Every evening about a dozen blue-and-gold macaws arrive at Karem Guevara’s apartment in Caracas. They land on her windowsill, call loudly and accept sunflower seeds and banana slices. ‘These birds are like part of my family,’ Guevara says; she has been feeding them from her living room for five years. Occasionally they bring chicks, a sign of trust and successful breeding.
The colorful macaws are not native to Caracas, but their numbers in the capital have risen over the last two decades. Hundreds now cross the city, and many residents leave food on balconies and in gardens. The birds have become a distinctive, beloved feature of urban life.
That presence is now at risk because municipal crews are removing the old palm trees the macaws rely on for nesting. Biologist Maria Lourdes Gonzalez of Simon Bolivar University, who studies the birds, warns that without suitable nest sites the local macaw population could decline 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 the chaguaramo, known as the royal palm. They use trunks that have lost their crowns and are decaying—those partly hollowed cores, often created by insects, provide the cavities the birds need. City crews are cutting these trees from parks and public spaces to make areas look tidier and to reduce the risk of falling, rotting trunks. Those reasons make sense for public safety, but the removals also eliminate crucial nesting habitat.
Gonzalez notes that the species does not build stick platform nests; they occupy holes inside old trunks. Because the macaws were introduced to Caracas—likely during the 1970s when pet owners released birds they could no longer keep—she says a decline in the city’s macaws would not disrupt native ecosystems. Still, losing them would erase an unusual chapter of Caracas’s urban wildlife.
The birds’ presence traces back to escaped or released pet macaws. ‘Macaws are terrible pets,’ Gonzalez says: they are loud and difficult to manage in apartments. Caracas’s mild climate, tree-covered mountains and availability of fruit and seeds helped feral macaws survive and reproduce. The introduced royal palms provided nesting sites, and the lack 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 carry out a new count to see how recent palm removals have affected numbers, 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 and 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 serving Venezuelans abroad who miss 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 city managers pursue safety and aesthetic improvements by removing decaying palms, residents and researchers worry that the very trees the introduced macaws need to reproduce are disappearing—threatening a distinctive urban wildlife presence developed over decades.