A beak like a nutcracker
It can crack a Brazil nut, and a broom handle.
Parrots · For experienced keepers
Scarlet macaw
Large parrot · from Central and South America
A huge red parrot with yellow and blue wings, a bare white face, a great hooked beak and a very long tail.
- Size
- 80 to 90cm long, with the tail
- Lives for
- 40 to 50 years or more
- Suits
- Specialists with an aviary or a room to give it
Flaps after you on enormous wings. Move your pointer and see.
Good to know
Six things about the macaw
Heard for miles
Its call carries for miles through the forest. Indoors, the neighbours will hear it.
It blushes
The bare skin of its face flushes pink when it is excited.
A pair for life
Wild macaws mate for life and fly so close together that their wings almost touch.
It eats clay
In the Amazon, macaws gather on riverbanks to eat clay, which may help them cope with poisons in seeds.
A lifetime
It can live for fifty years or more.
The real thing
Photos of the macaw
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Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
Looking after one
It needs an aviary or a room of its own, daily flying, strong toys to destroy, and a diet of pellets, nuts, fruit and vegetables. And ear plugs.
Before you get one
A macaw is magnificent, deafening and destructive. Very few homes can give it what it needs, and it will probably outlive its owner.
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