Julia comes every morning and stays until evening. Romeo is usually already waiting for them, and the two keep company for the rest of the day. They beak through the chain link fence, croak, pluck each other’s feathers and tilt their heads. At dusk, Juliet flies away again, leaving Romeo behind in his aviary in Bio Parque, the recently opened zoological garden in Rio de Janeiro.
Nobody knows exactly where Julia spends the night. But it has to be somewhere in the jungle of the Brazilian metropolis, in the middle of which lies the largest inner-city national park in the world. Numerous wild animals are at home here, such as monkeys, anacondas, caimans and sloths. And also Julia, a large, multi-feathered yellow-and-breasted macaw, commonly one would say: a parrot.
Julia, as the employees of the zoo have christened her, is the only wild Ara Rios. On the one hand, this is puzzling because nobody knows exactly where Julia comes from and how she got into town. On the other hand, it’s tragic because macaws are very sociable animals and you never see them alone in nature. So Julia must have been looking for company when she first visited her conspecifics at the zoo. That was around two decades ago, and since then it has come almost every day.
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Around 35 macaws live in the Bio Park in a species-appropriate, around 1000 square meter aviary. They share them with dozens of other parrots, parakeets, toucans, and cockroaches. As a visitor, you walk through the up to seven meter high aviary, while the brightly colored animals flutter, croak, cackle and whistle above you. In freedom, macaws fly around 30 kilometers per day, and you can feel this need here too. You can also understand why the natives of Brazil once gave the birds the name “Arara”. They voiced their reputation.
You have to look carefully in the polychromatic spectacle to make out Julia. She is sitting up in the aviary and is frequently visited by other macaws, including her Romeo (his name also comes from the zoo employees). It claws at the grille from below with its powerful beak. At their rendezvous, the couple not only exchange tenderness, but also food. From time to time Romeo brings seeds from the aviary feeding places and Juliet gets fruits from nature.
The lovers will always be separated by a metal fence
The two must have got to know each other during Julia’s first visit to the old zoo. Despite the fence between them, they became a couple – a decision with ramifications, because macaws are considered monogamous, that is, they form strong bonds that can last for many years, possibly even their entire life. A macaw can live to be 35 years old in the wild and 80 years in captivity. As in William Shakespeare’s drama “Romeo and Juliet”, this animal relationship is also a tragic one. Because the pair of lovers will always be separated by a metal fence and will have no chicks. The advantage of pair bonding with the macaws is that it prevents energy-consuming advertising for a female and rivalries between the males, so it serves to keep the peace. In addition, the couples cooperate in raising the offspring, which ensures their survival.
“We are asked that a lot,” says a zoo employee. “Why don’t you just let Julia in with her conspecifics? Or why don’t you let Romeo out? ”Both would be irresponsible, he says, because Juliet obviously gets along well in nature. She is well nourished, has bright plumage and no one knows how she would react to a life in captivity. Romeo, in turn, was born in the zoo and has no experience of life in the wild. For example, he does not know how and where to look for food.
It is still unclear how Julia actually got to Rio. The last wild yellow and breasted macaw was spotted in the city by an Australian scientist in 1818, when Rio’s forests had been completely cut down for coffee plantations. It is therefore believed that Julia was smuggled into Rio by pet dealers and then escaped, perhaps from someone who kept her illegally as a pet. The main distribution areas of the macaws, of which eight species are distinguished – such as the blue macaw and the green-winged macaw – are today the Amazon forest and the adjacent ecosystems such as the cerrado or the floodplain Pantanal in western Brazil. They are thousands of kilometers from Rio.
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© REUTERS / Pilar Olivares
Many of the macaws that live in the Bio Park today were once confiscated during police actions against wildlife smugglers. Their magnificent plumage, their charisma and their intelligence – they use tools, solve problems, recognize themselves in the mirror – make them extremely popular. Abroad, a macaw can fetch up to $ 3,000 on the black market. The colorful dress of the macaws helps them to find each other in the dense jungle, where they live together in groups of up to 50 specimens; but the blaze of color also makes it easier for illegal hunters to track them down.
Because of its biodiversity, Brazil is particularly hard hit by wildlife smuggling, which is the third largest illegal trafficking activity in the world after drug and arms trafficking. The Ibama environmental agency estimates that up to 38 million wild animals are caught in Brazil each year. Most of them are birds: macaws, parrots, toucans. Monkeys, big cats and snakes are also often caught. The Ibama estimates that 90 percent of the animals do not survive the rigors of captivity and transport. The love between Romeo and Juliet is therefore also the story of two survivors.
As beautiful as it is, it has a catch. Because you can’t say with certainty which of the two macaws is actually Romeo and which is Juliet. It is impossible to tell a female from a male macaw with the naked eye. “You would have to do a genetic test or examine the sex glands,” says biologist Angelita Capobianco, who works at the Bio Park. However, she sees no reason to expose the animals to this stress “just because of a romantic projection of humans”.
Perhaps the story of the two macaws will come to an unexpected end
And so you have to come to terms with the gender attribution made by the zoo employees: Juliet lives in freedom, Romeo in the zoo. The park’s visitors don’t care anyway. Many are here to take their children to see the redesigned zoo and take the opportunity to show them Romeo and Juliet, whose story was once again in the media when it opened. “This loyalty should also exist among people,” says one woman. An older man reports that he saw Romeo and Juliet in the old zoo many years ago and is now completely surprised that they are still there.
But maybe the story of the two macaws will come to an unexpected end. The tasks of Rios Bio Park include the rearing and release of some animal species in cooperation with various research institutions. The macaw is one of the selected species. Around 20 of them are to be released in Rios Tijuca National Park at the end of 2022 and will also contribute to the diversification of the fauna there. “Macaws can crack fruits whose shells are too hard for other birds, such as some palm species,” explains the biologist Marcelo Rheingantz from Rio’s Federal University UFRJ, who coordinates the reintroduction project called Refauna. “The macaws spread the seeds and ensure a greater variety of plants.”
