What Happened to the Scarlet Macaw in the Yucatán Peninsula?

Photo by Angelo Rodriguez Greco - Xcaret

About a month ago, I visited Xcaret, a well-known nature and cultural park here in Quintana Roo, with my family. As I stood watching their Scarlet Macaws perched nearby, I found myself returning to a question I had wondered about before: what happened to the Scarlet Macaw in the Yucatán Peninsula?

I knew about Xcaret's successful breeding program and the reintroduction of Scarlet Macaws in other parts of Mexico, but seeing the birds here brought the question back to me. Were Scarlet Macaws once flying over the forests of the Yucatán Peninsula? Where exactly did they live? When and why did they disappear? And if we are successfully breeding them here today, could they ever return to the wild?

Looking into those questions took me much further back in time than I expected.

A Macaw in the Maya World

Long before birders traveled to Mexico hoping to see its endemics and colorful birds, macaws already occupied an important place in Maya stories, art and beliefs.

One of the best-known examples appears in the Popol Wuj, in the story of Seven Macaw and the Hero Twins. Seven Macaw is a magnificent and arrogant bird who claims the brilliance and authority of the sun and moon. The Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, eventually confront him, and Hunahpu shoots the great bird with his blowgun while Seven Macaw is feeding in a tree.

What makes this story particularly interesting is that it was passed down through oral tradition before being written during the colonial period. The story itself is much older: pre-Hispanic Maya art contains scenes associated with the same mythological episode, including representations of the great bird and the Hero Twins with their blowguns.

We don't have to travel outside the Yucatán Peninsula to find evidence of the importance of macaws in the Maya world. A Late Classic vessel from Balamkú, Campeche, depicts a Scarlet Macaw associated with the sun. Another vessel from Becán represents the chak mo', or Scarlet Macaw, with its wings spread. The famous Blom Plate, originating from the Chetumal Bay area in what is now Quintana Roo, depicts the great bird associated with Seven Macaw together with the Hero Twins and their blowguns.

The Blom Plate, from Chetumal Bay, Quintana Roo, depicts Itz'am Yeh, later known as Seven Macaw, in the episode associated with the Hero Twins and their blowguns. © Secretaría de Cultura–INAH.

The relationship extended beyond the Maya. Macaws and their spectacular feathers were highly valued throughout Mesoamerica and traveled considerable distances through ancient trade networks. At Paquimé, in what is now Chihuahua, archaeological evidence shows that Scarlet Macaws were kept and even bred far beyond the species' natural distribution.

Clearly, seeing a macaw represented at an archaeological site doesn't necessarily tell us that wild macaws lived there. Birds themselves, their feathers, ideas and stories could all travel. This distinction became particularly important as I started looking into where Scarlet Macaws actually occurred in the Yucatán Peninsula.

Where Did They Actually Live?

The historical range of the Scarlet Macaw in Mexico was once enormous compared with what remains today. The species occurred through tropical areas of eastern and southeastern Mexico, from southern Tamaulipas through Veracruz, Oaxaca, Tabasco and Chiapas, reaching Campeche on the Yucatán Peninsula.

So we do know that Scarlet Macaws were once part of the peninsula's natural birdlife, at least in Campeche.

What is less clear is how far their natural distribution extended beyond Campeche. So far, I have not found equally strong evidence demonstrating historical wild populations in the present day states of Yucatán or Quintana Roo. This is especially interesting considering how strongly macaws appear in Maya art and mythology throughout the region.

Their cultural distribution, in other words, was considerably wider than the natural distribution we can currently document.

At some point, however, Scarlet Macaws also disappeared from Campeche.

How Did We Lose Them?

It is difficult to imagine a bird like the Scarlet Macaw simply disappearing. They are large, colorful and extremely vocal. Yet the species eventually vanished from almost all of its historical range in Mexico.

There probably wasn't one single cause. The destruction and fragmentation of tropical forest removed both feeding areas and the large, mature trees Scarlet Macaws need for nesting. Hunting and capture for the pet trade placed additional pressure on populations. A spectacular, intelligent and long lived bird was inevitably highly desirable in captivity.

This also made me wonder about something much older. If macaws and their feathers were so valuable to pre-Hispanic cultures, could they have been hunted so heavily that this contributed to their disappearance?

We know that macaws were captured, traded, kept and even bred by pre-Hispanic societies. What I have not found, however, is evidence that would allow us to blame the ancient Maya for the disappearance of Scarlet Macaws from Campeche. The much better documented pressures are the modern ones: destruction and fragmentation of tropical forest, hunting and wildlife trafficking. In Campeche, the loss of tall evergreen tropical forest has specifically been identified as an important factor in the species' local extinction.

Today, Mexico's remaining original wild populations are concentrated mainly in Chiapas, a tiny fraction of a distribution that once extended much farther north.

