In 2020 First WILD Chicks HATCHED In Argentina For 150 Years — The FOREST Answered!

[00:00:00]On a bright October morning in 2020, in a stand of native Paraná forest at the northern edge of the Iberá Wetlands, a 1.8 million acre protected area in the province of Corrientes in northeastern Argentina, a wildlife biologist named Marianella Masat climbed a wooden ladder braced against a tall timbó tree, reached the top, and looked into a custom-built nest box that her team had installed the previous summer.

[00:00:31]What she saw inside the box changed the ornithological history of an entire country.

[00:00:38]Three chicks, red-and-green macaw hatchlings, pink-skinned and mostly featherless with the huge dark eyes and disproportionately large beaks that mark newborn parrots.

[00:00:52]They were, on that October morning, the first red-and-green macaw chicks to be born in the wild anywhere in Argentina in 150 years.

[00:01:03]The species had been declared functionally extinct from Argentine territory sometime in the mid-19th century.

[00:01:11]The last confirmed sightings documented in explorer records from the northern provinces dated back to before the country's founding population had reached 3 million people.

[00:01:23]By the time Argentina became a modern nation, one of its largest and most ecologically important parrots had already been gone for at least a generation.

[00:01:35]And what the three chicks in Masat's nest box represented was not just the return of a bird, it was the return of a piece of ecological function that had been missing from the Paraná forest for so long that most of the trees in that forest had never, in living memory, met their original disperser.

[00:01:57]I'm Edmund Hale, and this is the story of a species that vanished from a country before that country knew what it had lost.

[00:02:06]A forest that spent a century and a half quietly failing to regenerate for reasons nobody understood.

[00:02:13]And the small team of Argentine ecologists who spent a decade proving that some ecological wounds can heal if you bring back exactly the right piece at exactly the right time.

[00:02:28]But before we get to Massat's nest box, we have to deal with an uncomfortable truth about the Ibera wetlands.

[00:02:35]Because the problem with that ecosystem is not the one most people would guess.

[00:02:42]Walk into any part of the Ibera today and it looks from a distance like one of the most extraordinary wilderness landscapes on Earth.

[00:02:52]Marsh grasses stretching to the horizon.

[00:02:55]Caimans sunning themselves on floating vegetation.

[00:02:59]Capybaras in family groups along the water's edge.

[00:03:03]Marsh deer wading through the shallows.

[00:03:07]Since 1997, when a small international conservation organization, now called Tompkins Conservation, began purchasing degraded ranchland in the region and donating it back to Argentina for permanent protection, the Ibera has become one of the most successful wildlife recovery projects on the South American continent.

[00:03:30]But if you know what you're looking for, and you walk into the native forest patches at the edges of the wetlands, you will notice something is missing.

[00:03:39]The trees are wrong.

[00:03:42]Not obviously wrong, but quietly wrong.

[00:03:47]The mature Parana forest that survives in isolated patches around Ibera contains a suite of tree species, timbo, queen palm, ombu, and roughly two dozen others that produce large fruits and large seeded nuts.

[00:04:05]These trees evolved over tens of millions of years in partnership with a set of large-bodied animals whose job was to eat those fruits, transport the seeds across long distances, and either drop them or excrete them into locations where new trees could establish.

[00:04:25]The system worked.

[00:04:27]For as long as anyone had records of it, the forest regenerated itself, moved across the landscape as conditions shifted, and maintained the complex three-dimensional structure that made it a functioning forest rather than a museum of trees.

[00:04:45]Then, sometime in the middle of the 19th century, a critical piece of that partnership vanished.

[00:04:53]The red and green macaw, Ara chloropterus, is one of the largest parrots on Earth. Adults weigh between 1 and 1.7 kg. Their wingspan reaches over a meter.

[00:05:07]Their beaks, adapted for cracking hard-shelled tropical nuts, can generate several hundred kilograms of pressure per square inch.

[00:05:16]And through most of the 18th and early 19th centuries, they were the primary long-distance dispersers of the largest seeded plants across the Paraná forest ecosystem.

