08/20/2026
I have a story to tell on this one.
Yes, you are seeing right, that is a baby chicken and a mama macaw. You may be wondering how we got to this point because I sure was when I made the discovery.
This blue and gold macaw has wanted to become a mother more than anything. She came to live here at Arizona Parrot Network because she spent much of her previous life as a single macaw in a pet home laying and sitting on her own eggs on the floor of her cage, despite ever having had another macaw in the same home as her. When she arrived, I knew of her tendencies of egg laying, hoping a new setting would distract her from the constant state of nesting she was in, and it did.
Fast forward two years and this blue and gold macaw hen has fallen in love. No, not with another macaw, and no, not with a rooster either😂 with me. She loves me more than any other bird. In the 2 years' time though, she never laid any more eggs once in my care.
I keep my single macaws in a large aviary which allows them to choose their own mate, as I found better success in macaw pairing by them selecting mates in a social setting. But, all attempts to pair her with a potential mate seemed to fail. This girl turned down every male macaw that even looked at her. She is so easygoing and has a sweet personality, but stands her ground in the aviary. The right macaw male is yet to come with her and so we will just have to wait it out.
In the meantime, during my busy season tending to babies, I was not paying as close of attention to the happenings in my singles macaw aviary. In that aviary, I keep a dummy nest box 12’ up. When macaws see the chance to nest it often stimulates pairing. So the nesting site is only to draw interest into nesting for newly bonded pairs. Once the pairs fully bond they are then placed into their own aviary with a private nest. During the past few months, this single blue and gold hen had claimed the nesting box, and I was aware she was spending time in the box. I knew she had no prospective males interested in nesting with her, so I left her be, not thinking to ever check as she hadn’t laid eggs in over two years.
As you know, poultry and parrots go hand in hand at Arizona Parrot Network. If you didn’t know parrots are extremely wasteful when it comes to their food, while poultry are extremely thorough in eating anything and everything. In this giant macaw aviary, I keep a flock of a few chickens as a cleanup crew for all the wasted parrot food that drops to the ground. It prevents built up food waste which helps to minimize cleaning for me and keeps food cleared that would attract rodents. In this cleanup flock are hens and rooster chickens. Are you starting to see how this happened?
This particular chicken breed lays white eggs, same as a macaw, only about 3x larger than a macaw egg. Being aware that the chickens lay eggs, I have a nesting site for them low to the ground where I collect their eggs from. Neither bird species ever really paid attention to each other. Well, one day a chicken decided to explore new options as to where to lay her egg. Mind you, 12 feet up in the canopy of this aviary is a dark crevice, no place that a chicken would ever find. I don’t know who started the nest of eggs but I know who finished it. So one day that chicken made her way up into the canopy to lay her single egg in the macaw nesting box.
I decided it had been a while since I inspected the community macaw nest. Not having an easy access to this nest because I don’t actually use it as a real nesting site. I have to use a ladder to inspect the nest and didn’t have one with me at the time. Being tall enough I reached up and stuck my phone up to the entrance of the nest and took some pictures of the contents inside. She was just as surprised as I was when I looked at the pictures I had just taken😆
Under this blue and gold macaw hen, she had been sitting and incubating 2 of her own infertile macaw eggs and 1 fertile chicken egg that I did not place in the nest. I just happened to discover it the day that baby chicken hatched. I am very in tune with my birds and the happenings of my facility, but this one caught me off guard and was a total shock to find.
This macaw was determined to become a mother without a mate and somehow she managed to do so! To her, that baby chicken was her own. Unfortunately, two completely different bird species with two very different rearing processes just couldn’t coexist even though I would have loved for her to raise that chicken. The baby chick is safely in my care now and mama macaw finally hatched the baby she always wanted.
As always,
Stay wild 🐔🦜
