Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  Pittman remarked that ‘driving through the countryside where the Glaucous Macaw was found in the eighteenth century is just like driving through parts of southern England. There is no way a bird that size could be around with no one noticing it. It’s very bare of trees and heavily ranched.’ In addition to large-scale cultivation and ranching in the areas where the yatay palms once grew, large sections of the river valleys had been modified or flooded by huge engineering works, such as the Salto Grande hydroelectric complex on the river Uruguay. The men spoke to the locals but could find no one who knew of it. Not only that, but they encountered genuine astonishment from people at the idea that such a bird could possibly still exist.

  Disappointed, Pittman and Cuddy returned with no evidence that the bird survived. But in 1997, following new information, they went back and this time they did find someone who knew of the blue macaw they looked for. While in the vicinity of the little town of Pilar that lies on the Paraguayan bank of the river Paraguay, Pittman was introduced to Ceferino Santa Cruz, a 95-year-old cotton farmer who lived in a little village.

  The old man spoke only the local Guaraní Indian language, so Paraguayan friends had to translate his words into Spanish. He told them that he had been born there in 1902. His father had moved to the place in 1875 following the devastating War of Triple Alliance with Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. This bitter conflict ruined Paraguay, killing 90 per cent of the country’s adult male population. Ceferino’s father was among the survivors. Although the old man had never himself seen the blue macaw, his father had told him about them. His father had said that the parrots fed on fresh green palm fruits. This interview, across generations through the Indian tradition of storytelling, provided perhaps the only direct link that remained with the Glaucous Macaw. No one else in the world seemed to know anything about it.

  The inescapable conclusion was that the Glaucous Macaw was extinct, and probably had been for some years. The most likely reason for its disappearance was degradation and disappearance of its habitat, especially the loss of the yatay palms on which it probably fed. One analysis found that yatays are the only colonial palm species occurring where these birds once lived with a nut of the right size and type. Ornithologists examining the bird’s likely diet concluded that, ‘There has been no palm regeneration in the range of this extinct macaw, and the remnant palm groves are more than 200 years old.’20

  The reason for the palm’s disappearance was the introduction of European agriculture. The colonists soon learned that the places where the yatay palms grew indicated the richest soils, and naturally that was where the farmers first settled. The region was accessible by river and a substantial population grew up in early colonial times. The city of Corrientes that lies in the heart of the bird’s historical range was founded in 1588, the year the Spanish Armada sailed on England, so the impact of an advanced European society had, by the time of Pittman’s visit, already lasted more than 400 years.

  Even in areas where the birds’ favourite palms might have survived the onslaught of ploughing, their eventual loss was assured by extensive cattle-grazing. Ranching was already an economic mainstay by the end of the eighteenth century, and meant that the effective regeneration of sufficient palms for the macaws to survive did not occur; their staple food plants were nibbled away by the cattle before they had a chance to grow or produce fruit, and eventually died out. Indeed, several species of palm in the genus Butia (to which the yatay belongs) are themselves listed as threatened with extinction. The trapping of birds for captivity certainly hastened the macaw on its way, but to what extent this pressure was complicit in its disappearance cannot be known.

  It seems that the last living Glaucous Macaw reliably identified by a scientist was the one kept in the Paris Zoo (Jardin d’Acclimatation) for ten years from 1895. Whatever the reasons for its rapid slide into oblivion, the Glaucous Macaw – a large and conspicuous blue parrot – had become extinct and no one had noticed until decades after the event. Indeed, one leading parrot expert blithely described the species as ‘rare’ even in the late 1970s, by when it had not been seen for certain in the wild for more than a century. Certainly no one in the Berlin Zoo in 1900 would have realised that they were gazing upon a doomed species.

  THE LEAR’S MACAW

  In the 1970s, ornithologists believed that a similar fate awaited the gorgeous blue Lear’s Macaw (Anodorhynchus leari). This parrot was known to Victorian naturalists as a similar-sized species to the Glaucous Macaw (although a little larger at 71 centimetres) and the two were obviously close evolutionary relatives. The Lear’s was, however, darker, deeper blue and more glossy; in some respects it was more like the Hyacinth Macaw, from which it was distinguished not only by size but by a curious facial expression created by the oval bare yellow skin patches around the eyes that made the birds look a bit sleepy.

