At 12.00 on 4 November 2025, we documented what appears to be, to the best of our knowledge, the first confirmed instance of roadkill involving the red-browed Amazon Amazona rhodocorytha (chauá in Portuguese), of the parrot family Psittacidae, in Brazil. The individual was found freshly dead at km 117 along the BR-101 highway, within the municipality of Sooretama, Espírito Santo state. It lay on the roadway adjacent to a forested corridor that connects the Sooretama Biological Reserve and the Vale Natural Reserve and coincides with the buffer zone of these protected areas. These two reserves are among the largest and most important strongholds for this globally threatened species, which is categorized as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, Brazil’s national Red List and the Espírito Santo Red List. We retrieved the carcass and deposited it in the Zoology Collection of the Museu de Biologia Mello Leitão (MBML).

Amazona rhodocorytha inhabits the forest canopy and is restricted to remaining Atlantic Forest fragments in eastern Brazil. Because it typically feeds and moves in the upper canopy, road collisions have not previously been considered a relevant threat in national or global assessments. Like its congeners, the species tends to avoid forest edges (Vallejos et al., 2024, Landscape Ecology, 39, 53). However, these birds may explore edge areas during the breeding season (September–November). Unfortunately, ongoing habitat loss, the isolation of forest remnants and strong edge effects along the BR-101 are increasingly forcing individuals closer to forest margins. These shifts in movement behaviour may heighten exposure to vehicle traffic, especially in areas where highways, agriculture and power transmission corridors disrupt canopy continuity. Despite the ecological importance of this landscape, this stretch of the BR-101 lacks effective speed reduction structures or wildlife warning signage in the buffer zones of the protected areas.

Roadkill is an emerging yet underreported source of avian mortality in Brazil, with the majority of existing data focusing on mammals. Reports concerning threatened parrots are particularly scarce in the Atlantic Forest; there have been no documented instances of A. rhodocorytha in either the research literature or roadkill monitoring programmes. Consequently, this observation is an alert for conservation practitioners and environmental authorities regarding a potentially overlooked threat. The Atlantic Forest region between Sooretama and Linhares contains some of the last viable populations of this species, and even isolated mortality events could have population-level implications for a bird contending with significant habitat loss and illegal capture (Ribeiro et al., 2025, Oryx, 59, 553).