“Baby Blue ~ Blue and Gold Macaw,” an acrylic painting , copyright wildlife artist Susan A. Walton, S. A. Walton Studio, Hudson, Florida.

This painting of a young Blue and Gold Macaw, surrounded by bromeliads and tropical foliage, was a fun little study of a friend’s bird done when I babysat it as a favor. Later I offered limited rights to reproduce this painting on T-shirts and other products to another bird lover.

When first hatched, a baby macaw has an enormous head relative to its body size. It cannot hold its head up and to feed it, a parent has to regurgitate a morsel from its crop and while holding it in its beak, delicately lift the chick’s head and with the tongue push the food in, waiting until it goes down the hatch to let the chick slump back down. The chicks initially grow quickly and learn to synchronize their movements with the pumping action of the parent and then it seems like they are off to the races, gulping down food like a college kid chugging beer. But that big head is still quite tiring for them to hold up; they fill up fast and then hunker down for long naps between feedings.

They eventually get big enough and strong enough to not only sit up on their own and beg for food, but to hold their giant noggins up as they begin to explore their immediate surroundings, and learn in awkward attempts to groom themselves and their parents with their impressive beaks.

Blue and Golds, when young, have the same kind of relaxed, slightly unfocused, go along to get along attitude as a human baby, exploring everything they encounter with open-mouthed wonder, often nodding their heads very slowly as they go, like one of those oil pumps you see now and then in farmer’s fields in Indiana or Illinois. They love to play and wrestle with siblings but are still a bit clumsy at this stage.

When they are fully weaned- which takes several months- they become clowns, completely well-meaning but with beaks steadily growing more powerful day by day. They need a lot of attention and care and training at this point so that they learn how much pressure is too much when “beaking” - this is when a set of well-adjusted parents and can be most helpful in correcting the chick if and when those nibbles get too hard. The siblings will squawk even before a nip begins to hurt, to let each other know when enough is enough, so mimicking that behavior is one way for a human to let the baby know to stop applying pressure when it grabs a finger or ear.

Being careful not to reinforce undesirable behavior is critical because they grow into surprisingly powerful birds … never laugh when a bird or human gets a hard nibble from a chick, or else it will be harder the next time. They love laughter, so it is like a reward when they can instigate it, and many blue and golds seem to like instigating, even laughing mischievously when successful.

As adults they can look very intimidating, even with the clownish bare face, but are naturally a little cowardly, being prey animals in the wild, subject to many threats from predators (or rivals looking for the same resources, such as good nest trees) and usually attempt to bluff first in an effort to get their way. But it is easy to accidentally reward them and teach them the wrong lessons.

If you enjoyed this avian art, please take a look at some of my other artwork for bird watchers and parrot lovers on this web site, and come back to see new releases.

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