Hyacinth Macaw

About the hyacinth macaw

The hyacinth macaw is a parrot native to central and eastern South America, and by length it is the largest parrot species alive. From the top of its head to the tip of its long, pointed tail, it measures about one meter, or roughly 3 feet 3 inches, and it is both the largest macaw and the largest flying parrot in the world. Its plumage is mostly blue, lighter across the back, with the neck feathers sometimes taking on a slightly grey cast. Large parts of the underwing and undertail are black by contrast. The most distinctive marks on the bird are not blue at all: a ring of bare, vibrant yellow skin circles each eye, and another patch of yellow skin sits just beneath the beak.

Weighing between 1.2 and 1.7 kg, with wings measuring 38.8 to 42.5 cm each, the hyacinth macaw carries an oversized, powerful beak that is central to how it lives. English physician and ornithologist John Latham first described the species in 1790, working from a taxidermied specimen that had once belonged to Lord Orford. The hyacinth macaw is one of only two living species — plus one likely extinct one — in the South American macaw genus Anodorhynchus, and it is easily recognized within its range, though it can be confused with the smaller Lear's macaw.

In the wild, the hyacinth macaw occurs today in three main areas: the Pantanal region of Brazil and adjoining parts of eastern Bolivia and northeastern Paraguay; the cerrado of eastern interior Brazil, spanning states including Maranhão, Piauí, Bahia, and Mato Grosso; and open areas along the Tocantins, Xingu, and Tapajós rivers and Marajó island in the eastern Amazon basin. It generally avoids dense, humid forest, sticking instead to the edges of such habitat or to genuinely open country, and it is often found near the moriche palm, a tree whose fruit sustains it.

Behavior and diet

Nuts make up the bulk of the hyacinth macaw's diet, especially those of the acuri and bocaiuva palms, though the bird also eats fruit and other plant matter and will travel widely to find the ripest food available. Its beak is strong enough to crack coconuts, Brazil nut pods, and macadamia nuts — a non-native food that has become a useful substitute in captivity, since it requires roughly 300 psi of pressure to open and the hyacinth macaw is one of the few birds strong enough to manage it. The acuri nut is so hard that the birds cannot eat it directly; it must first pass through the digestive system of cattle before the macaw can get at the kernel. English naturalist Henry Walter Bates described watching the birds crush palm nuts "so hard as to be difficult to break with a heavy hammer" using nothing but their beaks, a passage that led Charles Darwin to call the species a "splendid bird."

Limited tool use has also been documented in both wild and captive hyacinth macaws, dating back to observations from 1863. Birds will hold a chewed leaf or a scrap of wood against a nut to keep it from slipping while they gnaw into it, a behavior seen in hand-raised as well as wild-born macaws, with older individuals proving more efficient at it than younger ones.

Nesting takes place between July and December, in tree cavities or, in some parts of the range, cliff faces. In the Pantanal, 90 percent of nests are built in the manduvi tree, a species whose seeds are dispersed largely by the toco toucan — the same toucan that also consumes over half of hyacinth macaw eggs it finds. Suitable nesting hollows exist only in manduvi trees around 60 years of age or older, so competition for them is intense. A clutch is one or two eggs, incubated for about a month while the male tends to his mate, but typically only the first-hatched chick survives, since the second egg hatches several days later and the smaller chick cannot compete for food. Chicks fledge around 110 days old, stay dependent on their parents until six months, and do not begin breeding themselves until around age seven.

Range and habitat

The hyacinth macaw's range centers on Brazil, with populations extending into adjacent eastern Bolivia and northeastern Paraguay. In Bolivia, the known range has grown over recent decades; the bird is well established near the tri-national border with Brazil and Paraguay, where locals consider it emblematic of the region and sometimes feed it maize as they would chickens. Most of the Bolivian population is believed to live in the San Matías Integrated Management Natural Area, a swampy pantanal region where censuses in 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2014 counted roughly 100 to 230 birds at a time — numbers that are inherently rough given how difficult the terrain is to survey.

Across its range the hyacinth macaw favors semi-open, wooded country over dense rainforest, showing up in savannah grasslands, dry caatinga thorn forest, and palm stands or swamps. A 2014 Bolivian study found the birds most often in seasonally flooded savannas, wetlands, and — somewhat surprisingly — cattle ranches practicing extensive grazing, though the study's authors cautioned their methods might not be fully reliable. The species has also escaped or been deliberately released into Florida, but there is no evidence of a self-sustaining breeding population there.

Conservation status

The hyacinth macaw is classified as Vulnerable by the IUCN and is listed on Appendix I of CITES, which bans commercial export of wild-caught birds. The first serious population estimate, published in 1987, put the wild total around 3,000 birds, with a range of 2,500 to 5,000. By 2004, the World Wildlife Fund estimated the population had recovered somewhat to around 6,500, even though roughly 10,000 birds are believed to have been taken from the wild for trade during the 1980s alone.

The species' biggest threats are habitat loss and nest poaching. Cattle ranching, mechanized agriculture, hydroelectric development, and farmer-set grass fires have all reduced or degraded its range, and the bird's dependence on just one or two palm species for food, plus old-growth manduvi trees for nesting, leaves it vulnerable if either resource is disrupted. It is protected by law in both Brazil and Bolivia, and conservation groups including the Hyacinth Macaw Project in Mato Grosso do Sul have ringed individual birds and built artificial nests to make up for the shortage of natural cavities. The Minnesota Zoo works with BioBrasil and the World Wildlife Fund on hyacinth macaw conservation. In July 2025, Mato Grosso do Sul recognized the hyacinth macaw as its symbolic bird under state law, a designation local conservationists hope will support both preservation and tourism.