Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  Roth criss-crossed these huge tracts of rugged country looking for signs of the mysterious blue birds. During his first expedition he met a bird trapper from Piauí who knew a lot about parrots. He told Roth to go to Curaçá, a little town about ninety kilometres to the north-east of Juàzeiro, near to the place where Spix found the first known specimen. In April of the following year, 1986, Roth was able to confirm that there were indeed Spix’s Macaws, about thirty kilometres south of the little caatinga town of Curaçá. But there were only three, a pair and a single bird, the trio with which our account began in chapter 1; two others had recently been trapped. It was later to emerge that two birds were exported from Brazil that year via a trader in Paraguay and were sent to Europe accompanied by a forged export permit. It is possible that these two were the individuals in question (see chapter 7).

  Roth found the elusive birds in an area of woodland bordering the Melância Creek, one of the many seasonal watercourses that drained the otherwise dry country during the wet season. He made close observations of the birds and found they preferred the bigger caraiba trees that grew by the creek for nesting and as look-out posts. It was Roth who learned how the aggressive African bees were a problem for the Spix’s Macaws and he also confirmed that these parrots, like any other bird or animal large enough to be worth a round of ammunition, were seen as fair game for the pot.

  But despite these disturbing new details, it was clear that the real and present danger was bird trappers. To help protect the few birds he had tracked down in that vast dry area, Roth arranged for contacts of his in Munich to pay a few of the locals to guard them. Having done what he could to safeguard the trio in the Melância Creek, he set off again in search of the other flocks that he was convinced were out there, somewhere. Roth’s confidence stemmed from his conviction that the trappers must have led him to the three birds at Curaçá while they got on with capturing some other Spix’s Macaws that he didn’t know about. He set himself the task of finding these other populations before the traffickers finished them off.

  The news of Roth’s guards at Curaçá spread far and wide. The trappers became wary of Roth and briefed one another on how to deal with his endless questions about where to find more of the blue parrots. Convinced that he was being fed misinformation by people who would rather he didn’t find the location of any more Spix’s Macaws, he nonetheless persisted with his one-man mission to scour the interior of Brazil.

  He conducted more searches in the remote wilds of Piauí, he looked in Maranhão along the Parnaíbinha River and went to the Gerais region where Sick had seen the birds. He travelled thousands of kilometres across the interior searching and asking wherever he went for evidence of other families of the elusive blue parrots. In the Gerais his battered car had been no match for the vast swamps and dense forests dissected by the rugged high plateaux. An additional hazard was the presence of armed men, so-called pistoleiros, hired by local ranchers to help ‘settle’ land ownership disputes. With a real danger of violence and a vehicle not up to the job, Roth’s search had been superficial. He had not found the birds, but he believed they might well be there. And so the new information from Marigo was especially intriguing.

  While Roth had been conducting these far-flung searches, the situation at Curaçá had gone from bad to worse. He returned to the Melância Creek in May 1987 to pay the guards and check on the last three birds. By the time he arrived there were only two left: a month earlier another one had been caught. For all his searching, Roth could say with certainty that in the wild he knew of just a single pair of Spix’s Macaws. Disaster followed. On Christmas Eve 1987, Roth was called by his local contacts to be told that a trapper had returned and taken the last female. The bird trader and his entourage of bullies had not been gentle in their theft. Knowing that a few of the locals were working for Roth to protect the parrots they had arrived with armed accomplices.

  The robbers had chosen their moment well. Because of the Christmas holidays, Roth could not make contact with the Brazilian wildlife enforcement authorities and it was not until early in 1988 that the alarm was finally raised in official circles. By then the bird had been quietly spirited into the underworld and was on its way to a wealthy collector. In January 1988, Roth received news that even the last one had gone too, taken by the trappers. It seemed that it was the end of the story for the birds at the Melância Creek. The Curaçá population had been wiped out for ever.

