Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  When the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) came into force in 1975 (see page 34), thereby banning trade in some of the most threatened parrots, the smugglers tried every means possible to circumvent the treaty’s protective measures. Rare parrot laundering via countries with more open borders or less strict regulations, document falsification, disguising rare species as common ones and straightforward smuggling all occurred and still do.

  Even in countries that had the will to enforce the Convention, the means used by the traders to evade detection grew ever more sophisticated. Parrots are packed inside sections of drainpipe, hidden inside vehicles’ spare tyres and put in plastic bottles to smuggle them past customs officials. Rare parrot eggs are taken on planes strapped against the body of smugglers to keep them warm, hatched in incubators, the babies hand-reared and the birds sold on for a fortune. Where detection of smuggling in some places has improved, the trade routes have shifted to exploit the next weakest point of entry.16

  During the second half of the 1980s, the scale of the disaster about to overtake the world’s most familiar and popular birds finally became clear. One man was devoting his working life to the matter: Dr Nigel Collar at the International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP), a network of bird conservation groups from around the world headquartered at Cambridge in England.17 He had been writing about endangered birds for years and was the world expert on the subject. Collar had accumulated a vast global network of museum curators, academics and ornithologists who helped him piece together a picture of what was happening to the world’s fast-disappearing birds.

  The results of this sifting through old manuscripts, field reports and collections, was the compilation of so-called Red Data Books. Collar’s great tomes systematically set out the situation faced by individual endangered species so that action to save them could be properly directed and prioritised. Basing his research on the collections and journals of the early natural history explorers like Spix and Martius, the fieldwork of top ornithologists and bird records compiled by different societies and academic bodies, Collar coordinated research that in 1988 led to the publication of Birds to Watch. It showed that more than one thousand species of bird out of a total of about ten thousand were in danger of disappearing for good.

  One family was doing worse than any others – the parrots. Some 71 out of the 350 known species were then listed as at risk of extinction. Collar found that the principal reasons for this catastrophic decline were collection of birds for the pet and collector markets and destruction of the birds’ forest homes.18

  Collar’s findings demanded that there was a change in the one-sided relationship between people and parrots. Hundreds of years of trapping and deforestation had taken their toll: there wasn’t much time to spare. Some of the most beautiful parrots were already at the very brink of extinction; for them the endgame was now in play. Just a few last moves were left as a final prelude to more than 50 million years of evolutionary memory being wiped away for good.

  The group of parrots nearest to the edge was the blue macaws. Once seen in the flesh it is obvious why this group of spectacular blue parrots above all others should attract special attention from the trappers, dealers and collectors. Outstanding among even the parrots for charisma, charm and visual impact, the blue macaws – Spix’s among them – have been doomed by their unique qualities to become one of humanity’s most prized possessions.

  4

  The Four Blues

  Visitors to the Berlin Zoo in 1900 enjoyed a unique spectacle. The crowds filing past the cages didn’t know it, but they were the only people in history to have seen all four species of the spectacular blue macaw alive together. In addition to the rare Spix’s Macaw, captive Hyacinth, Glaucous and Lear’s Macaws were then held in the Berlin aviaries as well. All had been imported from South America. These highly coveted zoological treasures would never meet again.

  Today, the three large and similar-looking blue macaws are included in the biological genus Anodorhynchus, the name coined by Spix. These macaws are larger than the Cyanopsitta macaw first collected by Spix. They also differ from Spix’s in having a proportionately larger bill and curious patches of bare yellow skin at the base of the beak and around the eyes. The function of the bright startling highlights is unknown but could be to aid recognition, some form of adornment that is important for bonding and breeding or a means to reduce their temperature when the birds get too hot.

  The large, black, hooked bill of the Anodorhynchus macaws is uniquely adapted for eating the fruits of various palms. The largest nuts eaten by the largest species, the Hyacinth Macaw, are about the size of a golf ball. Even with a big hammer or heavy-duty bench vice, it is impossible for a person to break them open. The macaws are, however, experts. They rotate the nuts in their bill manipulating where necessary with tongue and foot to place the tough objects in exactly the correct positioning for peeling. Once they have removed the tough external skin, the birds make perfect transverse cuts with the heavy square chisel at the cutting edge of the lower half of the bill that enables them to split the nuts in two. Inside is the prize, a nutritious fatty kernel.

  As the palm trees evolved tougher and tougher shells to prevent their seeds being eaten, so the big blue macaws advanced a larger bill to crack them. And so it went on: an ecological arms race that produced surely the most impressive of all bird bills. Remarkably, the huge and powerful bill of these macaws is rarely used in anger. Despite having the potential to remove fingers easily, the birds are the gentle giants of the parrot world.

  Fieldworkers studying Hyacinth Macaws have described the effect of their work on palm nuts as resembling that of a machine tool or laser rather than that of a bird’s bill. Once opened, the coconut-like flesh of the nut is crushed into a paste that the birds find absolutely irresistible. Hyacinth Macaws are clever when it comes to cracking such tough nuts. One German aviculturist noticed that when his macaws were given Acrocomia nuts brought home from a visit to South America the birds used small pieces of wood to help grip the fruits firmly in their beaks. His macaws would shave a small piece of wood 3–4 millimetres long from their perch, position it inside the upper half of their bill and use it as a wedge to keep the smooth nuts in place for easier opening.

