This toucan occurs in the humid lowland forests of western Amazonian Bolivia. It has a pale bill and red, black, and yellow breast bands; fruit-feeding has been recorded in the canopy.
The UCI species page identifies a light-colored bill and red, black, and yellow breast bands in its photo caption.
A Bolivian regional guide records it moving through the canopy of humid lowland forest, forest edges, and gallery forest, feeding on figs and Cecropia fruits; it also catches small insects.
At Cocha Cashu in Manu National Park, southeastern Peru, a 1994 study recorded P. azara perching at a fruiting Ficus pertusa s.l. tree and swallowing the figs whole. The paper did not assign a subspecies, so this observation alone cannot identify the birds as mariae.
The 1919 catalogue describes the form then called P. flavirostris mariae as having the whole lower mandible ochraceous brown, compared with the mostly yellow bill of P. f. flavirostris. This is a form-level description of mariae, now placed within P. azara.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.