 This habitat has long been disappearing through decades of intensive logging, followed by further disturbance in the converting of logged land to subsistence farming.What is left of said habitat comprises less than four percent of its original area.These small habitats, islands of forest called "brejos", are fragments of moist forest caatingas, surrounded on every side by either dry forest caatingas, or by cerrados, swaths of shrubby vegetation resembling savanna, where "M. rufula" cannot grow.