  These big blue macaws (the Hyancinth, Lears and Glaucous) can eat other food but their ecological niche is very much dependent on palms. Since they eat so many of the nuts, they need lots of palm trees to keep them going, so they live around types of palms that grow in communal clumps. They need palms that produce the right-sized nuts, and nuts that permit the extraction of the nutritious flesh. These exacting requirements are paramount in determining the distribution of these spectacular birds.

  The largest of the 3 big blue macaws, Hyacinth Macaw, is the largest parrot in the world. The intelligence, huge size, striking coloration, dramatic appearance and pure charisma of these parrots make them exceptionally collectable. Their top-heavy appearance – a third of their muscle weight is concentrated in their large head to operate the massive beak – gives them a unique identity.

  They have a comical expression, particularly when they’re flying – their features appear overemphasised. In some respects they resemble clowns and to the first-time observer it is as if nature has made some amusing mistake. They are very inquisitive, engaging and usually have quite a laid-back disposition. It is no wonder that ever since they were first seen they have been in demand. Rosemary Low sums up the Hyacinth’s appeal. ‘It is just such a charismatic creature, even if you don’t have the faintest interest in parrots you look at one and it just knocks you out. They are incredible birds, not just their colour but their behaviour, their character – it is extraordinary.’

  Although there is undoubtedly more to it, colour plays a big part in the attraction. Blue land animals are rare. There aren’t any blue mammals and very few blue birds. Since earliest times people have placed a great value on blue and gone to great lengths to manufacture the co
lour. Plants from the genus Isatis (woad) yielded a blue dye called indigo that once held great ceremonial importance. Later on, this plant attained considerable commercial value. Until the advent of synthetic dyes, woad was cultivated in great plantations that were for a time a mainstay in some colonial economies. Indigo was, for example, the main export of El Salvador until coffee took over in the 1870s.

  Among the parrots there are only a handful of species that are naturally mainly blue and very few that have completely blue or bluish plumage; the four blue macaws are the most spectacular. The least known of the trio of larger blue macaws is the Glaucous Macaw (Anodorhynchus glaucus).

  THE GLAUCOUS MACAW

  Europeans visiting South America made their first references to this bird during the late eighteenth century. Travellers to the southern part of the continent made their long journeys to the interior, as elsewhere in the vast New World, principally by river. It was in the middle reaches of the great rivers Paraguay, Paraná and Uruguay in southern South America that early chroniclers saw a large long-tailed blue parrot. Its general plumage was pale powdery blue but brighter, almost turquoise, above. It had a heavy greyish tinge on the underparts and head and in certain lights could appear nearly green. Sánchez Labrador, a Spanish priest dispatched by the Jesuits to work as a missionary with the Guaraní Indians in the region of what is today northern Argentina and southern Paraguay, was one of the first to write about a bird that was probably of this species.

  Labrador worked there from 1734 until his return to Europe in 1767 following the expulsion of the Jesuits from the continent by the Spanish and Portuguese colonial authorities. He was a passionate naturalist who spent long hours documenting the wildlife in the many places he visited. Much of his writing remains unpublished and apparently languishes unedited in the archives of the Vatican. One manuscript on the fish and birds of Paraguay written in 1767 has, however, been printed. In it are some of the very few details from that era about the Glaucous Macaw.

  The priest used the local Guaraní Indian name for the bird, Guaa obi. Guaa is the onomatopoeic name for macaw and obi (or hovy) describes a colour between blue and green. He wrote about one of these macaws that he met in the village of La Concepción de Nuestra Señora:

  When a missionary arrived from another mission, the macaw would go to his lodging. If it found that the door was shut, it would climb up … with the help of its bill and feet until it reached the latch. It then made a sound as if knocking and often opened the door before it could be opened from the inside. It would climb on the chair in which the missionary was sitting and utter ‘guaa’ three or four times, making alluring movements with its head until it was spoken to as if thanking him for the visit and attention. Then it would climb down and go into the courtyard very contented.

  If it did anything untoward to other tame birds, the missionary would call it. It would approach submissively and listen attentively to his accusation, the punishment for which was supposed to be a beating. When it heard this it lay on its back and positioned its feet as if making the sign of the cross and the missionary pretended to beat it with a belt. It lay there quietly … then it turned over, stood up and climb up the robe to the hand of the missionary, who had pronounced the punishment, to be stroked and spoken to kindly before leaving very satisfied … There are very many of these birds in the woods of the eastern bank of the Uruguay River, but they occur rarely in the forests along the Paraguay River.

  Other travellers to the region also came across the Glaucous Macaw but similarly recorded very few details about its natural history. Félix de Azara lived in South America from 1781 to 1801. His 1805 account of his travels mentions a blue-green macaw that he saw on the Paraná and Uruguay rivers in Argentina and northwards to just inside the south of modern Paraguay. He said that the Guaa-hovy was a common bird along the banks of these rivers. Apart from a few details on its distribution, no more was noted.

