Greenwing Macaws are for some breeders one of the hardest Macaws to breed. We have been lucky over the years as all of our pairs breed for us. When we first started raising Greenwings I fell in love with at least one baby each year. We now have second generations of Greenwings breeding for us.
To beautiful loving companions. From just out of the egg, to fuzzy babies. Greenwing Macaws are one of the larger macaws, they are a heavier bodied macaw then the Blue & Gold or Scarlet macaw. They are intelligent, gentle, outgoing and great talkers.
Greenwings have beautiful dark red feathers and are sometimes mistaken for a Scarlet Macaw, but their red face feathers that frame their intelligent eyes are your first good clue they are different. They are know for their good natured personalities and talking abilities and are often ranked along side the blue & gold macaw as making one of the best pets. They generally fit very well into a family environment and enjoy the attention of the whole group.
Male
Female Greenwings are very affectionate and whether they are male or female they both make excellent pets.
A Greenwing Story.
This is a true story.
John and I use to live in the San Fernando Valley near L.A. Calif. I worked for the local phone company outside repairing telephone lines. One afternoon in Sept, many years ago, I was sitting in my work truck eating lunch on a shady side street when I heard a loud "Rrruk". I looked up and saw a beautiful red macaw in the top of a 25' tree. I offered him some of my Jack-in-the-Box salad, but he was not interested. After watching him flap his full wings and holler for awhile, I decided I had to go back to work.
At 4:30 instead of heading home I went back to the tree I had seen the macaw in. He was still there flapping and squawking. I quickly drove home and came back with a handful of walnuts. I sat down across the street on the curb and started cracking the nuts open. It was not long before the macaw's attention was turned towards me and the nuts. Only a few minutes passed before he started to eased his way down the tree to a branch that I could reach over to and feed him a walnut. I did not know if he was tame or not so I took my sweatshirt off and reached over and grabbed him off the lower branch that he had come down to. In one fluid motion I threw him into the little Honda Civic I use to drive and shut the door.
I stood outside the car watching him through the window wondering what he was going to do. Slipping out from under the sweatshirt he reached over to the backside of the passenger seat and climbed his way to the top. As he perched on the seat and positioned himself facing forward he looked at me as though to say " Let's Go !!!"
Deciding that the greenwing macaw was not going to attack me, I got in the front seat and drove to John's welding shop in Van Nuys. When I got there John was on the phone just finishing a call. I waited until he was done and then told him the story of seeing and catching a greenwing macaw. At this point John looked at me and said "So where's the bird?"
We walked out the door of the shop to my car parked right out front. The greenwing macaw was sitting on the passenger seat patiently for my return.
For the next month we checked the newspaper ads for the bird's owner. Nobody ever claimed the bird. We did find out that the bird's name was Roco though. Roco would say in the clearest voice "Hello Roco". We kept Roco in the house as a pet. He would always talk when we were both around. One day when I got home before John did, I started cooking dinner with Roco right there with me. He was talking a little bit and then he did something that he had not done before......He started singing the opera scales. He did this for a few minutes and then stop just before John came home. I told John that Roco had sung Opera, to which I got an "Oh sure" kind of look. Over the months Roco would sing opera for me, but never John. It was not until many years had gone by that John was outback in the yard and Roco, who by then was set up with a mate, was in one of our bird barns singing opera. John laugh as he told me that he finally heard him sing and that he had never quite believed me until then.
The following January, four months after I had found Roco, one of the guys I work with, came up to tell me what had happen to him that day. He knew that I had parrots so he told me that he was working in Sun Valley earlier that day and that while he was on the roof of the customers house a big red bird almost ran into him. He said that he had seen it on the roof of the neighbors later that day right before he had come back to our company's garage. I asked him where the house was and then drove a 1/2 hour to the neighborhood with that address. As I slowly drove down the street it was almost dusk and then I saw it. The bird was sitting on the top of a fence right next to a house. I slowly approached the bird trying to make sure it did not fly away. The bird was not tame, but when I offered it a piece of grass I had just plucked up from the yard it leaned forward to take it. The bird looked very thin and weak. I carefully slipped off my sweatshirt and held it like a towel when you go to capture a bird. I very quickly reached out and grabbed the bird right off of the fence. The bird let out a loud scream as I walked back to the car and released it into my Honda. I stopped and looked around expecting some of the neighbors to come out, but nobody did. The bird was very afraid and was setting in the back seat as far away as it could get from me.
When I got home I found John sitting in the living room. I sat down and told him I had just caught another macaw and it was out in the car. He laughed and said "Oh sure and what kind of macaw did you catch this time ?" I said "Another greenwing macaw." He laughed again and then looking at me said" You're not kidding, are you ? " I smiled and said, "No."
We took the bird to the vet the next day and he said that the bird had lost a lot of weight and had a horrible bacterial infection. The chances that the bird would live were very slim. We took the greenwing home and gave it tons of food to eat and treated it with antibiotics for a week. When we took the bird back a couple of weeks later Dr. Weiss was amazed that this was the same bird. It had gained all it's weigh back and looked great.
We had the bird sexed and it turned out to be a female. This was great, because Roco had turned out to be a male. A few months later we paired up Roco and the female, now called Angel, and it was a match made in heaven. A year later they gave us 3 beautiful babies and then went on to becoming our first and one of our finest breeding pairs of Greenwings.
All Pictures taken by Cindy Hollingshead. Pictures are ©Copyright. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited.
