Travel to Barba Azul Nature Reserve

The Barba Azul Nature Reserve covers 12,200 hectares in the Llanos de Moxos, the vast seasonally flooded savanna that spreads across northern Bolivia’s Beni Department. For roughly eight months of the year much of the reserve lies under shallow water, then dries out into open grassland cut by the Omi River and studded with raised islands of palm and tropical forest. These forest islands, many of them built up over centuries by pre-Columbian communities, sit a few meters above the floodplain and hold the trees, fruit, and shelter that wildlife depends on once the waters recede. Five distinct habitats meet here: open savanna, treed cerrado, forest islands, gallery forest, and marsh wetland.

Asociación Armonía, the BirdLife International partner in Bolivia, established the reserve in 2008 and has expanded it through successive land purchases from an initial core to its present size. The reserve is the first protected area created specifically for the Blue-throated Macaw, a parrot found nowhere outside this corner of Bolivia. It is also Bolivia’s only site in the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network, recognized for the migratory sandpipers that stop here on their journey between the Arctic and the pampas of Argentina. Today Barba Azul functions as both a wildlife reserve and a working biological station, drawing researchers, birders, and conservationists from around the world.

The Blue-throated Macaw is one of the rarest parrots on earth, a large blue and yellow bird endemic to the Beni savanna and listed as Critically Endangered. Feared extinct in the wild until a population was confirmed in the early 1990s, fewer than 450 are thought to remain across three separate subpopulations in northern Bolivia. The species was driven to the edge by decades of capture for the pet trade and by the loss of the old palm trees it needs for nesting. Barba Azul protects the largest of the three groups, and the reserve has become the species’ most important refuge in the dry season.

Through the non-breeding months the macaws gather to roost in the reserve’s forest islands, and the counts have climbed steadily as habitat has recovered. In July 2022 a record 228 birds were seen flying to a single roost, more than half of the known wild population at the time. Armonía’s team supports the species across the wider landscape with artificial nest boxes, fire management, and research that has tracked where the birds breed beyond the reserve. Visitors in the dry season can watch flocks of thirty to seventy macaws stream across the savanna at first and last light, one of the great wildlife spectacles of South America.

Barba Azul is far more than a single species. More than 340 bird species have been recorded across its grasslands, wetlands, and forest islands, including up to six macaw species, Greater Rhea, Jabiru, Southern Screamer, and a long list of savanna specialists prized by birders. The open country is some of the best in Bolivia for large mammals: maned wolf, giant anteater, marsh deer, and pampas deer are all seen regularly, and jaguar, puma, and ocelot move through the reserve. Black and yacaré caiman patrol the river channels, while capybara and black howler monkeys are common around the forest edges.

Each September the reserve fills with migratory shorebirds making the long flight between the Arctic and southern South America. As Bolivia’s only Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network site, Barba Azul is the country’s most important stopover for the Buff-breasted Sandpiper, with thousands recorded in peak years alongside Pectoral and Upland Sandpipers and American Golden-Plover. The reserve’s short-grass habitat, kept open in part by a carefully managed herd of cattle, gives these birds the feeding grounds they need. Days here are spent walking the forest island trails, watching macaw roosts at dusk, and exploring the Omi River by boat.