[00:05:28]Explorer records covering the period from 1809 through 1945 place them in flocks throughout northern Argentina, moving through the canopy in noisy groups, cracking nuts, carrying seeds, and doing the quiet reproductive work that kept the forest alive.

[00:05:48]They were also, by the accident of their own beauty, exactly the wrong bird to have around humans.

[00:05:56]Their vibrant red, green, and blue plumage made them commercially valuable in the exotic pet trade.

[00:06:04]Their feathers were harvested for religious ceremonies and colonial fashion.

[00:06:08]Their large size made them tempting targets for subsistence hunting.

[00:06:13]And the same forest they depended on for food was being systematically cleared through the 19th and early 20th centuries for cattle ranching, timber extraction, and colonial agricultural expansion.

[00:06:28]By the middle of the 19th century, the population had collapsed.

[00:06:33]By the early 20th century, the last remnant birds had disappeared.

[00:06:38]And here is where the ecological cascade started, invisibly, over the course of the next 150 years.

[00:06:47]The trees continued to produce fruit, the nuts continued to fall, but the dispersal function that had been carrying the seeds across kilometers of forest and depositing them in the soil and light conditions where new trees could establish was gone.

[00:07:03]The regeneration of the Paraná forest slowed down.

[00:07:08]The species that could still be dispersed by smaller frugivores, smaller birds, small mammals, occasionally domestic cattle, continued to reproduce.

[00:07:19]The species that had depended on the core-scale dispersal did not.

[00:07:24]Nobody noticed this at the time.

[00:07:27]The forest didn't die, it just stopped regenerating certain species.

[00:07:32]Over the decades that followed, biologists working in the region would document the gradual erosion of particular tree populations, the collapse of certain plant communities and the shift toward a simpler, less diverse forest structure.

[00:07:48]But the underlying cause, the absence of one bird species that had been ecologically load-bearing without anyone realizing it, was not identified until conservation biologists began in the late 20th century to catalog what had been lost from South American ecosystems during the colonial and post-colonial period.

[00:08:11]Which brings us to the small team of Argentine ecologists who, starting in 2014, decided to try to put the macaw back.

[00:08:21]Sebastian Di Martino is the director of conservation for a nonprofit called Rewilding Argentina, which is the operational partner in Argentina for the international organization Tompkins Conservation.

[00:08:36]Di Martino is a wiry, sun-weathered field ecologist by training.

[00:08:41]He has spent most of his professional career working on the largest ecosystem restoration effort ever attempted in South America, the ongoing reintroduction of a suite of 10 locally extinct species, including jaguars, giant otters, giant anteaters, and the red-and-green macaw to the Iberá wetlands.

[00:09:04]The macaw project began, according to the peer-reviewed documentation, in 2014.

[00:09:10]In 2015, Rewilding Argentina conducted what became the first experimental release of the species anywhere in Argentina.

[00:09:20]Seven captive-bred macaws, donated from various zoos and rescue facilities across the country, released into a protected area within the Iberá system.

[00:09:32]The 2015 release did not go well.

[00:09:36]Two of the seven birds were killed by predators within days. Three flew beyond the range of the tracking equipment and were never confirmed alive again.

[00:09:46]One transmitter was recovered underwater in a lagoon.

[00:09:50]One bird was recaptured after failing to find food and the peer-reviewed publication that eventually documented the effort, which appeared in a journal called Ornithological Applications, was, in its own honest assessment, more valuable as a documentation of what not to do than as a demonstration of what worked.

[00:10:14]But Rewilding Argentina had learned something critical from the 2015 attempt.

[00:10:20]The problem was not that macaws could not survive in the Iberá.

[00:10:25]The problem was that captive-bred macaws, raised in cages by humans and never having flown more than a few meters in their entire lives, arrived at the release site missing every skill they needed to be wild birds.

[00:10:41]They could not fly long distances.

[00:10:44]They did not know which fruits in the forest were edible.

