Beer Can Hill

Today I finished reading The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw by Bruce Barcott. It is about Sharon Matola’s crusade to save a population of wild Scarlet Macaws in Belize. Sharon Matola founded and runs The Belize Zoo.

I’m going to admit up front that I am not a science or history buff, and this book was full of information that would appeal to either crowd. I checked the book out of the library because I live with two macaws and wanted to read about how they live in the wild. Chapter 8 of this book was the only portion that talked about that topic and I was disappointed.

According to my macaw book, there are two distinct populations of wild scarlet macaws (Ara macao) in Central and South America. The only visual difference is the yellow wing band is less pronounced on the southern flocks. Neither population is considered a subspecies.

Barcott’s book, however, claims that they are separate subspecies. He states that ornithologist David Wiedenfeld named the northern Belize population Ara macao cyanoptera in an article published in Ornitologia Neotropical in 1994. Wiedenfeld noted that the scarlet macaws north of Costa Rica had no green band in their wing feathers and he felt that this was a striking difference.

I’m not a scientist of any form, but it seems to me that color variation is common in most parrot species, particularly when they are kept in captivity. I am also wondering if perhaps the scarlet macaws had intermingled with the green-winged macaws (Ara chloroptera) in their regions. Green-winged macaws are also red macaws, but they are larger and have no yellow in their wings. Here is a YouTube clip of scarlets and green-wings munching on lava rock to break down the toxins found in native seeds.