The first wild-hatched Spix's macaw chick in twenty-six years left its nest cavity in a caraibeira tree near Curaçá, Bahia, on the afternoon of November 9, 2025. The chick was photographed by a remote camera at 3:22 p.m. local time and the image was posted by the Associação para a Conservação dos Papagaios Azuis (ACPA) at 11:18 the following morning.
It is a small bird. It is also evidence of something the species has not had in a generation, which is a wild generation.
Spix's macaw, Cyanopsitta spixii, was last recorded in the wild in the year 2000, when the final known free-flying male disappeared from the gallery forest above the São Francisco River. The species was sustained through the 2000s and 2010s by a handful of captive collections, primarily in Qatar and Germany, totalling fewer than ninety birds at the low point.
The reintroduction programme, formally launched in 2020 and operationally underway since 2022, has now released 64 birds across three cohorts. As of April 2026, 41 of those birds remain alive and free-flying in the Curaçá and Juazeiro municipalities.
The mortality figures are within the range the programme's biologists predicted. Three birds were taken by hawks in the first ninety days post-release. Two collided with power lines. One was found dead beneath a caraibeira with no obvious cause and tested positive on necropsy for a low pathogenic strain of psittacine herpesvirus.
Dr. Camila Ferraz, who leads field monitoring for ACPA, walks a five-kilometre transect along the dry river bed each morning at 5:30 with two field assistants and a battery-powered yagi antenna tuned to the transmitter frequencies of the released cohort.
She locates between seven and fifteen birds on a typical morning. By late afternoon, when the heat drives the birds into the densest galleries of trees, she is back at the station logging coordinates.
What the team did not expect, and what has become the working surprise of the 2026 field season, is the volume of agonistic interaction between released individuals. The birds are defending small territories. They are vocalising at neighbours. They are doing the unromantic work of being parrots.
Two of the captive-reared females, both hatched at the ACTP facility in Germany in 2019, formed a pair bond with the same male in March. The triangle resolved over six weeks. The losing female has since paired with a younger male released in 2024.
Ferraz keeps a notebook of the disputes. She is reluctant to use the word personality. The notebook is, in any case, organised by date, location, participants, and outcome.
The reintroduction works because the caatinga around Curaçá still holds the right structure. The caraibeira trees, Tabebuia aurea, provide nesting cavities. The gallery forest along the seasonal rivers provides cover from heat and predators. The Africanised honeybees that occupy a third of available cavities are a problem but not yet a crisis.
What the area does not hold, and what has changed since the species' extinction in the wild, is its old population of conspecifics. The released birds are improvising the cultural component of being Spix's macaws from scratch.
There is no living teacher. There is no flock memory of which fruits ripen in which sequence, which roosts are safe in which weather, which predators warrant the alarm call.
Ferraz has watched the released birds work this out. They appear to use the local population of Illiger's macaws, Primolius maracana, as a kind of reference. The two species sometimes feed in mixed groups. The Spix's birds appear to follow the Illiger's lead on foraging and roosting in a way that the programme's behavioural ecologists are now writing up for publication.
Whether this constitutes cultural recovery in the technical sense remains an open question.
The first wild-hatched chick fledged on December 1, 2025. A second chick from a different pair fledged on January 17, 2026. Both birds were monitored daily through their first weeks of independence. The January chick was killed by a Harris's hawk on March 4.
The November chick, designated F26-W1 in the project database, is still alive. It is feeding on caraibeira flowers and following its parents in a loose family group of three.
The release of a fourth cohort, twenty birds from the breeding facility in Bahia, is scheduled for August 2026. The programme's published target is a self-sustaining wild population of one hundred and fifty birds by 2035.
Ferraz, asked whether that figure is achievable, said only that the figure is the figure. The morning's count had been twelve birds, all healthy, two of them arguing.
It is more arguing Spix's macaws than the caatinga has held since the 1990s. By the unsentimental measure of the recovery programme, that counts as progress.
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