a group of Coragyps atratus 

Karen McReynolds

On Isla Coiba: in pursuit of Ara macao

One of the conclusions the head of the Scarlet Macaw project on Isla Coiba reached by the end of his time there was that no one knows anything about the Scarlet Macaws on the island.  They only know that they are indeed present, because they can sometimes be seen at certain locations. This is both a bad thing and a good thing.  It is a bad thing because it makes research very difficult; there is nothing to start with or to go on in making decisions about how to allocate time, effort, and money (all of which are very limited).  It is a good thing because anything learned is publishable.  It is all new.

In studying the logistics of the island, it isn’t hard to understand why no one has studied the macaws present until now.  Coiba is not perforated with roads.  Even if it were, there are no vehicles on the island.  Access therefore occurs by boating to various beaches and rivers and proceeding inland from there, whether up waterways or by hiking on the few existing trails.   There are no docks on the island either.  This means that Feliciano the boat captain steers his panga as close as he can reasonably get to the destination on shore, and everyone hops out of the boat into the surf, carrying any gear, lunches, snake boots, etc. that they may need.  My time on Coiba gave me firsthand knowledge of what the term “inaccessible” really means. 

Isla Coiba contains minimal accommodations for its human visitors, but we remain very grateful for those that do exist. Now a Panamanian national park, park headquarters on the northern end of the island include a few simple dormitory-style rooms with tile floors and, thankfully, attached bathrooms. To my happy surprise, they also have air conditioners which come on every evening when the electricity for the whole place is turned on.  This made for far better accommodations overall than we were expecting.  This cheery discovery was dampened somewhat by the fact that dozens of black vultures (Coragyps atratus) of all ages are permanent residents of the far end of the residential complex. They lurk about in the trees near the kitchen area, quarreling over leftover scraps and roosting en masse at night, with young birds acting helpless and begging their parents for food (vulture regurgitant, yum yum) in the universal manner of juvenile birds.  But we bird lovers mustn’t be biased, or at least not too much.  Vultures fill a valid niche also.  The student of vulture lore would be elated.

Each morning we departed from our lodging at park headquarters courtesy of Feliciano and his panga.  Our first sighting of Ara macao occurred at what turned out to be the best and most reliable place to see them throughout our time on the island.  This was the Rio San Juan, a wide and winding river with its mouth on the southeast side of the island.  Tides on the Pacific side of Panama are significant and were always taken into account on our boat excursions.  Rio San Juan was only safely accessible as the tide was entering the river, raising water levels throughout, so the timing of our excursions upriver varied considerably.  But almost every time we visited there we discovered some screeching macaws.  Finding them amid the dense vegetation was difficult, especially toward the evening when they would find a roosting branch and settle down there.  But they remained noisy enough most of the time so that we would eventually be rewarded with a glimpse of color and an alert eye, well aware of our presence. 

We saw both mated pairs and at least one adult with a juvenile.  Juveniles are identified by their short tails.  Although they grow quickly and their bodies are soon the same size as the adults, they just haven’t lived long enough for their distinct central rectrices to reach the length of an adult’s.  In the same way, breeding females can be identified by their ragged and broken tail feathers.  Sitting in that nest cavity wears down their tails. 

As a result of our efforts on Coiba, there is now some fundamental data on the resident macaws.  But far more remains to be discovered. Where are their nest sites? How successful is their reproduction here? Why don’t they appear to feed in the same trees they gorge on in Belize? It seems to me that it would be a lot easier to study vultures.  Well, yes; I’ll grant them that victory. The vultures win the Accessible-and-Ugly-But-Still-Interesting award.  For the Raucous Splendor award, Ara macao wins hands down. 

Related: Ms Frizzle and the Ara macao