Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  Not only was the account of what they saw of great importance; their collection made a substantial contribution to the Natural History Museum of Munich. They brought back specimens from 85 species of mammals, 350 species of birds, 116 species of fish, 2,700 insects and 6,500 botanical specimens. They also managed to bring live animals back, including some parrots and monkeys. Many of their specimens were from species of animals and plants new to science.

  Among the treasures brought home to Bavaria was the blue parrot shot by Spix near to Juàzeiro in the north of Bahia, not far from the river São Francisco. Since it was blue with a long tail, it seems that Spix believed he had taken a Hyacinth Macaw.

  It was customary by this time for all species to be assigned a two-part name, mainly in the then international scientific language of Latin – but also Greek – following the classification system proposed during the eighteenth century by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, better known as Linnaeus. The idea was to avoid the confusion often created by the use of several different colloquial names by adopting a common international system. The first part of the name denoted the genus, that is the group of closely related creatures or plants to which the specimen belonged. The second half of the title was to identify the particular species.

  Whether he knew about Latham’s name for the blue parrot or simply used the name in ignorance (this occurred quite commonly in the early years of natural history classification), Spix confusingly called the little blue caatinga macaw Arara hyacinthinus in his volume called Avium Brasiliensium Species Novae published in 1824–5. He also had specimens of the larger, and similarly blue, Hyacinth Macaws that he proposed be renamed Anodorhyncho Maximiliani. ‘Anodorhyncho’ was a new name proposed by Spix to denote the genus of large blue macaws to which it belonged, and ‘Maximiliani’ was in honour of the King who had sponsored his explorations in South America.

  The confusion that Spix evidently experienced in naming his blue parrots was quite understandable. Unlike modern naturalists, Spix was not able to rely on a glossy field book that succinctly set out with accurate colour pictures, maps and clear descriptions what birds he might encounter on his travels through the interior of Brazil. Even now, at the start of the twenty-first century, there is still no handy field and identification guide for Brazilian birds, although Helmut Sick’s 1993 Birds in Brazil provides a comprehensive overview of birds occurring in the country. It is worth noting that many dozens of guides are available for European birds, a portion of the globe with far fewer endangered species.

  With no manual to rely on, it was not a straightforward business for Spix to recognise new species, let alone ones that had already been collected by other museums or expeditions. For a start, any naturalist seeking to catalogue a vast and diverse country like Brazil, even for a relatively obvious and distinctive group of animals like birds (even large blue parrots), would need a basic understanding of what had already been collected and what typical geographical variations might be expected over different species’ sometimes vast ranges. Such knowledge in early nineteenth-century Bavaria was, as elsewhere, extremely scarce.

  It was not until 1832, six years after Spix’s death, that the magnitude of his error became apparent. The blue parrot he had collected in the caatinga, and so carefully transported all the way back to Munich, was utterly unique, unlike anything else ever catalogued: Spix had found a new species. It later emerged that not only was it a species new to science, it was a representative of a whole ‘new’ genus.

  Spix’s mistake was noticed first by another Bavarian naturalist, his assistant Johann Wagler. Wagler, a Professor of Zoology at the University of Munich, realised that the bird collected by Spix was smaller than the birds previously described as Hyacinth Macaws and was a different colour too. It had a greyish head, black bare skin on its face, instead of the yellow patches seen in the Hyacinth, and it had a smaller and more delicate bill than the bigger Hyacinth Macaw and its relatives.

  In his Monograph of Parrots published in 1832, Wagler paid tribute to the bird’s collector in the naming of a ‘new’ species after him; Sittace Spixii, he called it – a name basically meaning ‘Spix’s Parrot’. Wagler, like Spix, completed his bird book just in time. That same year, Wagler was involved in a shooting accident. He peppered his arm with small shot while out collecting birds. He contracted blood poisoning, amputation was fatally delayed and he died in the summer, aged thirty-two.

  Following Wagler’s realisation that a species new to science had been found, the French naturalist Prince Charles Bonaparte proposed in the 1850s that it be placed in a new genus called Cyanopsittaca. Bonaparte, the son of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Lucien, was a passionate ornithologist who had a special interest in parrots. Since this bird was unlike the other blue macaws in several important respects, Bonaparte believed that a whole new genus of parrots was warranted. He took the Greek word for blue, Kyanos, and the Latin for parrot, Psittacus, to denote a new genus literally meaning ‘blue parrot’.

