One more time, the story begins

 

Scarlet Macaws nest in tree cavities, just like the one in the picture. By the end of October, the majority of our nests has been occupied.

Over the past few months, we have slowly started to see the return of Scarlet macaws to the nests around The Tambopata Research Center. Since mid-October, successful pairs from last year have been settling in to their old nests. Some new pairs have been defending nests and starting to stay inside of them. Everybody, macaws and us, are getting ready for the new breeding season.

Mandy Lu nest was our first nest with eggs this season, on October 23th. The same pair from last year is occupying it and just like last season, they were the first ones laying eggs in our area. Both nesting female and male are great parents and we have great hopes they will be willing to foster one of our future foster chicks this time, like they did last season .

 

Every day, we go to the forest carrying 25 pounds of climbing equipment and climb + 25 meters high cavity nests searching for macaw eggs. We are monitoring about 42 nests, including both artificial and natural cavities. Every day, around 12 nests are checked. Very hard and demanding work but every egg we found brings joy to our team. Every day is an adventure in the rainforest!  

So far, we have 14 nests with eggs: Mandy Lu, Tinker, Gavilán, Molinero, Amor, Hugo, Stanford, Pukakuro, Silver, Invisible, Max, Sue B, Tigres and Franz. So far, all the nest we placed foster chicks last season are occupied and with eggs. We don’t know exactly how many eggs we have so far, because we don’t climb during the incubation period. We come back after 26 days to check what surprises each nest has for us.  

We expect the first chick to hatch in Mandy-Lu on the 18th of November so keep an eye out for our next lab note!