Great Green Macaw

Appearance

Great green macaws are the largest parrots in their natural range, the second heaviest macaw species (although they are relatively shorter tailed than other large macaws such as the red-and-green macaw and are thus somewhat shorter), and the third heaviest parrot species in the world. The tail is brownish-red tipped with very pale blue. The bare facial skin is patterned with lines of small dark feathers, that are reddish in older and female parrots.

This species averages 85–90 cm (33.5–35.5 in) in length and 1.3 kg (2.9 lb) in weight.

Range and habitat

The great green macaw lives in tropical forests in the Atlantic wet lowlands of Central America from Honduras to Panama and Colombia, and in South America in the Pacific coastal lowlands in Panama, Colombia and western Ecuador, where they also occur in deciduous (seasonal), dry tropical forests. In Colombia, where both species occur, it prefers more humid woodlands than the closely related military macaw. The habitat where it breeds in Costa Rica is practically non-seasonal, evergreen rainforest, with rain some ten months of the year, a precipitation of 1,500 to 3,500 mm a year, and an average temperature of 27 °C throughout the year.

In the early 2010s a flock of 36 birds was seen in Río Canandé Reserve in northern Ecuador, disproving the low estimate. As of 2015 Indio-Maíz Biological Reserve in Nicaragua is threatened by settlers moving into the reserve to found farms, especially of subsidence agriculture, oil palm and cattle.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

In Costa Rica it breeds in the lowlands, but disperses to higher elevations afterwards, gathering together in flocks that migrate in search of food. This species rests and forages in the upper areas of the canopy.

The great green macaw's breeding season starts in December and ends in June in Costa Rica, and from August to October in Ecuador. The nest cavity has no specific orientation.

In crisis

The first estimate of world totals of the wild population was 5,000 birds in 1993, 2,500 to 10,000 birds in 2000, and less than 2,499 in 2002 in the first Red List of birds of Colombia. In 2004–2005 Jahn sent an unpublished estimate to Bird Life International (BLI) of 2,500 mature individuals, or some than 3,700 individuals among them young, of that he believed 1,700 to 2,500 were to be found in the Panama-Colombia borderlands. BLI somehow derived an estimated total world population of 1,000 to 2,500 from that in 2005, and has maintained that number in subsequent assessments despite conflicting evidence.

All these previous estimates were basically guesses, but in 2009 Monge et al.. Performed calculations using known population densities, satellite imagery and the known ranges, and estimated a total population of 7,000, of that 1,530 were to be found in Costa Rica and the southeastern portion of Nicaragua, and 302 in Costa Rica. An unreferenced global population estimate by the American Bird Conservancy in 2016 put the population at 3,500.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Great Green Macaw is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Great Green Macaw, Wikidata item Q846974. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.