Endangered
Lear's Macaw
Anodorhynchus leari
Lear's macaw, also known as the indigo macaw, is a large all-blue Brazilian parrot, a member of a large group of neotropical parrots known as macaws.
Appearance
The body, tail, and wings are dark metallic blue with a faint, often barely visible, tinge of green, and the head is a slightly paler shade. It has an area of pale-yellow skin adjacent to the base of its beak, and orange-yellow eye rings. It has a large, blackish beak and dark grey feet.
Lear's macaw is 70–75 cm (27+1⁄2–29+1⁄2 in) long and weighs around 950 g (2 lb 2 oz).
It was first described by Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1856.
Range and habitat
For a century and a half after it had been described, the species was only known from sporadic occurrences in the bird trade, and the whereabouts of the wild population was unknown. This palm stand habitat is thought to have once stretched over 250,000 km2 (97,000 sq mi) in Brazil, but has been much reduced due to clearance for agriculture. Cattle grazing in the palm stands also appear to be damaging and killing the seedlings, thus posing a challenge for the recruitment of new mature palms -such stands were found to have very little young licury palms.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The primary diet of Lear's macaw are the nuts (as many as 350 per day) of the palm Syagrus coronata, locally known as licuri, but the seeds of Melanoxylon, Jatropha mollissima, Dioclea, Spondias tuberosa, Schinopsis brasiliensis and Zea mays are also eaten, as well as the flowers of Agave. The macaw usually forages in groups.
If it is, then the macaws generally feed directly at the site, tearing the fibrous pulp off the fruit to obtain the extremely hard and thick-shelled nut. The mating season starts at the beginning of the summer rains, at the start of the year, and extends up to May, when the young begin to fledge and leave the nest.
In crisis
The wild population was surveyed as some 170 individuals in 2000. BI estimated a population of 250–500 mature wild individuals in 2008, arguing that because the population was probably increasing, most of the birds counted by in recent surveys were probably juveniles and therefore did not count as to the total population. BI states that if these juveniles mature over the next few years and the population grows from 250–500 to over 250 individuals, the species would need to be downlisted in the future.
The population growth was stated to be uncertain, with BI reasoning that because in the 1990s some 40 birds had been trapped for the pet trade, that had represented a "very rapid decline", it was unclear if the increasing population was increasing. This states that if 95% or more of the population is found in a single subpopulation, and the total population is 2,500 or less, the species should be assessed as endangered.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Lear's Macaw is 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 Lear's Macaw, Wikidata item Q838955. 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.