  The English name ‘Lear’s Macaw’ came from the title conferred on the species by French biologist Prince Charles Bonaparte – the nephew of Napoleon – who in 1856 wrote the first scientific description of the species. The Englishman Edward Lear, much better known for his nonsense verse, had illustrated the macaw in his book Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots. The first instalment of this work appeared in 1830. Lear was then a promising young artist who had begun work on painting parrots at a time when their popularity was soaring. Despite the care Lear devoted to his work, in common with others he mistakenly believed that his painting of the blue macaw was of a Hyacinth. Although he had the ‘wrong’ species, he did produce an excellent painting and the name stuck and remains with us today, alongside the bird’s other common English name: Indigo Macaw.

  But during the nineteenth century, Lear’s Macaw was even less well documented than its enigmatic cousin the Glaucous. A very few specimens were added to museum collections following the death of birds in zoos, but their natural origin was quite obscure. Although odd ones turned up in the USA and Europe in consignments of Hyacinth Macaws from Brazil, they were also rare in captivity. Scarcity and mystery added to their collectability; the rarity and obscurity made demand for them greater, not less.

  In February 1907, the journal of the Avicultural Society carried an item on the Lear’s Macaw by the Reverend Hubert Astley. Astley, who had several of the birds, wrote ‘my Italian servant said about the Lear’s Macaw I have in Italy, “è proprio un papagallo signorile,” a real gentleman amongst parrots, an aristocrat’. Astley evidently took great pride in his Lear’s Macaws and found the species to be especially clever. One particular bird was his favourite. He wrote that, ‘He loves a game with a handkerchief. It is thrown right on to his head, covering it completely up, upon which he proceeds to dance up and down with great glee, and at last either dances it off, or else pulls it off with one claw, holding it, and then laughing loudly and in a most human way: waiting for the fun to be commenced all over again.’

  Sadly for Reverend Astley’s macaws, their natural preferred food of palm nuts was not on the menu. ‘He likes sun-flower seed chiefly, with apple, banana or pear in the morning, and at five o’clock tea he always has some “Albert” or “Marie” biscuit, soaked in hot milk, and given not too moist.’ The bird might have seemed to enjoy this fare, or more likely ate it from lack of choice. At the time, where the birds came from was not known, let alone what they ate. Astley remarked ‘It is a curious fact that none of the authorities in Europe seem to know from what part of South America the Lear’s Macaw is bought. It is probably somewhere in Brazil, for they are brought from the ports of Bahia, Santos and Rio de Janeiro … So they probably inhabit some of the great forests in the heart of Brazil, and a few young birds are reared from the nest, and carried to the ports on the coast.’

  Indeed, the failure of ornithologists to locate a wild population of Lear’s Macaws had moved Dutch ornithologist K. H. Voous to suggest that it was not a proper species at all. Examinations of the few museum specimens of Lear’s Macaws and a comparison between those and a few Glaucous and Hyacin
th skins led Voous to propose in 1965 that it might be a cross-breed between the other two. At the same time as controversially suggesting that it was not a proper species, Voous threw down an ornithological gauntlet. He challenged someone to draw up accurate distribution maps for Anodorhynchus macaws, in other words to find Lear’s Macaws in their natural habitat. He added the understated rider that this ‘may prove a hard task’.

  One man ready to take on Voous’s challenge was the German-Brazilian scientist Helmut Sick. He’d arrived in Brazil as a young man from Germany just before the outbreak of the Second World War. He travelled there with a colleague to study birds in the Atlantic rainforests in the eastern coastal state of Espírito Santo. The trip was scheduled to last three months but during that time, in September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and war broke out in Europe. Sick decided to stay where he was.

