fluff its cheek feathers while dealing with humans, possibly a sign of its mood. It is the most commonly kept macaw on Earth, with about a million in captivity, and a well-cared-for bird can live 60 years or more.
This large parrot measures 81 to 91 cm and weighs up to 1.5 kg, with aqua-blue back and wings, a lime-green crown and a deep yellow to orange belly. Its face is almost featherless apart from thin black lines around pale yellow eyes. It lives in flooded varzea forest, woodland and savannah from Panama through much of tropical South America and on Trinidad, using a powerful black beak to crack nuts and to climb and hang from branches.
Carl Linnaeus described it in 1758, placing it with all other parrots in Psittacus. It now belongs to Ara, a genus named from the Tupi word for macaw, itself an imitation of the bird's call. The species name comes from a Tupi phrase meaning big dark parrot, originally applied to the hyacinth macaw, and Georg Marcgrave had used it as early as 1648.
Pairs usually mate for life and nest almost entirely in dead palms, most often Mauritia flexuosa. The female lays two or three eggs and incubates them for about 28 days, but typically one dominant chick takes most of the food while its siblings die in the nest. The survivor fledges around 97 days after hatching. In the wild birds live 30 to 35 years. A few pairs breed in the Brazilian city of Rondonópolis, using ornamental dead palms beside roads.
BirdLife lists the species as Least Concern because it remains widespread, though its wild population, thought to exceed 10,000, is falling, it is close to vanishing from Paraguay, and a Trinidad reintroduction using birds moved from Guyana between 1999 and 2003 has not changed its official extirpated status there. Captive birds scream for attention and chew destructively by nature, and the World Parrot Trust suggests an enclosure at least 15 m long. Feathers from a Yschma tomb near Pachacamac show the birds were traded across the Andes around 1000 to 1470 CE.
Source: Blue-and-yellow macaw
