Spix's Macaw

Appearance

Spix's macaw is easy to identify being the only small blue macaw and also by the bare grey facial skin of its lores and eyerings. Its plumage is grey-blue on the head, pale blue on the underparts, and vivid blue on the upperparts, wings and tail. The legs and feet are brownish-black.

It is about 56 cm (22 in) long among them tail length of 26–38 cm (10–15 in). It has a wing length of 24.7–30.0 cm (9.7–11.8 in).

It was first described in 1638 by German naturalist Georg Marcgrave when he was working in Pernambuco in Dutch Brazil.

Range and habitat

Spix's macaw was most recently (1974–1987) known in the Río São Francisco valley, in northeastern Brazil, principally in the basins on the south side of the river in the State of Bahia. In 1974, ornithologist Helmut Sick, based on information from traders and trappers, extended the possible range of the Spix's macaw to embrace the northeastern part of the state of Goias and the southern part of the state of Maranhão. Other ornithologists reporting the bird in various parts of the state of Piauí further extended the range to a vast area of the dry interior of northeast Brazil.

Other Spixs are located at Loro Parque Foundation, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Association for the Conservation of Threatened Parrots (ACTP) in Berlin, Germany, NEST in Brazil and Pairi Daiza in Belgium.

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

Diet and breeding

However these trees are colonizers, not native to the bird's habitat, so they could not have been historical staples of the diet. Its diet also included seeds and nuts from Joazeiro (Ziziphus joazeiro), Baraúna (Schinopsis brasiliensis), Imburana (Commiphora leptophloeos or Bursera leptophloeos), Facheiro (Pilosocereus piauhyensis), Phoradendron species, Caraibeira (Tabebuia caraiba), Angico (Anadenanthera macrocarpa), Umbu (Spondias tuberosa) and Unha-de-gato (Acacia paniculata).

It is suspected that late maturity in captivity may be due to inbreeding or other artificial environmental factors, as other parrots of similar size reach sexual maturity in two to four years. In the wild, mating involves elaborate courtship rituals, like feeding each other and flying together. The breeding season is November to March, with most eggs hatching in January to coincide with the start of the Caatinga January to April rainy season.

In crisis

This bird has been completely extirpated from its natural range, and following a several-year-long survey, the IUCN officially declared it extinct in the wild in 2019. Even so, after over 20 years of conservation efforts, 200 macaws have been bred from captive birds, and 52 individual birds have since been reintroduced into their natural environment in June 2022. At that time, the known captive population of Spix's stood at 15, and one in the wild.

Efforts to clear the habitat of introduced predators and restore the natural Caraibeira seedlings and important creek systems are ongoing on the land. Highlights of the plan are to increase the captive population to 150 specimens (expected by 2020), build a breeding facility in Brazil within the Spix's native habitat, acquire and restore additional portions of its range, and prepare for its release into the wild between 2017 and 2021.

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

Spix's Macaw is Extinct in the Wild 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 Spix's Macaw, Wikidata item Q743214. 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.