Tony Juniper - Spix’s Macaw - The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird

Following a search on the north shore of the river São Francisco near to Juàzeiro, Kaempfer wrote that

The region is one of the ugliest we have seen on the whole trip. No forest or anything alike; the vegetation is a low underbrush and open camp where grass only grows. The river is very large here forming on both shores large strips of swamp; the latter ones without any particular bird life besides small Ardeidae [heron family] and common rails. Owing to the character of the country the collection we could make was small only. All questions about Cyanopsitta Spixii that Spix discovered here a hundred years ago were fruitless, nobody knew anything about such a parrot.

The only Spix’s Macaw that Kaempfer was able to track down was a captive one that he saw at Juàzeiro railway station, another bird taken locally from the wild and about to embark by train on the first leg of a journey to lead a life in distant and obscure captivity.

In the early twentieth century, the only certainty surrounding Spix’s Macaw was its scarcity. As Carl Hellmayr, an Austrian naturalist studying the birds of South America with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, put it in 1929: it is ‘one of the great rarities among South American parrots’. Indeed, during the entire first half of the century, the only other possible record of the species in the wild, apart from Reiser’s in 1903, was a vague mention from Piauí before 1938. 3 This report, from the extreme south of the dry and remote state, was in an area of deciduous woodlands that comprises a transition zone between the arid caatinga and the more lush savannas of central Brazil.

The species was not heard from again in the wild until the 1970s. Various collectors and zoos however owned Spix’s Macaws. Living birds were exported from Brazil to a wide variety of final destinations. Several went to the United States, where one was for example kept in the Chicago Zoo from 1928 for nearly twenty years. Others finished up in the UK, where several private collectors and zoos, such as Paignton in Devon and Mossley Hill in Liverpool, kept them. In all, there were up to seven in the UK in the 1930s. At least one was kept in Ulster during the late 1960s; a recording of this bird’s call is in the British Library of Wildlife Sounds. Spix’s Macaws were also kept in The Netherlands at Rotterdam Zoo and in Germany. One spent some time at the Vienna Zoo during the 1920s, while at least a pair had been imported to Portugal from Paraguay.

Spix’s Macaws were also supplied to collectors in Brazil itself and at least one was successful in breeding them. During the 1950s a parrot collector called Alvaro Carvalhães obtained one from a local merchant and managed to borrow another from a friend. They fortunately formed a breeding pair – by no means a foregone conclusion with fickle parrots – and after several breeding attempts young were reared. Carvalhães built up a breeding stock of four pairs that between them produced twenty hatchlings. One of these later finished up in the Naples Zoo. The rest remained in Brazil where they were split up with another breeder, Carvalhães’s friend and neighbour, Ulisses Moreira. The birds began to die one by one as time passed, but the final blow that finished off Moreira’s macaws was a batch of sunflower seeds contaminated with agricultural pesticides. This killed most of the parrots in the collection, including his Spix’s Macaws.

Although there was evidently a continuing flow of wild-caught Spix’s Macaws during the 1970s to meet international demand in bird-collecting circles, the openness with which collectors declared the ownership of such rare creatures sharply declined in the late 1960s. At that point, the trade in such birds was attracting the attention of agencies and governments who were increasingly concerned about the impact of trapping and trade on rare species.

Brazil banned the export of its native wildlife in 1967 4 and the Spix’s Macaw became further prohibited in international trade under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 1975. 5 With effect from 1 July that year, all international commercial trade in Spix’s Macaws between countries that had ratified the Convention was illegal, except in cases where the birds were involved in official captive-breeding programmes, or were being transferred for approved educational or scientific purposes.

This new legal protection didn’t stop the trade, however; it simply forced it underground. To the extent that the trafficking was increasingly secret, the volume of commerce and the final destinations for birds being captured was unknown to anyone but a few dealers, trappers and rare parrot collectors. Despite the increasingly clandestine exploitation of wild Spix’s Macaws and a near-total absence of details about its impact, it was becoming ever more clear that the species must be in danger of extinction in the wild. The blue parrot first collected by Spix would come to symbolise a bitter irony: people’s obsessive fascination with parrots was paradoxically wiping them out.

Parrots are surprisingly like people and can bring out both the best and worst in humans. From love and loyalty to greed and jealousy, the human qualities of parrots can provoke the most basic of our human responses in their keepers. Perhaps that is why for centuries parrots have been our closest and most cherished avian companions.

There are hundreds of kinds of parrot. The smallest are the tiny pygmy parrots of New Guinea that weigh in at just 10 grams – about the size of a wren or kinglet. These minuscule parrots creep like delicate animated jewellery along the trunks and branches of trees in the dense, dark rainforests of New Guinea. The heaviest parrot, the rotund nocturnal Kakapo ( Strigops habroptilis ) of New Zealand, grows up to 300 times larger. These great flightless parrots, camouflaged so they resemble a huge ball of moss, can weigh up to 3 kilos. 6

Some parrots are stocky with short tails, others elegant with long flowing plumes. The smaller slender ones with long tails are often known as parakeets (the budgerigar, Melopsittacus undulata , is one), while it is the stouter birds that most people would generally recognise as ‘parrots’. The mainly white ones with prominent crests are called cockatoos and the large gaudy South American ones with long tails macaws. Despite this remarkable diversity, all of them are instantly recognisable, even to lay people, as members of the same biological family. The unique hooked bill, and feet, with two toes facing forwards and two backwards, identify them straight away.

Where the parrots came from is a baffling biological question. Many different ancestries have been suggested, including distant relationships with birds as diverse as pigeons, hawks and toucans. Even with modern genetic techniques it has not been possible to unravel the ancestral relationships between parrots and other modern birds. What is known, however, is that parrot-like birds have been around for a very long time.

The oldest parrot is known from a fossil found by a Mr S. Vincent in 1978 at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex, England. The tiny fragile clues that these diminutive birds ever existed were painstakingly investigated by scientists who identified the species as ‘new’: they named the creature Pulchrapollia gracilis . ‘ Pulchrapollia ’ translates literally as ‘beautiful Polly’, and ‘ gracilis ’ means slender.

This ancient parrot was small and delicate – not much larger than a modern-day budgie. Its remains were found in Early Eocene London Clay deposits dated at about 55.4 million years old. More remarkable than even this great antiquity is the suggestion that parrots might have been around even earlier. A fossil bird found in the Lance Formation in Wyoming in the USA might be a parrot too. If it is, it would demonstrate the presence of such birds in the Late Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago, thereby confirming that parrots coexisted with the animals they are ultimately descended from: the dinosaurs. Awesome antiquity indeed. 7 To place this ancestry in perspective, the earliest modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) are believed to have appeared only about 200,000 years ago.