The hyacinth macaw's survival depends on a toucan that also eats its eggs
In Brazil's Pantanal, 90 per cent of hyacinth macaw nests sit in manduvi trees, and toco toucans spread 83 per cent of that tree's seeds. The same toucans account for 53 per cent of the macaw eggs lost to predators. The world's longest parrot owes its homes to the bird that raids them.
About a metre from crown to tail tip and weighing up to 1.7 kilograms, the hyacinth macaw is the largest flying parrot and longer than any other parrot species. Its plumage is deep blue, set off by bright yellow skin around the eyes and beneath the beak. John Latham described it in 1790. It favours semi-open, lightly wooded country and generally avoids dense humid forest, living mainly in the Pantanal, Brazil's interior cerrado and nearby Bolivia and Paraguay.
That massive beak cracks palm nuts almost exclusively in the Pantanal. The naturalist Henry Walter Bates wrote in 1863 that it crushed nuts hard enough to resist a heavy hammer, and Charles Darwin admired the splendid bird and its enormous beak. In captivity keepers substitute macadamias, whose shells need about 300 psi to crack, a force few birds can apply. Wild and captive birds sometimes wedge a chewed leaf or bit of wood against a nut to stop it slipping, a limited form of tool use.
Breeding runs from July to December. Suitable hollows appear only in trees roughly 60 years old, so competition is fierce, and although pairs lay one or two eggs, usually only one chick fledges. Jays, crows, opossums, skunks and coatis also take eggs.
Trapping for the pet trade hit hard: an estimated 10,000 birds were taken in the 1980s, half for the Brazilian market. Munn's 1987 count put the wild population near 3,000, and by 2004 the World Wildlife Fund estimated 6,500. It remains listed as vulnerable and protected under CITES Appendix I, while projects in Mato Grosso do Sul ring birds and put up artificial nests. On 3 July 2025 that state adopted it as its symbolic bird.
Source: Hyacinth macaw
