Ara glaucogularis, Dabbene, 1921

Rodríguez, Oscar, Castillo, Leandro, Smith, Paul & Castillo, Hugo del, 2019, Status and distribution of Paraguayan macaws (Aves: Psittacidae) with a new country record, Papéis Avulsos de Zoologia 59, pp. 1-10 : 7

Blue-throated Macaw Ara glaucogularis

Wagler’s (1832) name Ara caninde was based on Azara’s (1805) description of his Guacamayo caninde. This was for a long time thought to apply to the Bolivian endemic Blue-throated Macaw Ara glaucogularis . However, the identity was confirmed as this species by Bertoni (1922) and Dabbene (1920, 1921) with further clarification provided by Ingels et al. (1981). It seems that all Paraguayan reports can be traced back to this confusion. Two supposed Paraguayan specimens in the NHM mentioned by Forshaw (1973) are in fact from elsewhere ( Ingels et al., 1981).

Podtiaguin (1944) writes of a pair of Ara glaucogularis being killed in Colonia Esperanza (probably Guairá department) on 18 June 1939 by E. Ávila (though earlier in the same publication he attributes the record to “E. Krenitsky”), with another taken by P. Willim at Colonia Nueva Italia, Central department.The location of Colonia Esperanza is uncertain, as there is also a locality with this name in Presidente Hayes department (S 23°58 ′ 04.36 ″, W 58°45 ′ 42.58 ″). He describes the species as “travelling a lot” in certain years and it “not being rare to find it in Paraguay ”. However, this is completely at odds with all available evidence, and as Podtiaguin had a tendency to write secondhand accounts of birds in a firsthand manner (Smith, 2016), it is far from clear whether he ever examined the specimens he wrote about.