News that the Loro Parque Fundación has released two Lear’s macaws ( Anodorhynchus leari) into their natural habitat in Brazil has had Rakewell squawking with pleasure. These Brazilian parrots were first described in the 1850s but would not be defined as a distinct species until 1978, when an ornithologist discovered their wild population. At that point, they were named after Edward Lear, the painter-poet whose first publication, in 1832, was a volume of lithographic reproductions of his drawings of parrots made in the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park. The young Lear took to birds like, well, a duck to water. In December 1830, in a verse note to a friend, Harry Hinde, he wrote that ‘ever since breakfast / I’ve had one bun merely’, so ensconced was he in drawing his feathered friends: ‘For all day I’ve been a- / way at the West End, / Painting the best end / Of some vast Parrots / As red as new carrots […]’. Although some of his sketches were of stuffed birds, he insisted, as his biographer Jenny Uglow observes, ‘in drawing from live birds wherever possible’. And these were not only specimen drawings, but portraits of individual parrots: ‘A huge Maccaw is now looking me in the face as much as to say – “finish me”,’ he wrote in one letter.