  Because he was a German national, Sick was kept in captivity by Brazil which had a stance of neutrality. During the war years he developed considerable expertise on termites, one of the very few animal groups lending itself to convenient direct study by a prisoner in the tropics. When the war ended, Sick resumed his career as a professional zoologist and became one of Brazil’s foremost bird experts. He travelled widely in pursuit of his ornithological passion, making many new discoveries.

  He had read Voous’s writings but was convinced that the Lear’s Macaw was a distinct species and, although rare, still lived somewhere in a remote part of Brazil. He set out to prove it. He had been interested in the bird since 1954, but all of his efforts to locate it had come to nothing. He found it incredible that a giant blue parrot with a 1.2-metre wingspan could have gone unnoticed for so long. Dozens of scientific expeditions had by then criss-crossed Brazil; Sick had been on many of them himself. Still no one had found the Lear’s Macaw – it seemed to many a nonsense bird, worthy of the man who had given his name to it.

  There was one clue though. It came from the town of Juàzeiro on the river São Francisco, the town near where Spix collected his blue macaw. There, in 1950, one of Sick’s colleagues had seen a tame captive Lear’s Macaw that he believed had been caught nearby. Sick also had a hunch that it was in this arid and remote region that the birds would be found. He began searching in earnest in 1964, but the region of north-east Brazil where he thought the birds might be was larger than France. After four exhausting expeditions during the 1960s and 1970s, Sick began to narrow his options. He decided in 1978 that the place to look was the Raso da Catarina, a remote region of the caatinga in the north-east of Brazil. He described the place as ‘a rugged dry area, a great white patch on the map far away from civilisation’. There were no roads, no towns and few rivers, only a vast area of thorn bush, cacti, rocks and dry cliffs. The single reason the place was notable at all was for its traumatic and violent past.

  The Canudos hills on the south side of the Raso da Catarina had during the nineteenth century been a refuge for revolutionaries and bandits, and the place had been scarred by conflict and war. In the Canudos war of 1896 to 1897 a group of religious zealots revolted against the Republic. Thousands of the rebels perished. More than 1,000 soldiers, including elite government troops, also died there, many from thirst. It was into this tragic ‘Lost World’ that Sick was to venture next in his decades-long search for the enigmatic blue macaw.

  Sick and his two field assistants arrived at the Raso da Catarina in the height of summer 1978. Travelling along tracks and trails in the driest and most inhospitable part of the vast caatinga, they found, on 29 December, the first evidence that they might be close. A hunter told them that several months before he had killed a bird like the one in the pictures the scientists had shown him. The man had eaten it but kept some of the long blue feathers. As it happened, Sick had made a special trip to San Diego in California the previous year to study live Lear’s Macaws kept there in the city’s zoo, and he had also devoted time to making careful measurements from museum specimens, so he knew what he was looking at when the hunter produced the bird’s remains. The feathers were from a Lear’s Macaw. Elated at this find, they decided to search the local area.

  Sick’s four-wheel-drive diesel Toyota, the most robust off-road vehicle available in Brazil, had found the going too tough. Buried up to its axles in sand, it had to be abandoned in favour of a tractor and then horses. And Sick, no longer a young man, was in bad shape too. He wrote a letter to his family about the rigours of the search:

  Three days before departure I noticed that I was developing a hernia. It soon got worse … Wherever possible I pressed it in with my hand while walking, holding a weapon and other things with my other hand. Endless riding on pack animals, not on a saddle, but on a wooden frame for attaching loads to and without stirrups, so that one’s legs hanging without support over the sharp edges went ‘to sleep’ and the blood vessels in the upper thigh became squashed. It was a miracle that my prostate did not play up, which was my greatest concern. On the very first day I suffered a malaria attack as well. My assistants frequently had fever, diarrhoea, sunburn and injuries because of plants and allergies and so on.

  But on 31 December 1978, Sick’s team got their reward. They found wild Lear’s Macaws, the first ever recorded by scientists. Observed flying high above the caatinga on their daily commute to feed on palm nuts. The birds’ exceptionally long wings and deep wingbeats helped distinguish them from any Hyacinth Macaws that might have wandered into the region. The blue macaws swooped and dived over the cliffs and canyons of the rugged Raso.

