Hyacinth Macaw

Hyacinth Macaw battle analysis

The hyacinth macaw is a specialist built around one extraordinary tool. Its huge black bill, powered by jaw muscles that produced a mean measured bite of about 539 N in live birds, lets it live almost entirely on palm nuts that few other animals can open. It holds the nut with its foot and tongue, sometimes wedges a chewed leaf against it, and chisels a line across the shell until it splits cleanly. In the Pantanal it even collects acuri nuts from cattle dung, after the cattle have eaten the fruit and passed the nuts.

Its life is tied to a few plants. It eats one or two palm species in each part of its range and nests almost only in old manduvi trees whose hollows take about 60 years to form. The toco toucan spreads most manduvi seeds and also takes about half of the macaw eggs lost to predators. Trapping for the pet trade in the 1970s and 1980s cut the wild population to a few thousand; protection by ranchers, artificial nests and the CITES Appendix I listing have helped it recover in the Pantanal.

In an absolute matchup the hyacinth has the best bite of any bird on the roster, but it sits on a 1.3 kg body with feathers for armor and feet made for holding nuts, not prey. It can deliver a crippling bite to anything small enough to be caught in it and can fly away from ground threats. Against a raptor or a carnivore that seizes it, that single weapon is not enough.

Habitat & range

The hyacinth macaw lives in central South America in three main areas: the Pantanal of Brazil with adjacent eastern Bolivia and north-eastern Paraguay; the cerrado of interior eastern Brazil; and open areas along the Tocantins, Xingu and Tapajós rivers and Marajó Island in the eastern Amazon basin. It uses palm savanna, forest edge, dry woodland with gallery forest, and swampy stands of palms such as the moriche palm. The key requirement is the presence of its food palms.

Diet & hunting

It feeds mainly on the nuts of a few palm species in each region. In the Pantanal the main palms are acuri (Attalea phalerata) and bocaiuva (Acrocomia aculeata); in the Amazon it uses Maximiliana, Orbignya and Astrocaryum; in north-eastern Brazil it uses Attalea funifera and Syagrus coronata (WPT). It also takes other fruit and apple snails. Its link with the toco toucan is unusual: the toucan spreads most seeds of the manduvi tree the macaw nests in, but is also its main egg predator.

Social life

Hyacinths live in pairs, family groups or small flocks of up to about 10 birds, and are noisy and conspicuous. Peak feeding activity is in the morning and late afternoon (WPT).

Conservation

The hyacinth macaw is listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN and is on CITES Appendix I. WPT gives a world population of about 4,700–11,000 mature birds. The first estimate, in 1987, was about 3,000 birds, after heavy trapping: an estimated 10,000 were taken from the wild in the 1980s. Threats are trapping for the cage-bird trade, burning and clearing of habitat, and the scarcity of old nest trees. It remains locally common in the Brazilian Pantanal, where many ranchers now protect it, and the Hyacinth Macaw Project has added artificial nests to make up for lost cavities.

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