[00:10:48]They could not recognize predators.

[00:10:51]They had no social structure.

[00:10:54]They were, in the honest ecological sense, tourists rather than residents.

[00:11:02]The redesign that followed was slow, patient, and expensive.

[00:11:07]Over the next 5 years, Rewilding Argentina built a specialized aviary at a place called the Aguada Conservation Center.

[00:11:17]They developed a pre-release training program that taught captive macaws to fly long distances, to recognize wild fruits, to identify aerial predators, and to interact with each other in the flock structures that wild macaws maintain.

[00:11:36]They partnered with a Peruvian research organization called the Macaw Society based at Texas A&M University and directed by an American ornithologist named Don Brightsmith who had spent decades studying wild red-and-green macaws at a research station in the Tambopata region of Peru.

[00:11:58]They designed nest boxes based on the Tambopata team's field observations.

[00:12:04]And they installed those nest boxes in the tallest trees of the Iberá forest patches where they hoped the reintroduced birds might eventually establish territories.

[00:12:17]Marianella Masat became the coordinator of the day-to-day field operations.

[00:12:23]By 2019, four breeding pairs had established territories at the Iberá reintroduction site.

[00:12:31]Nest boxes had been adopted.

[00:12:34]The birds were foraging on wild fruits and covering meaningful distances during their daily flights.

[00:12:42]In the summer of 2020, one of the reintroduced females began sitting on eggs for the first time.

[00:12:50]In October 2020, Masat climbed her ladder and found the three chicks.

[00:12:58]Now, I'd be doing you a disservice if I made this sound like a completed victory because it isn't.

[00:13:05]And the complications that have unfolded since October 2020 are worth being direct about.

[00:13:12]The Iberá wetlands, like most neotropical ecosystems, are increasingly vulnerable to fire under the climate conditions of the current century.

[00:13:24]In the summer of of a series of massive wildfires burned through the region, destroying approximately 60% of Iberá National Park and 13% of the surrounding Great Iberá Provincial Park.

[00:13:42]The aviary at Aguará was damaged.

[00:13:45]The forest patches where the reintroduced macaws had been establishing themselves were burned.

[00:13:52]And the timing was catastrophic.

[00:13:55]Rewilding Argentina had a group of five newly trained macaws, four females and one male, that had been scheduled for release in the weeks the fires were burning.

[00:14:09]The team went ahead with the post-fire release anyway.

[00:14:14]In a public statement that Di Martino gave to reporters at the time, he made an argument that has since become a founding principle of the project.

[00:14:25]If the macaws were essential to the regeneration of Paraná Forest, and if large portions of that forest had just been destroyed, then the macaws were more critical to the recovery of the burned area than they had been before the fires.

[00:14:43]The five released birds joined the group already established in a northern sector of the wetlands called Yeda'balito, and they began the work of rebuilding the population in an ecosystem that was, itself, in the process of trying to recover.

[00:15:02]By 2023, additional wild chicks had hatched.

[00:15:06]Three of them, born to another reintroduced pair in a nest box similar to the one Massa had checked in 2020, were named Charrua, Bamba, and Doba, after three indigenous nations whose territories had historically included the Iberá region.

[00:15:23]Charúa, the youngest of the three, learned to fly successfully in early 2024 and was documented ranging widely across the wetlands over the following year.

[00:15:35]In October 2025, Charúa was killed near a rural community called Concepción del Yaguareté Corá.

[00:15:44]The bird was struck by a projectile from a slingshot wielded by a human being who had apparently decided, in a moment whose motivation Rewilding Argentina has been careful not to speculate about, to shoot the bird.

[00:15:59]Charúa was recovered by field staff and taken to a veterinary facility.

[00:16:04]Despite emergency care, she died.

[00:16:08]It was the first documented intentional killing of a reintroduced macaw in the 10 years of the project.

[00:16:16]The response from the Rewilding Argentina team, according to statements the team gave to Argentine and international press in the weeks that followed, was a combination of grief, legal action, and renewed commitment to the community engagement work that has been part of the project from the beginning.

