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Thanks to Pranav for this week's suggestion!\n\nHappy birthday to\xa0MaxOrangutan! Have a great birthday!\n\nFurther reading:\n\nScarlet macaw DNA points to ancient breeding operation in Southwest\n\nThe glorious hyacinth macaw:\n\n\n\nRoelant Savery's dodo painting with not one but TWO separate mystery macaws featured:\n\n\n\nThe blue-and-gold macaw:\n\n\n\nEleazar Albin's mystery macaw:\n\n\n\nDetail from Jan Steen's painting of a mystery macaw:\n\n\n\nThe scarlet macaw:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\nRecently, Pranav suggested the topic of mystery macaws. As it happens, that\u2019s a topic I researched for the book, which by the way is now FORMATTED! And hopefully by the time you hear this I\u2019ll have been able to order a test copy to make sure it looks good before I order enough copies for everyone who backed the Kickstarter at that level. Whew!\nI\u2019ve used the mystery macaw chapter from the book as a basis for this episode, but it\u2019s not identical by any means\u2014I\u2019ve added some stuff.\nBefore we learn about some mystery macaws, though, we have a birthday shout-out! Happy birthday to MaxOrangutan! Max! I bet you like bananas and climb around a lot! I hope you have a fantastic birthday, maybe with a banana cake or a cake banana, which I think is a thing I just made up but it sounds good, doesn\u2019t it?\nMacaws are a type of parrot native to the Americas. They have longer tails and larger bills than true parrots and have face patches that are mostly white or yellow. There are six genera [original incorrectly stated six species] of macaw with lots of living species, but many other species that are extinct or probably extinct. The largest living species is the hyacinth macaw, which is a beautiful blue all over except for yellow face markings. It can grow over 3 feet long, or about 92 centimeters, including its long tail. It mostly eats nuts, even coconuts and macadamia nuts that are too tough for most other animals to crack open, but it also likes fruit, seeds, and some other plant material. Like other parrots, macaws are intelligent birds that have been observed using tools. For instance, the hyacinth macaw will use pieces of sticks and other items to keep a nut from rolling away while it works on biting it open.\nThe story of a mystery bird sometimes called the Martinique macaw starts almost 400 years ago, when Jacques Bouton, a French priest, visited the Caribbean in 1639 and specifically Martinique in 1642. Bouton wrote an account of the people and animals he saw, including several macaws that don\u2019t quite match any birds known today. One of these is the so-called Martinique macaw, which he said was blue and saffron in color. Saffron is a rich orangey yellow.\nWe have some paintings that might be depictions of the mystery macaws. An artist named Eleazar Albin painted a blue and yellow parrot with a white face patch in 1740 that\u2019s supposedly the Martinique macaw, although Albin would have seen the bird in Jamaica when he visited in 1701, not Martinique. The two islands are about 1,100 miles apart, or almost 1,800 kilometers.\nA similar blue and yellow macaw appears in Roelant Savery\u2019s 1626 painting of a dodo. The dodo lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, nowhere near the Americas. Savery just liked to paint dodos and included them in a lot of his art. In another 1626 painting, called \u201cLandscape with Birds,\u201d he included a dodo, an ostrich, a chicken, a turkey, a peacock, ducks, swans, cranes of various kinds, and lots of other birds that don\u2019t live anywhere near each other. On the far left edge of the painting there\u2019s a blue macaw with yellow underparts.\nIn the early 20th century, a zoologist named Walter Rothschild read Bouton\u2019s account and decided those birds needed to be described as new species, even though there were no type specimens and no way of knowing if the birds were actually new to science.\nHe described the Martinique macaw in 1905 but reclassified it ...