Every evening about a dozen blue-and-gold macaws fly up to Karem Guevara’s apartment in Caracas. The birds perch on her windowsill, call loudly and accept sunflower seeds and banana slices. “These birds are like part of my family,” says Guevara, who has been feeding macaws from her living room for five years. Sometimes the birds bring chicks, a sign they trust her.
Blue-and-gold macaws are not native to Caracas, but their numbers in the capital have grown over the past two decades. Hundreds now fly across the city, dazzling residents with their colors and calls. Many people leave food for them on balconies and in gardens, and the birds have become a local symbol.
That bond is at risk because city authorities are cutting down the old palm trees the macaws use to nest. Biologist Maria Lourdes Gonzalez, who studies the birds at Simon Bolivar University, warns that without suitable nesting sites the macaw population in Caracas could fall sharply. “If they don’t find a place where they can breed, there will be no new generation of macaws,” she says.
In Caracas the macaws nest almost exclusively in a palm known as the chaguaramo, or royal palm. They use trunks that have lost their leaves and are decaying—those partly hollowed out by insects provide the cavities the birds need. City crews are removing these old palms from parks and public spaces to beautify areas and reduce the risk of falling, rotting trunks—actions that make sense for public safety but remove critical nesting habitat.
Gonzalez notes the macaws do not build platform nests of sticks; they occupy holes inside old trunks. Because the species was introduced to Caracas—likely in the 1970s when pet owners released birds as they became difficult to keep—the biologist says a decline in city macaws wouldn’t disrupt native ecosystems. Still, their loss would erase an unusual part of Caracas’s urban life.
The birds’ presence began when pet macaws were set free or escaped. “Macaws are terrible pets,” Gonzalez says: loud and hard to live with in apartments. The mild climate and the mountainous, tree-covered surroundings of Caracas, which supply fruits and seeds, helped feral macaws survive. The introduced royal palms provided nesting sites, and the absence of natural predators like harpy eagles or monkeys made reproduction easier.
About ten years ago Gonzalez conducted a census and estimated roughly 400 blue-and-gold macaws in the city. She wants to run a new count to measure how recent palm removals have affected the population, but she lacks funding. With a public university salary of about $160 a month, she cannot afford gas to travel the city for a solo survey, so she plans to rely on volunteers using a different methodology than her first census.
Photographer Mabel Cornago, who has fed macaws for 15 years, says it would be “terrible” if their numbers dwindled; the birds are “a symbol” of Caracas. Cornago has taken more than 40,000 macaw photos and sells prints to shops for Venezuelans abroad who long for images of home. “For me these birds are like angels,” she says, “who came to us as our country was going through very difficult times.”
As Caracas managers pursue urban safety and aesthetics by removing decaying palms, residents and researchers worry that the very trees the city’s colorful, introduced macaws need to reproduce are disappearing—threatening a distinctive urban wildlife presence built over decades.