[00:16:36]The organization filed a formal judicial complaint.

[00:16:40]The team held meetings with residents of Concepción del Yaguareté Corá and surrounding communities, and they doubled down on the community-based monitoring network that has, throughout the decade of the project, been the primary reason the reintroduction has worked at all.

[00:16:59]I want to be direct about something the project's own documentation makes clear.

[00:17:05]The Iberá macaw reintroduction is not, as of the moment I'm recording this, a fully self-sustaining wild population.

[00:17:15]There are approximately 15 released birds.

[00:17:19]Several breeding pairs have established territories.

[00:17:22]Multiple generations of wild chicks have now been produced, but the population is small, geographically concentrated, and dependent on continued monitoring, food supplementation, and active protection from the human threats that had originally caused the extinction.

[00:17:42]The peer-reviewed literature, including a comprehensive review published by Zamboni and colleagues in a journal called Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation in 2017, treats the ebird rewilding program as an ongoing experimental effort rather than a completed success.

[00:18:02]But the experimental data are, in the specialized language of ecological restoration, promising.

[00:18:10]A diet composition study published in Ornithological Applications in January 2022 used advanced genetic techniques to document what the reintroduced macaws were actually eating in the wild and confirmed that the birds were successfully identifying and consuming a diverse mix of native fruits, the same fruits their ancestors would have been eating 150 years earlier.

[00:18:39]The birds are, in the honest ecological sense, doing exactly what the trees have been waiting 150 years for something to do again.

[00:18:49]They are eating the fruit.

[00:18:51]They are moving the seeds.

[00:18:54]They are, slowly and in small numbers, restoring the ecological function whose absence had been quietly weakening the Paraná forest for six generations.

[00:19:07]Step back and look at the whole arc, and it is genuinely staggering.

[00:19:13]A bird that vanished before Argentina became a country.

[00:19:17]A forest that spent 150 years failing to fully reproduce itself for reasons nobody was tracking.

[00:19:25]A small team of ecologists in the 1990s and 2000s who identified the loss, retro-engineered the biology of a captive-bred reintroduction, learned from an early failure, redesigned the training program, partnered with an international network of macaw researchers, and in October 2020, watched three tiny pink hatchlings open their eyes for the first time in a nest box in a native forest patch that had not held a wild macaw chick since roughly the time of the American Civil War.

[00:20:05]The forest is not yet regenerated.

[00:20:08]Population is not yet self-sustaining.

[00:20:11]Charrua is dead.

[00:20:13]And Rewilding Argentina has a decade or more of continued work ahead before anyone in the peer-reviewed community will feel comfortable calling the Ibera macaw reintroduction a completed success.

[00:20:27]But the birds are back.

[00:20:29]The nest boxes have chicks. The fruit is being moved. And the forest, in the slow ecological time in which forests operate, has started to answer.

[00:20:41]Marianella Massat is still coordinating field operations. Sebastian Di Martino is still directing the broader Ibera Rewilding Program. The community-based monitoring network is still functioning across the wetlands. And the surviving 2023 chicks, Pampa and Toroba, along with a growing cohort of younger birds, are, on the day I am I'm this, being tracked in flight over one of the largest wetland systems in the Southern Hemisphere, doing the reproductive work of a species that Argentina had accidentally deleted from itself in the middle of the 19th century, and then 170 years later chose to try to put back.

[00:21:26]If you found this as remarkable as I do, let me know in the comments. And tell me whether you think an ecosystem that has been ecologically incomplete for 150 years can be genuinely rebuilt by returning the missing species, or whether the memory of what a healthy forest looked like has been lost too long for the current landscape to fully remember.

[00:21:51]If this changed how you think about what a functioning forest actually requires to keep working, share it with someone who'd appreciate it, and subscribe, because there are more of these missing piece stories out there than the current conservation vocabulary quite has language for, and I've got plenty more to tell you.

[00:22:12]I'm Edmund Hale.

[00:22:14]Thanks for watching.