  Roth remained convinced that the Spix’s Macaw still lived somewhere in the vast wilds of the interior. He believed that there must be another population being plundered by the trappers: but where it was he didn’t know. The task of the 1990 expedition was to find it. With a potential search area of 300,000 square kilometres, a territory larger than Great Britain, to find a parrot was considerably more challenging than searching for a needle in a haystack. At least we had a strong lead: Marigo’s fax about the sightings in the Gerais, and the remote hills of the Chapada das Mangabeiras.

  At dawn on 9 June 1990, I arrived at Rio de Janeiro international airport. Unlike Spix and Martius, I’d spent just eleven hours crossing the Atlantic from Europe. It was impossible not to think of the sixteenth-century navigators who had first come here from Portugal aboard frail wooden ships, propelled onwards under billowing sails at the mercy of the winds, with only the stars for guidance, not knowing where they would land or when they would get there. Impossible, too, not to contemplate how different was modern travel and how profound were its consequences in accelerating the rapid shrinkage of our planet.

  On leaving the airport terminal, the modern traveller is struck by the smell of cane alcohol. In some ways the smell sums up Brazil’s environmental situation. Because of the worsening economic crisis caused in part by vast external debts owed to Western banks and official agencies like the International Monetary Fund, there has been a government programme of import substitution. The idea was to help balance the country’s accounts by conserving foreign exchange through avoiding imports, including oil. As part of this policy, many of the vehicles in Rio have been converted to run on alcohol distilled from sugar cane grown in Brazil rather than petrol or diesel imported from abroad. Of course, sugar cane needs land so forests have been cleared to make space to grow it. Brazil’s ecological dilemmas can be smelt in the penetrating aroma from the car exhausts.

  That evening – in the glamorous city of Copacabana Beach, the Girl from Ipanema and Sugarloaf Mountain – brought a vivid demonstration of the social inequalities that had driven a wedge through the heart of Brazilian society. In the middle-class suburb of Gavea, right next to the comfortable house of a couple of English friends in this pleasant neighbourhood, was one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas, an informal settlement where the homeless, landless, poverty-stricken and excluded were washed up at the tideline of polite society.

  Thousands of human souls were squeezed into a shanty town of makeshift dwellings that clung to the steep hillside. Its inhabitants, many coming from the rural areas of the north-east, scratched a living from scavenging, casual work or crime. The brutal existence was ruled by drugs and violence. Even the police rarely ventured in. It was a product of a deeply divided society, failed economic policy and corruption. So desperate was Brazil to deny this aspect of its nationhood that this great scar was not even marked on city maps; neither were several other large shanty towns.

  Although many people in the developed nations regard Brazil as a ‘Third World’ country, it has the planet’s eighth largest economy. I was soon to learn that widespread poverty is more a reflection of great inequality caused by corruption, debt and institutional failures than an absence of national wealth. In the face of such enormous social problems it was painfully obvious that the conservation of rare species was not a top priority.

  In Gavea, several of Brazil’s leading ornithologists had gathered that evening to discuss the Spix’s Macaw and the chances of finding some in the wild. It was here that I first met the dark-bearded Marigo, whose fax ha
d first encouraged the expedition, the dashing young Pontual and the 81-year-old Helmut Sick. We exchanged pleasantries and sipped cold beers in the humid warmth of early evening. Sick explained why he believed the Spix’s Macaw was a bird of buriti palm groves and set out his views on where such birds might still be found. He made comparisons with the other blue macaws and advised that the search team should target their efforts around buriti palm groves in remote areas of the Gerais. Marigo in turn explained the source of his new lead.

  I finished the evening impatient to leave for the north-east. But a couple of days’ wait in Rio, while vehicles were prepared and the other expedition members arrived, were unavoidable. To make use of the time, a few of us decided to visit the notorious wildlife market at Duque de Caxias in the hope that valuable information could be gathered from the animal dealers there. Right under the noses of the Rio police, macaws, anteaters, crocodiles and monkeys, including the very rarest species, were available for sale on the street. It was all illegal, but no one attempted to interrupt the traders.28 Dozens of endangered animals and birds were for sale. Some of the more common species of parrot had had their tails trimmed and their feathers coloured with hair dye to resemble more valuable species. The crude imitations would not fool the more discerning collectors but they were a demonstration of the value of such exotic species. And it showed how few rare parrots there were – no blue ones were there, fakes or otherwise.

