Paul Rosolie

So you'd wake up before dawn and go sit and just stare at the side of the river and the macaws would show up.

And like you said, they all scream and bicker at each other.

It's just how they talk.

It's very, it's very, very loud and very, very harsh.

But they do love each other.

You can actually hear when you walk through the forest, I know what the sound of macaws giving affection is.

They make a certain kind of sound when they're just preening each other's feathers and taking care of each other and just nuzzling.

And then there's a different call altogether when they're yelling at other macaws or saying, let's go.

And you start to learn macaw language.

It's interesting to see two animals sticking by each other's side, and they're both raising a chick.

And at the bottom of the stairs at the station, there is a macaw nest in an ironwood.

And the relationship that you mentioned is that in the jungle, there's a limited amount of macaw real estate.

And those are all ancient ironwood trees, at least 500 years or more.

So they have to be thick.

Thus, again, car thickness or bigger.

And when a branch falls off, it creates a hollow, and the macaws use that to reproduce.

And because there's only so many nest sites in the forest, only about 17% to 20% of the macaw population reproduces in a given year.

So they have a slow replacement rate.

And macaws are one of the things that people come to the jungle to see.

And so along with gold mining and logging and all these extractive things, in our region, ecotourism has been great.