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The Macaw Recovery Project at Manu Wildlife Center

Large macaws are declining in much or most of their range in Central and South America, but at Manu Wildlife Center, Peru Verde conservation group, working in conjunction with the US conservation group Tropical Nature, is reversing this negative trend.

Specifically, Peru Verde and Tropical Nature are actively protecting large macaws by guarding two large macaw clay licks in the Manu Wildlife Center area and are patrolling to prevent any hunting of macaws or robbing of macaw nestlings or cutting of macaw nest trees in an area about the size of the US State of Rhode Island. Additionally, Peru Verde is hanging artificial nest boxes for macaws, in this case made of 6-foot-long sections of thick, 14-inch-diameter PVC pipes fitted with special features to help the macaws nest successfully inside.

The forests of the Manu Wildlife Center area were logged in the 1960's through the 1980's for several species of hardwoods, including two species of mahogany and two other species of trees that have very hard, beautiful wood that is made into parquet flooring. These two species are the towering legume species Dipteryx alata (called "shihuahuaco" in Peru) and the majestic Iriartea deltoides palm (called "pona" in Peru). Both species were heavily exploited in the region that now is the conservation forest of Peru Verde in the Manu Wildlife Center region. In 1990, Peru Verde managed to begin systematic protection of these forests, and now the area offers the finest wildlife tourism in the entire Amazon basin (according to Condé Nast Traveler Magazine, among other sources).

After only 17 years of protection, the macaw populations are bouncing back considerably, and the birds have become common and easy to see. Nevertheless, the recovery is far from complete, because their favorite nest trees (the palm and the legume) have not yet recovered, as both are very slow growing. Consequently, to ensure that macaw populations in the Manu Wildlife Center area can continue to grow and keep pace with the threats to wild macaws outside our protected region, Peru Verde and Tropical Nature are hanging these artificial nests to allow every adult pair of macaws interested in breeding to find suitable nest sites. Even without the destruction of so many nest trees for parquet flooring during the period of 1960 to 1989, the scientists of Peru Verde and Tropical Nature showed in the 1990's that there is a natural shortage of large tree cavities in completely virgin, unlogged forest in the Amazon. Thus, the cutting of many of the most important nest trees reduced the ability of the macaws to reproduce. The current project is designed to redress this imbalance and to help the macaws of the Manu Wildlife Center region to recover to their pristine population sizes and thus grace the forests of Manu and the rest of Amazonian Peru for centuries to come.

For more information on our project and how you can support it, please do not hesitate to contact us at cmunn@tropicalnature.org and dblanco@tropicalnature.org

Charles A. Munn, Ph.D.
Chairman of the Board
Tropical Nature

And

Daniel H. Blanco V., B.Sc.
President and CEO
Peru Verde