  Sick wrote to his family, ‘I have succeeded in solving the greatest mystery in the ornithology of South America (not only of Brazil) – the discovery of the origin of the Lear’s Macaw, a magnificent large blue macaw … which until now was only known from specimens in captivity.’ They were found in a remote dry canyon where they roosted and nested on inaccessible cliffs. It was the only species of macaw to occur there and this remote rocky area appeared to house twenty-one of them. Sick shot one in order to prepare the first properly documented museum specimen of the species collected from the wild. It went to the museum in Rio de Janeiro.

  Sick’s letter reflected on the experience of finding the macaws.

  On my birthday (I was sixty-nine on 10 January) I sat in one of the macaw canyons and observed the birds arriving to roost, at least fifteen through the new telescope, provided to me a few days before my departure by the Brazilian scientific service and imported after years of struggle from Zeiss in East Germany. The viewfinder encompassed a pair of the splendid birds … They were surrounded by a dense cloud of insects and sometimes scratched themselves on the head. It was certainly the most memorable birthday of my life.

  Professor Helmut Sick returned to Rio with a double hernia but was soon fixed up and back to work.

  Scientific papers about the amazing find were published, and interest in the macaw was intense.21 Carlos Yamashita, one of Brazil’s leading parrot experts, picked up the baton. In 1983 he visited the Lear’s Macaws to determine more details about their habits so that they might be more effectively conserved. He found that the parrots nested in burrows dug into the soft sandstone cliffs; this was also where they spent the night. The macaws would leave the cliffs at dawn and come back after sunset. Yamashita followed the birds and found that they were flying to palm groves in the cattle pastures that lay some distance from their canyons. The most important palm that the macaws visited was the licuri (Syagrus coronata), a species named by Martius, Spix’s travelling companion.

  The palms grew up to two metres high and produced the hard nuts the birds adored. The nuts were small, about the size of a British pound coin, one euro or US quarter dollar, but very hard. Yamashita saw that they fed in groups of two or three. They would take nuts both from the ground and directly from the trees, but in either case there would always be a sentinel perched high up in a tree with a commanding view so that the alarm could be raised at the first sign of danger.

  Yamashita confirmed Sick’s belief that the macaws lived
only in the Raso, a compact area of 15,000 square kilometres. He estimated the total population at only 60 birds. And this tiny nucleus was threatened by hunting for the pot and trapping of live birds for the international collectors’ market. Longer term, the birds were also at risk from the loss of the palm trees. Although local ranchers had left palms so that cattle could feed on the fruits, whether there would be enough for the birds to eat, especially in severe drought years, was another question. The nuts were also collected for people to eat and were vulnerable to dry-season fires set by ranchers to improve their pastures.

  Another hazard threatening the macaws’ survival prospects was the risk of a landslide at their roosting sites. The cliffs they had decided to live in were highly fractured and the extreme daily temperature variation created periodic landslips and collapses. One occurring at night or in the breeding season would have disastrous consequences for such a tiny population.22

  Why there were so few of the birds was not obvious when Sick found them and still isn’t. But like the Glaucous Macaw, the Lear’s tiny population could be a relict, the last survivors from a time when the species was much more widespread. D’Orbigny’s observations of the Glaucous in the nineteenth century suggested that, like the Lear’s, it was also a cliff-nesting species. This, along with their outward similarities, in turn points to some quite recent (in evolutionary terms) separation of the two species, perhaps the result of a more widespread ancestor declining to the point where only two isolated populations remained, the Glaucous in a few river valleys in the south of the continent, the other, the Lear’s at its arid outpost in the north-east.

  What drove the Lear’s Macaw into its last refuge could be the result of many different factors. Farming, trapping, climatic changes, or perhaps an ecological relationship had been broken with some long-extinct creature. These birds once shared their palm savannas with sabre-toothed cats, giant armadillos and great ground sloths. Yamashita thought it might be that the ground sloths that once walked the South American plains passed palm nuts in their dung, digested off the hard outer coating and thus provided a relatively easy source of food for the macaws to exploit.