What Did Scarlet Macaws Find to Eat Here?

I remember watching Scarlet Macaws in Costa Rica feeding on tropical almonds and wondering about the trees they depended on. Tropical almond (Terminalia catappa), as it turns out, isn't even native to the Americas. Scarlet Macaws have simply learned to take advantage of it, just as they exploit a wide variety of foods throughout their range.

Their natural diet consists largely of fruits and seeds, along with flowers, shoots and other plant material. In southern Mexico, studies have documented native foods such as jobo (Spondias mombin), among many others. Their enormous bills allow them to open fruits and seeds inaccessible to many other birds.

But having enough food is not enough. Scarlet Macaws also need large, mature trees with suitable cavities in which to nest. In Chiapas, nests have been documented in ceibas, figs and other native forest trees. A suitable macaw forest therefore needs more than tree cover. It needs old trees, food resources, nesting cavities and enough connected habitat for large birds that move considerable distances through the landscape.

Understanding those requirements becomes particularly important when we start talking about bringing a species back.

Bringing the Scarlet Macaw Back

Photo: CONANP by A.BORGARO

This is where the story returns to the macaws I was watching at Xcaret.

Xcaret, here in Quintana Roo, has developed a highly successful breeding program for Scarlet Macaws. Rather than simply maintaining a captive population, birds produced through the program have helped establish new wild populations in parts of Mexico where the species had disappeared.

The program itself has a fairly long history. Xcaret began its Psittacidae breeding program in 1993, and it later developed into a conservation program focused on restoring Scarlet Macaws to Mexican forests. Before birds are selected for release, potential sites are evaluated and the birds themselves undergo genetic, health and behavioral assessments.

In 2013, Scarlet Macaws were reintroduced near Palenque, Chiapas, where the species had been absent for more than 70 years. A second reintroduction program followed in Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, in 2014.

Of course, bringing back a species is considerably more complicated than transporting birds to a forest and opening a cage. Before release, the macaws need to be prepared for life outside captivity. They need strong flight skills, must recognize natural foods, interact appropriately with other macaws and avoid becoming dependent on people. The projects used carefully managed soft releases and continued monitoring the birds after they began living freely. The Palenque project was designed according to IUCN reintroduction guidelines and included genetic testing to ensure the released birds belonged to Ara macao cyanoptera, the subspecies native to Mexico and northern Central America.

Perhaps the most encouraging result is that the story didn't end with the released birds surviving. The restoration efforts have created new free living populations in areas from which Scarlet Macaws had disappeared.

Standing at Xcaret and knowing that birds from this breeding program had helped restore wild populations elsewhere in Mexico made my original question even more interesting.

Why not here?

Why Aren't Scarlet Macaws Being Released in the Yucatán?

At first, the idea seems obvious. Scarlet Macaws are successfully bred in Quintana Roo. The Yucatán Peninsula still contains large areas of tropical forest. Why take the birds to Veracruz and Chiapas instead of releasing some of them here?

But a reintroduction doesn't begin by asking whether an animal could live somewhere. It begins by asking whether it belongs there.

Conservationists need to establish that the species historically occurred in an area, determine whether enough suitable habitat remains, understand why the original population disappeared and decide whether those threats have been sufficiently reduced. Food, nesting sites, genetics, connectivity, human pressure and the risk of illegal capture all have to be considered.

This helps explain why releasing Scarlet Macaws in Quintana Roo isn't necessarily as logical as it first appears. Despite their enormous importance in Maya culture and archaeological representations from the region, I have not found convincing evidence that a wild population historically occurred in Quintana Roo.

Campeche, however, is different. We know Scarlet Macaws once lived there.

And that leads to the question I am now most curious about.

Could Scarlet Macaws Return to Campeche?

Campeche still contains some of Mexico's largest expanses of protected tropical forest. Looking at those forests, it is tempting to imagine Scarlet Macaws flying over them again. Whether they actually could is a much more complicated question.

A future reintroduction would require careful evaluation of habitat quality, food availability, mature nesting trees, connectivity, human pressures and the threat of capture. We would also need to understand whether the habitat that supported Scarlet Macaws historically still exists in sufficient quantity and quality today.

So far, I have not found evidence of a formal Scarlet Macaw reintroduction program planned for Campeche. For now, it remains a question rather than a proposal. But it is a question worth asking.

For centuries, macaws occupied an extraordinary place in the stories, art and memory of the Maya world. Eventually, Scarlet Macaws disappeared from the forests of Campeche, while surviving in Maya imagery and stories.

Today something unexpected has happened. Scarlet Macaws bred here on the Yucatán Peninsula have helped return their species to forests elsewhere in Mexico where they had been absent for generations. Perhaps there is still another chapter to this story.

Could Scarlet Macaws someday return to the forests of the Yucatán Peninsula?