蜜芽传媒

The Spix's macaw, a bird that had once vanished in the wild, is now thriving in its South American homeland after a successful breeding programme.

The future for the species looked dismal until the bird鈥檚 fortunes were revived by the 2011 film Rio, which tells the story of a domesticated male Spix鈥檚 macaw called Blu.

Tom White is a biologist from the US Fish and Wildlife Service and a technical adviser to the international rescue project. He told Newsday that the parrots were released with another non-endangered native species 鈥渢hat had all of their鈥�innate survival skills intact鈥� What we want to see is Spix's macaws nesting in the wild, fledging chicks in the wild and these will be the new generation of actual wild Spix鈥檚.鈥�

(Picture: All eight of the released Spix's macaws sampling wild foods. Credit: Tyson Chapman/ACTP)