Scarlet Macaws Aren’t The Best Parents, As They Purposefully Neglect Their Youngest Chicks
Scarlet Macaws have personality, flair, and a bright red, yellow, and blue color scheme that turns heads. They also mate for life and are known to form strong bonds with humans when kept as pets.
With their loyal character, charm, and rainbow of feathers, it seems that they can do no wrong. However, these birds are not as perfect as they appear to be.
Scarlet Macaws might make excellent mates and wonderful companions, but they are neglectful parents, often abandoning their chicks.
They tend to show favoritism when feeding their chicks, purposefully ignoring the youngest offspring in the brood.
Scientists from Texas A&M University have come up with a way to compensate for the birds’ bad parenting, ensuring that fewer chicks die from neglect.
Even when an abundance of resources is available, scarlet macaws will neglect to feed their youngest chicks.
As a result, only one or two chicks are able to fledge, which is the process of teaching young birds to fly and survive on their own. Broods can host up to four chicks.
“Scientists have known for years that Scarlet Macaws hatch more chicks than they fledge,” said Donald Brightsmith, a professor at Texas A&M.
“We found that 26 percent of second chicks in Scarlet Macaw broods and nearly all third and fourth chicks die before fledging.”
Martin Mecnarowski – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only – pictured above a Scarlet Macaw sits in a branch
The researchers tested multiple theories as to why these chicks do not make it to adulthood. The cause behind their deaths was not sibling rivalry or even a lack of food. The parents simply stop feeding certain chicks, and they end up starving to death.
According to Gabriela Vigo-Trauco, the leader of the study and a postdoctoral researcher with the Schubot Center for Avian Health, Scarlet Macaws do not lay all their eggs at once.
Instead, they lay their eggs over a period of several days, meaning that their chicks do not hatch at the same time.
“If the second chick hatches only a couple of days after the first, there is a good chance that the parents will feed it. However, if it hatches four, five, or more days after the first chick, the parents will probably neglect it and let it die,” said Vigo-Trauco.
This may be because chicks that hatch four or more days apart have different needs. For instance, some chicks need feeding, while others still require incubating. The parents can’t take care of all of them, so they choose one or two to focus on.
Once the team learned of these parental dynamics, they developed a strategy to help neglected chicks survive by assigning them macaw “foster parents.”
Neglected chicks are raised in captivity for a few weeks before joining the nests of chicks at a similar developmental stage or that have lost all their chicks to predators.
Over the course of three breeding seasons, a total of 28 chicks have been successfully re-homed.
Chicks that would have been starved now get to grow up and become the beautiful, stunning birds they were meant to be.
“Thankfully, Scarlet Macaws are not endangered or threatened, but there are many parrot species that are,” said Brightsmith.
“We hope that this foster program will be used to help save the populations of endangered parrot species.”
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