Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  The female bird at first flew on a north – south axis through the gallery woodlands while the male tended to trace an east – west route on his daily foraging trips. But the birds did meet and showed signs that their relationship was being rebuilt. The female soon attained the fitness she needed to keep up with the male and they were seen flying together and interacting. Sometimes the green maracana flew with them in a trio. It seemed that a truly remarkable feat had occurred. A wild pair of Spix’s Macaws had been established. There was, after all, a chance to cheat the grim reaper of extinction. The media went so far as to compare the reunited pair with Adam and Eve.

  Not only was there cause for encouragement from the birds in the creek, but moves to generate local support for the programme had gathered effective pace too. The decision taken by the 1990 expedition members – with official Brazilian endorsement – to publish the location of the last wild bird had met with fierce criticism because of the potential to alert other trappers to the existence of the last Spix. The expedition members knew they were taking that risk but figured that since the species faced such a desperate situation anyway, public attention might make a difference. In the event, the opposite to what the critics feared actually occurred.

  The caatinga people strongly identified with their lone blue parrot. Like them he had suffered the tragic loss of family members, he lived on his wits and depended on no one. He was a survivor; the harsh caatinga and greedy trappers had not got the better of him. For all of that he became a local hero.

  A year after the discovery of the last bird the mayor of Curaçá had adopted the Spix’s Macaw as the symbol for his re-election campaign. At the same time local church sermons included the struggle of the beleaguered blue bird of the caatinga. The blue parrot was even displayed on a float in the Independence Day parade, where it was a source of national pride and Brazilian identity. The media, politicians and even the Church took up the cause of the last Spix Macaw. In this atmosphere, the trappers didn’t dare to go near him.

  Stickers and posters of the macaw were passed out among local cafés and to truck drivers. A phone number was printed for people to call with information about the bird. The poster slogan read ‘Have you seen this bird?’ Old-fashioned transistor radios scattered through the little houses and television sets in bars had broadcast news of the last bird’s plight to even the furthest-flung of the illiterate natives of the caatinga. It was very rarely that the world’s gaze alighted here and the people loved the Spix for bringing attention to their forgotten corner as much as they loved him for what he stood for: resistance, defiance and determination.

  The Recovery Committee and the Brazilian Government realised early on that it was vital to build on this local goodwill. The appointment of a Brazilian biologist, Marcos Da-Ré, had in this respect given the bird’s prospects a big boost. Da-Ré worked locally and spent his time communicating with the communities living in the area where the last bird was found. Da-Ré initially had the help of Francisco Pontual, one of the Brazilian members of the 1990 ICBP expedition that found the last bird. The two men used market days when people from isolated farms were gathered together to distribute posters and stickers. They gave talks and visited schools and gradually developed a strong body of local support for the macaw’s cause.

  Da-Ré and other field staff based at the Concordia facilities also sought to involve the local caatinga people in the recovery work and to support work of benefit to the local community. In addition to passing out educational materials, a school house for twenty-two local children was opened with support from the recovery programme in February 1995. The little school was located next to the Melância Creek and was involved with the restoration of the bird’s habitat by establishing goat- and sheep-proof fences nearby to allow the regeneration of the caraiba trees. It was called the Escola da Ararinha – the school of the little macaw.

  In Curaçá the recovery programme continued to make its mark. A road sign welcomed visitors to Curaçá, ‘the town of the Spix’s Macaw’. In town, in addition to the opening of the Blue Macaw restaurant, a play about the macaws was staged at the town’s dilapidated old theatre. With words, music and colourful (mainly blue) costumes the play told the story of the Spix’s Macaw. Despite the dreadful plight of many local people, the storyline was optimistic. It told of the terrible loneliness of the last macaw, the loss of his loved ones to poachers and of his choice to pair up with a different species. The players portrayed the return of his long-lost mate and ended with the birth of blue baby Spix’s Macaws in the birds’ favourite hollow tree in the Melância Creek.

  The play was performed at the same time as a meeting in nearby Petrolina involving Wolfgang Kiessling and other members of the Recovery Committee. They saw it during a visit to Curaçá. As a result, the restoration of the little theatre became one of the projects supported by the recovery plan. The Loro Parque Foundation provided US$50,000 that was matched by the local community with work and materials. In 1996 the restored theatre opened in time for its hundredth anniversary. It was given a full refit and a new coat of paint; blue of course.

  More serious than these acts of local cooperation, the Spix’s Macaw recovery programme had during the early 1990s become involved in relieving a famine caused by one of the most terrible droughts in living memory. Government employees used the name of the Spix’s Macaw rescue plan to raise donations of seven tonnes of basic foodstuffs to be distributed to rural households in the project area. Food was passed out via schools to households in need. This was an important part of the desperate campaign to conserve the world’s rarest bird. Trying to save a parrot, no matter how unique or beautiful it was, while people died of hunger, was not going to work. Either both causes were linked and pursued together or one of them would go.