  In Rio, you could buy almost anything – girls, boys, drugs, guns, you name it – if you had the money. All you had to do was go to the right part of town and ask the right people. As far as rare wildlife was concerned, most of Brazil’s rarest creatures could be ordered from here. But not, it seemed, Spix’s Macaws. A few discreet enquiries revealed no one able to supply such a bird. But Rio was a long way from the north-east, and not known as a trafficking route for such parrots. That no one claimed to be able to supply them did not mean no one was trapping them.

  With the arrival of Yamashita, a compact Japanese—Brazilian parrot expert, and the large-framed Otoch in Rio the next day, it was time to set off on the three-day drive to the north-east. Two four-wheel-drive vehicles were loaded up. One was a battered old Toyota that belonged to Helmut Sick. This veteran vehicle was the one he’d abandoned in the caatinga during his successful search for the Lear’s Macaw back in the 1970s. The paint was gone here and there but what remained was, appropriately, blue. The other was an ageing white Land Rover belonging to Pontual. Getting hold of spares from England was a hellish problem, but Pontual thought the aggravation was worth it.

  We chugged off north towards the moist coastal mountains that flanked Rio de Janeiro. Once clothed with dense rainforests, the coastal strip was now largely bare. Cultivated, ranched, logged and mined, the thick lush wall of green that greeted the first Portuguese sailors in the 1500s had been all but obliterated. It used to stretch in an unbroken 3,000-kilometre-long belt from the state of Rio Grande do Norte in the north right the way along the coastal lowlands and mountains to northern Argentina in the south. About 2 per cent of the original forest is left. These woodlands are priceless. Separated from the expanse of rainforests in the Amazon basin by the dry interior, thousands of unique species have evolved there in isolation, several now endangered parrots among them. The clearance of the forests pushed many species to the brink of extinction and an unknown number over it. Even the protected areas were not safe from fire, sometimes set deliberately to clear yet more land.

  Crossing the coastal mountains and reaching the plateau of the interior, the forest fragments that were still left became drier. In the state of Minas Gerais (Portuguese for General Mines) smelting operations had for centuries depended on a ready supply of charcoal. The forests were the source. Truck after truck spewed out stinking clouds of diesel fumes en route to the region’s many iron works. Where the natural forest once stood was either completely denuded, or at best replaced with vast sterile plantations of eucalyptus or acacia to feed the foundries.

  North towards the interior the drier cerrado woodland replaced the wetter forests of the coast. The cerrado is the second largest vegetation type in Brazil after the rainforests of the Amazon. Mostly evergreen, there were patches of more seasonal woodland where limestone came to the surface and made conditions more arid. But along the route of the road, most of the tree cover had gone. From horizon to horizon, the forest had been annihilated. The wholesale destruction of the cerrado had been brought about in part by logging of hardwood trees. Some of these were even more prized than the valuable woods taken from the Amazon; the rest had been turned into charcoal. The cleared areas were now either abandoned, converted to sanitised wood farms, or had been turned over to cattle-grazing. Vast open-cast mines had taken their toll too, not only for iron ore but gold and other minerals. It was an ecological disaster zone.

  After two days of constant driving, the vehicles reached the capital, Brasília. North from here the landscape was more broken and rugged. Dramatic red sandstone escarpments carved a jagged edge across the skyline. Although less densely settled, the environmental impacts seen to the south were evident here too. In the flatter areas, the rusty-coloured soils that had once supported native forests had been turned over to huge soya-bean and sugar-cane plantations.

  The soya, like the sugar, was part of another grand scheme to balance Brazil’s economy. The land was cheap, and for this reason so was the soya. The plan was to grow vast quantities to sell on the international market to earn foreign exchange. There was huge demand in Europe where the soya was fed to cattle. In Europe, taxpayers funded vast farm subsidies that made the soya an even cheaper source of animal feed. This in turn encouraged farmers to rear more cattle, thereby contributing to Europe’s overproduction of food. The soya thus helped to create Europe’s so called ‘milk lakes’ and ‘beef mountains’. Some of this surplus was then dumped on world markets, undercutting developing-country farmers, putting many of them out of work, including Brazilian ones.

