Birds and Birding's Guide to:

Watching THE CUCKOO-LIKE BIRDS

THE PARROTS

Macaws

Brazil and adjacent Paraguay is the home of two genera and four species of large Macaws which are characterized by an incomplete orbital ring and a plumage which is blue throughout. The first of the genera (Anodorhynchus), separated largely on the ground of feathered lores, is best exemplified by the Hyacinthine Macaw (A. hyacinthinus) of the central provinces of Brazil.

It is a splendid bird but little under three feet in length, the plumage being nearly uniform cobalt-blue, relieved by bright yellow skin about the eyes and at the base of the lower mandible, and the black, very powerful bill. This appears to be everywhere a rare species, occurring, according to Riker, about the inland ponds in the dense forests of the interior, where it feeds upon the fruit of a palm peculiar to these localities. Some of the palm fruits are so hard that it requires a sharp blow with a heavy hammer to break one, yet they are crushed to pulp by the powerful bills.

Its nesting habits, as we are told by Azara, differ from those of most other Macaws in that they excavate a hole in the river bank for their nest instead of placing it in a hollow tree; the eggs are said to be two in number. In Spix's Macaw (Cyanopsittacus spixi) of the province of Bahia, Brazil, the lores are naked and the general color also blue, but parts of the head are more or less grayish; its length is but twenty-two inches.

 

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