  In the 1860s in a monograph of parrots compiled by the German ornithologist Otto Finsch there is an everyday German name that translated means ‘Spix’s Blue Macaw’. Finsch wrote that the small blue macaw was easy to distinguish from the Hyacinth Macaw because of its smaller size and more bare skin on its face and around its eyes. He concluded that it was ‘An exceedingly rare species and found in few museums. Discovered by Spix on the river São Francisco at Juàzeiro’. Significantly, he wrote that, ‘Other travellers do not mention it at all.’

  Three decades later, the Italian zoologist Count Tommaso Salvadori compiled the Catalogue of the Parrots in the Collection of the British Museum. Salvadori completed his two-year task in 1891. He retained Spix’s bird in a genus called Cyanopsittacus. The fact that no other birds quite like it had been discovered meant that it remained in the genus on its own, thereby signalling that it was quite unique with characteristics seen in no other bird.

  The second half of its scientific name was spixii. From now on, the bird collected in 1819 by the river São Francisco would be known in its scientific Latin form as Cyanopsittacus – or more commonly today Cyanopsitta spixii, and in English as Spix’s Macaw.

  The fact that the species was now officially recorded was, however, to prove a mixed blessing. It intrigued not only scientists, but also conservationists and collectors, the former seeking to save the species, the latter to own and possess the most sought-after of all birds. But the blue caatinga parrots were to prove an elusive quarry for all concerned.

  Astonishingly, Spix’s Macaw effectively disappeared from the eyes of naturalists and travellers, and was not observed in the wild for eighty-four years after Spix had first encountered one. The fact that Spix’s Macaw was a rare bird was not lost on the early cataloguers and naturalists. Indeed, no European recorded one alive in the wild again until the start of the twentieth century when Othmar Reiser saw Spix’s Macaws during an expedition of the Austrian Academy of Sciences to north-eastern Brazil in June 1903.

  He wrote, ‘As I knew that Spix had discovered this rare and beautiful parrot in the area of the river São Francisco near Juàzeiro, I made sure to keep an eye out for it in the area described. Unfortunately without success. Any enquiries made to the local people were also negative.’ Finally, at the lake at Parnaguá in the state of Piauí, more than 400 kilometres to the west of Juàzeiro, Reiser and his companions were rewarded with two sightings of the elusive blue bird. They reported one sighting of three birds and another of a pair. ‘They arrive apparently from a long distance and the thirsty birds at first perch, calling, on the tops of the trees on the beach to survey the surrounding area as a precaution. After flapping their wings for a few times they fly down to the ground with ease and drink slowly and long from pools or the water at the bank.’2

  Reiser tried to approach but found the birds nervous and not tolerant of people. His attempts to shoot the macaws in order to obtain a specimen failed. ‘So it was that the parrot species most desired by us was the o
nly one to be observed, but not collected’, he wrote. The only other encounter with Spix’s Macaw noted during this expedition was a captive bird shown to the party in the town of Remanso. Reiser tried to buy it, but lamented that it was not for sale.

  But other Spix’s Macaws were for sale. Despite the lack of scientific observations by naturalists working in the field, the blue parrots were certainly leaving Brazil for a life in captivity overseas.

  In 1878, the Zoological Society of London at Regent’s Park had obtained a live bird for its collection from Paris. It died and so the zoo set out to get hold of a replacement. In November 1894, a second bird was procured for the Society by Walter Rothschild: that one lasted until 1900. A third was held at the London Zoo from June 1901 but expired after just a year. These individuals were among a steady trickle that by the late nineteenth century were being exported to meet a growing demand for live rare parrots. In common with other rare species, when these birds died they were often included in museum collections. Following the demise of the first Zoological Society specimen, its skin was preserved and placed in the collection held by the British (now Natural History) Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire. The second London bird’s skin is now kept in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And it wasn’t only the large zoological institutions like London that were interested in owning them. In late Victorian England, as in other parts of the world, aviculture was growing in popularity, and private bird collectors certainly knew of the Spix’s Macaw as a rare and desirable addition to a parrot fancier’s aviaries.

