Guarding Bolivia's Blue-throated Macaw From the Brink of Extinction

Asociación Armonía is a Bolivian conservation NGO that has protected the Beni savanna's forest islands since establishing Barba Azul Nature Reserve in 2008, one of the last strongholds of the Critically Endangered Blue-throated Macaw. The Bolivian government recognized 12,350 acres of the reserve as a Private Natural Heritage Reserve in November 2020, the country's first such designation for a private site in nearly a decade. Since 2007, Armonía's artificial nest-box program has helped 128 macaw chicks fledge into the wild, with roughly one in four wild birds today hatched in one of its boxes. Fewer than 500 Blue-throated Macaws remain in the wild, all confined to Bolivia.