Macaws are large, colorful, and loud parrots. There are at least 17 species of these spectacular parrots across the rainforests and savannas of South America. Macaws have disappeared from large parts of their ranges in South America, often due to the illegal pet trade. People capture wild macaws and keep them as pets or sell them on the international market.
The blue-and-yellow macaw is named for the colors of its plumage. In São Simão, in northwestern São Paulo state, Brazil, this macaw went locally extinct more than 50 years ago.
A team of conservationists is restoring blue-and-yellow macaws to the wild around São Simão. They are using new techniques to train the macaws to return to the wild.
The traditional method for releasing parrots into the wild is to use young birds born in captivity. These birds are released into the wild at 2-3 years old. However, this method can cause many problems for the young parrots.
Chris Biro is one of the conservationists involved in restoring blue-and-gold macaws to São Simão. He explains why using captive-born macaws for restoring the macaw population could be a problem: “If you raise an animal in a cage until it’s 2 or 3 years old, it will hardly know how to defend itself from predators or look for food because it’s being provided. It won’t have any navigational skills. And then you open the door to the enclosure, and they have to find their way around in an environment they don’t know. And that’s the biggest problem conservation programs face when releasing birds into the wild. It’s as if you raised a teenager all his life in a closed room and then suddenly released him into a crowded shopping mall.”
Humberto Mendes is a biology professor and another member of the macaw restoration team. He explains more about why using captive-born macaws is a problem: “When they are raised in captivity, in a closed environment, these animals are even afraid of the sun. They’re afraid of the wind, of butterflies flying, of falling leaves.”
Free-flight training is a new approach to restore macaws
The São Simão macaw restoration team’s method for restoring the macaws is both new and ancient: free-flight training. It is new because it has not been used for parrot conservation before. It is ancient because it is based on falconry, the millennia-old art of training birds of prey to fly.
Two male and four female blue-and-gold macaw chicks were selected from breeders for free-flight training. During training, they were accompanied by three other adult birds of the same species. The older macaws taught the young ones how to fly and behave in flocks.
The macaw team trained the macaw chicks at a young age, between 90 and 120 days old.
“We use a mobile cage, and as soon as the chicks have the slightest ability to fly, we encourage them to jump between two points to be fed. Little by little, we increase the distance. Then we fly them out of the aviary and back again,” Chris Biro explains.
As the length of the chicks’ flights got longer, they were given less and less food. This change in feeding forced the macaws to look for food in the wild and to stop depending on humans.
“Within two weeks, the macaws were flying normally, like free-living individuals. Their instincts were being developed for the natural environment and not that of a cage,” says Chris Biro.
Just over two years after their release in 2022, all six macaws are still alive and thriving in their wild habitat.
The São Simão macaw restoration team has high hopes for this free-flight training technique. They hope it can be used to help more birds fly freely in the skies of their native homes, especially where they have become extinct.
David Brown adapted this story for Mongabay Kids. It is based on an article by Suzana Camargo, published on Mongabay News.