  The French explorer, Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny, travelled in southern South America between 1827 and 1835. He found the species on the Uruguay River, probably on both the Uruguayan and Brazilian sections, also in Argentina on the Paraná River. As well as making passing references to this species in his travel journals he ate one, but found it very tough and the taste disagreeable. He noted that it was not a very common bird. More significant than details about the culinary potential of the Glaucous Macaw, however, was his observation of the vast swaths of yatay palms that grew on the rich soils that flanked the broad watercourses. These palms made a big impression on d’Orbigny. In his journal for 23 April 1827, he wrote:

  There I saw for the first time, the palm tree known by the local people under the name ‘yatay’, which had given the locality the name of Yatayty … This palm does not grow to a great height, the trunk of it is thick and covered with old marks where the leaves had been attached, in which grew several figs which finish by smothering the tree. The leaves of this palm are elegantly curved and the green-blue of their fronds directed towards the sky, contrast pleasantly with the surrounding vegetation.

  But d’Orbigny correctly saw the implications of colonial development for the fate of these beautiful palm forests:

  In the past the yatay palm covered all the sands in these places, but the need to develop the land for cultivation, or the appeal of the pleasant foodstuff that the heart of the tree offers, had necessitated such exploitation that, since the time of the wars, it can no longer be found on foot in other than very small numbers, sad and last of what is left of the handsome forest, of which they formed part, and which before long must disappear entirely.

  Later that year and in early 1828, d’Orbigny recorded more details about the fate of the splendid forests. On 4 January he noted:

  I was leaving Tacuaral, so as to go to Yatayty, without doubt the most productive land in the entire province of Corrientes … All the inhabitants of other parts of the province come to settle in the middle of these woods, cutting down the palm trees and planting the lands … It is also to be feared that they will destroy the palm trees, which will no longer grow back in the inhabited regions, and will finally disappear completely.19

  D’Orbigny also recorded some of the very few details collected at the time about the habits of the Glaucous Macaw. Of the River Paraná he wrote, ‘All along the cliff, one saw scattered pairs of macaws of a dull blue-green, from which the woods echoed repeatedly the incessant shrill cries. Each pair appeared either at the edge of huge holes they had dug out of the cliffs in order to lay down their brood, or perched on the hanging branches of trees which crowned the banks.’

  Other reports of these birds, or reports of parrots that might have been Glaucous Macaws, during the middle part of the nineteenth century, were few and far between. After 1860 no new wild specimens were added to museums and only a very few were procured by European zoos. There were three in the Amsterdam Zoo during the 1860s, several in Hamburg and Antwerp Zoos during the 1870s and 1880s respectively, two in London between 1886 and 1912, one in Berlin from 1892 to the early twentieth century and one in Paris from 1895 to 1905. Another one was reportedly kept in the Buenos Aires Zoo until as late as 1936, but was said to be an old bird that was by then forty-five.

  From the early twentieth century, even reports of captive Glaucous Macaws became less frequent, while reports of birds in the wild virtually come to an end. Indeed, after 1900 there were only two records that may have been of living wild birds, one from Uruguay in 1950 where a single bird was seen on a fence post, and another from Paraná in Brazil in the 1960s, where locals said they lived in the steep banks that flanked the Iguazu River. The locality where the macaw on the fence post was seen was later turned over to a eucalyptus plantation. They were not reported again on the Iguazu. By the late 1970s, the Glaucous Macaw seemed to be extinct.

  Then in June 1991 a British newspaper made the remarkable claim that parrot breeder and collector Harry Sissen had a Glaucous Macaw among the birds he kept at his farm in Yorkshire, England. As it turned
out, the claim was wrong. It was a similar-looking but quite different species, a Lear’s Macaw. But the report was one among persistent and continuing rumours that birds still existed in the wild and were still being supplied to bird collectors in the USA, Brazil and Europe. Another parrot enthusiast who was more concerned for the birds’ conservation was Tony Pittman. He believed the Glaucous Macaw could still exist and decided to go and look for it.

  Pittman had been interested in parrots for years and his special enthusiasm was for the blue macaws. He and his associate Joe Cuddy planned to trace the routes of the explorers, naturalists and writers who visited South America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They used research assembled by endangered bird expert Nigel Collar to find all the manuscripts and early accounts of the Glaucous Macaw that they could lay their hands on.

  The firm records formed a circle covering Corrientes and Misiones Provinces in north-east Argentina, Artigas Province in north-west Uruguay and portions of the southernmost states of Brazil. Collar was convinced that the species might yet survive, and Pittman and Cuddy were determined to look for themselves. In June 1992 they set off for Buenos Aires en route to search in the places where the birds had been reliably reported, in some cases more than 200 years before.

  They assumed that the original habitat of the bird was gallery forests along the main rivers from which the birds would foray into palm groves to feed. They also had good reason to believe that the Glaucous Macaws once nested in the steep cliffs and banks along the main rivers. With these likely habitat preferences in mind, they looked in the most promising areas.