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Chestnut-fronted Macaw | Ara severus
Dwergara | Guacamayo frenticastaño
The Chestnut-fronted Macaw is a small, mainly green macaw with a dark chestnut forehead. It is not native to the Caribbean. Curaçao holds a free-flying population derived from escaped or released cage birds, which breeds in and around Willemstad and uses communal roosts.
Voice
A raw, grating kraa-ak, higher and thinner than that of the large macaws, mainly in flight and at roosts. Flocks keep up a continuous screeching.
Recording: Juan Freile — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
45–50 cm, with a long pointed tail. Mostly green, with a chestnut band above the bill and a bluish crown. The bare white face has fine lines of black feathers. The upperwing shows blue flight feathers and a red patch on the leading edge; the underwing is reddish, as is the underside of the tail. The bill is black, the iris yellow. The sexes are alike. In flight the red underwing stands out.
Confusion species
Blue-crowned Parakeet Thectocercus acuticaudatus, found in the same districts on Curaçao, is smaller, with a blue head, a pale upper mandible and no bare white face. Brown-throated Parakeet Eupsittula pertinax is much smaller, with a yellowish-brown face and a yellowish underwing. The large macaws are twice as long and red or blue-and-yellow.
Habitat
On Curaçao residential districts with large trees, parks, country estates and golf courses, and the dry woodland and scrub on the edge of town. It eats fruit, seeds, flowers and buds of native and planted trees, and nests in holes in trees and palms. In its native range it lives in forest edges, gallery forest and swamp forest.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Curaçao: established population, mainly in and around Willemstad, with communal roosts in town. A few birds have been seen on Bonaire, and there are scattered reports of presumed escapes from the Bahamas. No populations are known from other islands in the region. Native from eastern Panama across northern South America and the Amazon basin to Bolivia and western Brazil; a feral population lives in Florida.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
On Curaçao in the early morning and at dusk, when flocks fly to and from roosts; birds are seen regularly in the residential districts around Willemstad and at Blue Bay. The red underwing and chestnut forehead separate it from the parakeets.
Conservation status
Not threatened globally. On Curaçao an alien; the size of the population and its effect on native cavity nesters such as Brown-throated Parakeet have not been studied.
Scientific name
Ara severus | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Psittacus severus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Ara was introduced in 1799 by De Lacépède. Ara comes from Tupí, where ará is an onomatopoeic name for the macaws. severus is Latin for 'stern, grim', after Linnaeus's 1754 'Papegoja trumpen', the surly parrot. The specimen the first description was based on came from Amazon River (originally 'the Indies', in error).