Meeting Abstract
Green and red macaws (Ara chloropterus) frequently visit colpas on the banks of rivers in the Amazon rainforest, presumably for the beneficial dietary function of the salts accessible there. However, their bright feathers stand out against the brown clay of the colpa making them more visible to potential predators. In order to compensate for their increased vulnerability macaws at colpas display a number of vigilance-related behaviors such as frequent head turns, look outs, and flash behavior that may aid them in avoiding predators. As humans encroach on their habitat, there are increasing reasons for macaws to view human made sounds as a predictive of danger, due to a substantial history of hunting and poaching. The current experiment explored how macaws at colpas behave towards human made sounds and whether their responses suggest that they view humans as predators. Over the course of a month during the non-breeding season at the Las Piedras Biodiversity station in the Madre de Dios region of Peru we played multiple audio stimuli to the macaws coming daily to a colpa located on the banks of the remote Las Piedras River. These playbacks included harpy eagle calls, screaming piha calls, boat engine noises, chainsaw noises, human voices, and synthesized digital audio. Our results strongly suggest that birds respond differentially to these calls. We found that the birds responded heavily to the boat engine playback and the chainsaw playback with many fly-aways and head-turns but this was different than their behavior towards the Harpy Eagle playback. The Harpy eagle playback had multiple head-turns but no fly-aways and we observed that the birds would freeze and not communicate when it was played. In future studies it would be interesting to look at the movement of the birds and flight patterns to the different playbacks.