  In the December 1897 issue of Avicultural Magazine, a journal for serious bird keepers, the Honourable and Reverend F. G. Dutton from Bibury in Gloucestershire wrote, ‘Have any of our members kept a Spix? I have seen only two – one that our zoo acquired some years ago from the Jardin d’Acclimatation [in Paris], and one bought by Mr Rothschild … They were both ill tempered: but as the first had a broken wing, it had probably been caught old. I was greatly tempted by the offer of one from Mr Cross the other day, but there are so many calls on a parson’s purse, that he cannot always treat himself to expensive parrots. I ought to have been keeper at the parrot-house in the zoo.’ Although he does not mention a price, it is clear that even in the late nineteenth century Spix’s Macaws were the preserve of the more discerning and wealthier bird collectors.

  After Dutton had published his request for details on any Spix’s Macaws kept in Britain at that time, a Mr Henry Fulljames of Elmbourne Road in Balham, London, came forward. The Reverend soon paid Fulljames a visit at his house to view his parrot collection. Dutton wrote, ‘Lastly, the most interesting bird was the Spix’s Macaw … It was very tame and gentle, but not, as regards plumage, in the best of condition. I never can see a bird in rough plumage without longing to get it right. And so it has been arranged between Mr Fulljames and myself that I should have the Spix at Bibury, and try what a little outdoor life might do for it.’ Although Dutton had hatched an apparently foolproof plan to have a Spix’s Macaw for free, at least temporarily, Henry Fulljames’s housekeeper put an end to the scheme. She was very reluctant to lose sight of the Spix’s and the bird stayed where it was.

  The Reverend persevered, however, and by September 1900 he had acquired a Spix’s Macaw of his own. ‘My Spix, which is really more a conure than a macaw, will not look at sop of any sort,’ he wrote, ‘except sponge cake given from one’s fingers, only drinks plain water and lives mainly on sunflower seed. It has hemp, millet, canary and peanuts but I do not think it eats much of any of them. It barks the branches of the tree where it is loose, and may eat the bark. It would very likely be all the better if it would eat bread and milk, as it might then produce some flight feathers, which it never yet has had.’ He later wrote that his Spix’s Macaw, which lived in his study, was learning to talk.

  The Reverend Dutton was not the only one to wonder if Spix’s Macaw might not be closer to the conures than the other macaws. Conures are slender parrots with long tails. They are confined to the Americas and are mainly included in two genera: Aratinga and Pyrrhura. Several writers repeated Dutton’s conjecture, but given the many macaw-like characteristics of Cyanopsitta it is safer to assume that it is a macaw.

  By the early twentieth century, Spix’s Macaws were well known among bird keepers, at least from books. In Butler’s 1909 Foreign Birds for Cage and Aviary, the author refers to the earlier published claims that Spix’s Macaws are bad-tempered birds. ‘As all bird keepers know well,’ Butler wrote, ‘it is impossible to be certain of the character of any species from the study of one or two examples only. Even in the case of birds which are generally ill tempered and malicious, amiable individuals may occasionally be met with. Moreover circumstances may alter cases, and a Parrot chained by the leg to a stand may be excused for being more morose than one in a roomy cage.’ Butler, in common with previous commentators, remarked that Spix’s Macaws were extremely rare.

  Another famous aviculturist in the early part of the twentieth century was the Marquis of Tavistock. In his book on Parrots and Parrot-like Birds in Aviculture published in the 1920s, he remarked that, ‘This rather attractive little blue macaw was formerly extremely rare, but a few have been brought over during recent years. It is not noisy, is easily tamed and sometimes makes a fair talker. There seems to be little information as to its ability to stand cold or as to its behaviour in mixed company, but it is probably neither delicate nor spiteful … In the living bird the feathers of the head and neck stand out in a curious fashion, giving a peculiar and distinctive appearance.’

  While birds occasionally turned up in collections, attempts to find Spix’s Macaws in the wild were repeatedly frustrated. In 1927, Ernst Kaempfer had been in the field with his wife collecting birds in eastern Brazil for two years. Although the Kaempfers had managed to ship some 3,500 bird specimens back to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Spix’s Macaw still eluded them.

  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 19
60s; 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.