Scarlet Macaw Facts

The scarlet macaw measures about 32 to 36 inches from head to tail tip — more than half of it tail — and weighs 2 to 2.5 pounds. The head, chest, and upper body are scarlet, with yellow wing coverts, blue flight feathers, and a bare white face crossed by fine red feathers. The curved beak has a mobile upper mandible that generates enough force to open hard nuts and palm seeds, while a muscular tongue extracts the kernel. Zygodactyl feet — two toes forward and two back — let the bird climb and hold food. It belongs to the parrot family Psittacidae, genus Ara.

The scarlet macaw has a huge but highly fragmented range across the Neotropics, from southern Mexico's Selva Maya south through Central America — Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama — and widely across the Amazon basin of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. It is an obligate resident of lowland tropical rainforest, humid evergreen forest, and riverside woodland, depending heavily on primary, undisturbed forest because it needs massive, ancient emergent trees like the ceiba that rise above the canopy — these giants supply the deep natural cavities it nests in and the vantage points for territory and long foraging flights.

Scarlet macaws are specialized frugivores and granivores whose diverse diet tracks the canopy's seasonal fruiting — large seeds, nuts, fruits, flowers, and nectar. Unlike toucans that swallow fruit whole and pass seeds intact, macaws are mainly "seed predators," using the powerful beak to destroy a fruit's armored or toxic husk and digest the nutrient-rich kernel inside. A striking part of their strategy is geophagy: in parts of the Amazon, especially Peru's Tambopata, hundreds of macaws and other parrots gather daily on exposed riverbank clay licks (collpas) to eat clay, which scientists think both supplies dietary sodium missing from their plant diet and binds and neutralizes the toxic alkaloids in the unripe seeds they eat.

Scarlet macaws are deeply social, intelligent, and loud. The core unit is a monogamous pair, often for life, intensely affectionate and constantly allopreening to maintain the bond, and outside breeding these pairs gather into loose flocks — sometimes dozens strong — at clay licks and big fruiting trees. Their calls are notoriously loud: deafening squawks, screeches, and throaty guttural notes that carry across miles of sound-dampening canopy to keep contact with a mate and warn of predators. They are powerful, direct fliers, traveling up to 15 miles a day between roosts and feeding sites with a shallow, stiff wingbeat.

Scarlet macaws breed slowly, so populations recover gradually after losses. They are secondary cavity nesters that rely on natural hollows in large dead or dying hardwoods and compete with other animals for these sites. The female lays 1 to 4 eggs and incubates them for 24 to 28 days while the male brings food. Both parents feed the chicks for 3 to 4 months before fledging and continue supporting them as they learn to forage. Wild scarlet macaws may live 40 to 50 years, with some captive birds living more than 70 years.

The IUCN rates the scarlet macaw Least Concern overall for its vast Amazon range, but that hides severe local extinctions, especially for the northern subspecies Ara macao cyanoptera in Central America, which is highly endangered. The main driver is accelerating deforestation of the Neotropics for cattle, logging, and agriculture, destroying both food sources and the ancient nesting trees. Compounding it is the illegal wildlife trade: prized for beauty and intelligence, chicks are poached from nests — often by felling the entire nesting tree, which permanently removes that habitat. Harpy eagles and jaguars are natural predators, but human impacts dwarf them; conservation leans on artificial nest boxes, anti-poaching patrols, and ecotourism that makes wild macaws worth more alive than caught.

• IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Ara macao
• World Wildlife Fund (WWF): Macaw
• San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance: Macaw
• Cornell Lab of Ornithology (Neotropical Birds): Scarlet Macaw