  The plight of the macaw was not missed nationally in Brazil either; it was, for example, given recognition as the subject of a postage stamp. Outside Brazil too the single wild bird became a high-profile figure; so did the cause he stood for. So widespread had his fame become that his struggle even featured as the subject of an English-language comprehension examination set for schoolchildren in the United Kingdom.

  The local educational, cultural and support work paid off. The Spix’s Macaw recovery project had gained strong local backing. It had nurtured exactly the kind of cooperation that would be vital later on when more birds were released: when that happened, local people would be essential allies in protecting the birds’ habitat from goats and their nests from trappers.

  The captive-breeding programme had made progress during the early 1990s too. In addition to the transfer of the bird from São Paulo Zoo to pair up with the lone (later to be released) female in dos Santos’s aviaries in Recife, some other important new pairings had taken place through the new Committee. One was to unite the single male bird at Walsrode with the female bird owned by Nelson Kawall in São Paulo. Both of these birds had been caught from the wild, the male in 1975 and the female in 1982, and were vital for the long-term genetic health of the breeding effort.

  Both Hämmerli and de Dios had become desperate for new blood to invigorate their breeding efforts, and were pressing hard for permission to swap birds with one another. In March 1992, an exchange took place in an attempt to establish new pairs. A captive-bred female was transferred from de Dios’s Birds International aviaries to Hämmerli in Switzerland and in return a captive-bred male was sent to de Dios.

  Even though some transfers had not been agreed by the Recovery Committee, the movement of birds was now taking place in the open with proper permits and the full knowledge of wildlife and customs authorities. Even the SwissAir magazine included a feature in its March 1992 issue that pictured the beaming Joseph Hämmerli sitting in the business class of a SwissAir 747. He was photographed on the plane in Manila ready to depart with a young female Spix’s Macaw sitting on his arm. She was to be paired with one of his wild-caught birds. She and her partner were about to become very important macaws.

 
Partly as a result of this and other exchanges and the successful breeding methods employed by some of the owners, the population of captive macaws began in the early 1990s gradually to rise.

  There was now some cause for optimism. A pair had been established in the wild, new pairs were breeding in captivity and a rescue programme was more or less functioning. But the situation was extremely precarious. The Spix’s Macaw had only just managed to cling to existence. Its fate was now entirely in the hands of a group of men who happened to own these most unique and precious creatures. The fate of the world’s rarest bird was now up to them.

  9

  Uncharted Territory

  In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, during November 1994 the hurricane season was in full swing. The flat sprawl of Lauderdale’s watery cityscape, beset with luxury yachts and visiting ocean liners, had been battered by high winds and squalls, and tornadoes were forecast. In a gleaming metal-and-glass conference centre, a fierce political storm raged as well. Another CITES conference was in progress, with governments once more locked in bitter dispute. This time their argument was about whether there should be trade controls on mahogany plundered from the Amazon rainforests by logging companies. In the shadows cast by this bitter debate, a separate meeting had once again been arranged in a quiet corner of the conference centre. It was convened to discuss progress with the captive-breeding plan of Spix’s Macaw.

  Some four years had elapsed since the Recovery Committee was first formed, and remarkably this was the first meeting of a working group set up to take decisions on captive breeding. Until this point the swaps and transfers had been done without overall coordination. The idea had been to organise a get-together of the owners of the birds to evaluate the captive breeding to date and make recommendations for new pairings. A studbook had by now finally been collated. Although Houston Zoo in Texas didn’t have any Spix’s Macaws, one of its bird specialists, Natasha Schischakin, had put herself forward to do the job of pulling the studbook together and maintaining it.

  Schischakin spoke Portuguese, had many contacts in Brazil, held strong views about parrot conservation and was determined to make an impact on the Spix’s Macaw’s fortunes. Saving the world’s rarest bird guaranteed a place in history – it was certainly one of the most exciting endangered species recovery programmes going on anywhere. The information she presented showed that, despite the lack of regular scientific meetings, some transfers had already taken place and there were some encouraging breeding successes to report, even though progress was soured somewhat by the fact that unauthorised transfers had taken place. Alongside the good news were some serious setbacks.

  The captive population had risen to thirty-one, but only eleven were females; this 2:1 male ratio could be yet another sign of inbreeding setting in. On top of that, the previous year had seen the catastrophic death of two females. One was a wild-caught bird kept at Loro Parque since 1985; the other belonged to private breeder Nelson Kawall in São Paulo. The second was a particularly serious loss. She was a bird taken from the wild in the early 1980s but although she had laid eggs she had never reproduced in captivity. Her genes were now lost to the flock for good. At least the one that died in Tenerife had left one offspring. The loss of these birds had also left two males of breeding age unpaired.

  The pair set up at dos Santos’s collection in Recife had not bred, and neither had the birds in São Paulo Zoo. At least one pair of Spix’s Macaws had been in residence there since 1969, but still no breeding had ever taken place. Other new pairings had been arranged following a build-up of numbers in de Dios’s and Hämmerli’s aviaries. The Filipino breeder now had eighteen birds, well over half of the world population at that time, including two reproductive pairs, while the Swiss Spix’s Macaw population stood at five, with one proven breeding pair among them.

