Hunting, the pet trade and the clearing of the forest finished the species off in Argentina. The last of them disappeared in 1988, and for close to four decades the Misiones canopy has carried no blue-winged macaw calls at all. The reintroduction is run by the NGO Aves Argentinas with Brazilian partners including Parque das Aves in Foz do Iguaçu, and it begins, always, with a bird that somebody tried to sell.
Those that pass the examinations go to a large forest aviary at the Puente Verde reserve, on the Andresito Peninsula. There they learn again what captivity took from them: how to fly a distance rather than a few metres, how to recognise native jungle fruits and shoots as food, and how to be afraid of people. The last lesson matters as much as the others.
In December last year a chick hatched in the wild at Puente Verde, the first in decades. The team named him Julián. He lived a month.
The release of the eight tracked birds is set for 20 September, after months of preparation. During the first adjustment period they will be able to return to the enclosure at night, a door left open against the hour when the forest becomes too large. Telemetry will follow them; supplementary food will bridge the gap until they feed themselves entirely.
There is precedent for the patience this requires. In Corrientes province, green-winged macaws were released into Iberá Park from 2015, and the first wild-hatched chicks appeared in 2020, after an absence from the country of more than a century and a half.
What the organisers are reaching for goes beyond eight birds. Misiones, Brazil and Paraguay hold fragments of the same forest, and macaws that move between them could begin to knit separated populations back together. Large parrots carry the seeds of palms and other fruiting trees; when the birds vanish from a forest, that work stops with them.
Di Nucci's part ends at the aviary door. What follows belongs to the birds.