  Many of the small farmers who lived here before the arrival of large-scale mechanised production had left. Some moved to virgin forest areas where more forest was cleared for farming. Several of these mass migrations had been assisted with funds from international agencies such as the World Bank. The people who stayed behind remained very poor and often had no land. The huge farms belonged to absentee landlords who harvested the profits from the massive plantations. Ten years earlier, the great blocks of forest here had been largely untouched.

  These insane and self-defeating attempts to balance the national accounts flew directly in the face of numerous speeches and promises about the government’s commitment to conserving the environment. The vast soya and sugar-cane farms were just the most obvious examples of how Brazil’s precarious economic situation fed worsening environmental devastation. It was the end point in a process of deforestation, the early stages of which had been documented by Spix and Martius when they passed through the region more than 170 years earlier.

  On the fourth day we drove across the border from Goiás into north-west Bahia; the dirt roads made the going slower. The little town of Barreiras was at the agricultural frontier. Half-built houses and newly cleared woodland with burnt areas and recent plantations of bananas and maize showed that people were moving into some of the moist valley bottoms. In places, heavy machinery had been used to clear large areas for cattle pasture. This was the front line of deforestation, and it was moving north frighteningly fast. Every day another swath of forest was consumed in the insatiable lust for agricultural land, one of the few commodities in Brazil that might keep long term value in the face of hyperinflation.

  Despite the recent agricultural incursions, buriti palm groves still grew in profusion in some of the flat areas flanking the rivers. This was the kind of environment where Spix’s Macaws might still hang on. The habitat was similar to that where Helmut Sick had recorded his sightings of the birds. But our frequent stops to scan the woods and conversations with locals revealed no tra
ce of them.

  North of Barreiras on a dirt road the radiator of the Toyota failed. There was no choice but to stop in Formosa do Rio Prêto while it was repaired. The little two-street town straddled the clear swift river Prêto. We moved into the local guesthouse, a little white one-storey building. Part of the back wall was missing and chickens wandered in and out of the bedrooms as they pleased. But it was comfortable and served good food; always eggs and fruit for breakfast and a combination of beans, rice, chicken and beef for dinner.

  While marooned there, Yamashita and I studied maps in an attempt to identify likely search areas. Marigo busied himself seeking out local knowledge. He wanted to speak to the village pharmacist and an associate of his who had been mentioned to us by Sick at the meeting in Rio. They were birdwatchers and might have some recent news. One of them said he knew that there were Spix’s Macaws near the place we planned to search. He also knew Helmut Sick, who had stayed in his house in 1974. When asked by Marigo why he believed the parrots could be found there, he said Sick had told him so. It was the only trace. One solitary repetition of what Sick had said more than fifteen years before confirmed there was no new information to be had. With the Toyota repaired, it was time to move on.

  On the track to the north lay the border with the poverty-stricken state of Piauí and, to the west, the border with northern Goiás, the Gerais and the Chapada das Mangabeiras, the area where our search team expected to locate Spix’s Macaws. Heading north, more large farms, some irrigated from the waters of the São Francisco, had recently replaced the natural forest. Huge expanses of sugar cane, maize and soya flanked the road to the horizon.

  In this desolate land a lone police officer had established a traffic checkpoint. With a hand hovering over his pistol he waved the vehicles to a halt. He wanted to know why four-wheel-drives with Rio number plates were in this remote place, evidently suspecting that drugs trafficking might be the reason. Once Marigo explained, the policeman soon relaxed and it turned out that he owned a farm just nine kilometres from the Santa Isabela ranch where the Spix’s Macaws had been reported. He certainly had a good knowledge of the local parrots that lived there and could describe them with some accuracy, including Hyacinth Macaws. But he had no experience of Spix’s.