  Against this background of only three reproductively active couples (one of which in the Philippines was an incestuous liaison comprised of siblings), new matches were recommended by the meeting’s participants. The overriding aim was to get more of the macaws producing, especially those that had not yet passed any of their genetic uniqueness on to a new generation. At the same time the new pairings were intended to establish different lineages at the different breeding centres so that one pair of macaws would not in the future swamp the entire population with its genes.

  The most urgent proposed transfer was to shift the lone male macaw from Nelson Kawall to a facility where it could be paired with a female bird. This macaw was well travelled, having been caught in the wild and then transferred to Germany. From there it had gone to the Dominican Republic and then back to Brazil. It was now proposed that it be sent to the Philippines.

  The pair from São Paulo Zoo were to go to Kiessling’s facilities in Tenerife. São Paulo Zoo was in some respects more like a refugee camp than a Noah’s Ark. The Brazilian police had seized many of the animals and birds kept there from their owners and smugglers. With cramped facilities and a steady stream of new arrivals, the last thing zoo staff wanted the animals to do was reproduce. As a result there was limited expertise there on breeding techniques and certainly not the history of conservation breeding of certain North American and European zoos. Some also questioned the quality of the birds’ accommodation and general care in São Paulo. It was these considerations that had lain behind Don Bruning’s impassioned plea in 1989 that the zoo think seriously of sending its macaws to other facilities.

  The São Paulo macaws were the single old female kept there since the mid-1970s and the other male taken in Paraguay in 1987. It was decided to create two new pairs out of these four birds as it was quite possible that they would prove more compatible in a new combination. With these four birds, Kiessling and Tony Silva would redouble their efforts to see if they could do better. The remaining single male from the São Paulo Zoo would go to Switzerland and a female from the Philippines to dos Santos’s facilities in Recife.

  The Fort Lauderdale meeting also tried to restart previously failed efforts to map the DNA of the captive birds. This would shed light on which birds in the breeding programme were closely related to one another and therefore give clear signals on the best genetic pairings. Such information was crucial to the recovery effort and an attempt to gather it had first been made in 1991. Consultants were hired in London and tissue samples had been collected. But there had been problems.

  Some of the DNA was successfully analysed and this was helpful, but the results were incomplete and some data was technically deficient. This meant that some transfers of birds had taken place without details on the possible genetic implications of the new pairings. This was potentially very problematic. Not only was there already breeding between relatives in the captive population, but there might have been inbreeding in the wild too. All of the wild-caught birds appeared to have come from two or possibly even only one small population near to Curaçá, and it was quite likely that parrots kept in different parts of the world were in fact close relatives. The gaps and problems with the DNA mapping had to be corrected and it was resolved that further analysis would have to take place.

  Out in the caatinga six months after the Fort Lauderdale meeting, the newly re-established wild pair of Spix’s Macaws were being closely monitored by research staff based at the field station. These two birds were among the most closely scrutinised living things on earth. Marcos Da-Ré, the Brazilian biologist leading efforts in the creek, had by now spent over three years there. He had carefully noted what the last bird ate, where he went and what he did. The close observation of first the single wild bird, and now the pair, had shed valuable light on the behaviour of the species.

  It had been found that the macaws fed from other trees than just the caraibas. These included the fruits of the faveleira tree (Cnidoscolus phyllacanthus), pinhão (Jatropha mollissima), joazeiro (Ziziphus joazeiro), pau-de-colher (Maytenus rigida) and braúna (Melanoxylon species). These and other food plants are widespread in the region where the last bird lived, thereby suggesting
that food availability was probably not a limiting factor for Spix’s Macaws, at least in the recent past. The lone macaw varied its diet depending on what was available at different times of the year. There had also been further investigations of other creeks in the region. The researchers had found that the Melância Creek was not just the last place where the macaw still persisted, it was also the only place where such a variety and abundance of trees could be found. It was a truly special place.

  Despite the frustrations and drawbacks with the captive breeding, the field researchers were able to report encouraging news from the wild pair. They had been seen courting. The female bird was, after several weeks at liberty, well habituated to her new surroundings and getting along promisingly with the male, even though the little green maracana was still in tow most of the time.

  The newly released bird had stopped going back to visit her captive companion, who was still kept at the release aviary. She had gone native. It had taken a nail-biting seven weeks for the reunited pair to settle down together, and it looked as though the big gamble had paid off. It was May 1995.

  Da-Ré and his colleagues could rely on the locals for help in keeping watch over the birds. Throughout the local creekside woods where the birds flew, the researchers were familiar to the cowboys and farmers and their families. Da-Ré had worked hard to build up good relations with the local people and his efforts had paid off in inspiring support for the project. Over 100 local families had been recruited, they had become known as Spix’s Cowboys. The result was a constant flow of reports of sightings and details on the birds’ behaviour provided by people only too happy to help with the conservation of their own uniquely special celebrity parrots.