Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  His interest in parrots had not gone away. He yearned to join the club of successful and influential men who owned Spix’s Macaws. He had wanted to own the birds for years and had in the past falsely claimed to have them. But now he had a renewed enthusiasm to get hold of some of the exotic blue parrots. Two near-fatal illnesses had made Messer think about his future and he said that he wanted to make a bigger contribution to the world. Saving Spix’s Macaw would be his new life mission.

  Messer gained membership of the exclusive Spix’s Macaw owners’ club in August 1999. He obtained most of Hämmerli’s Spix’s Macaws and in so doing appointed himself as one of the people who would help to keep the species on the right side of survival. He would do it through breeding the birds at his own aviaries under his own control. Although on the face of it legal with respect to Swiss law, there was no logic to the transfer of birds from Hämmerli to Messer in terms of either the future development of the studbook or Messer’s breeding record with macaws. He had little experience in breeding birds, let alone rare ones, was not a trained nature conservationist or ecologist, and had no experience of designing or implementing endangered species recovery work. But he did have the money. He also had a rather unusual track record with rare parrots.

  In November 1993, Messer had been found guilty of ordering the theft of endangered parrots from another Swiss bird collector. He paid three Germans a total of 24,000 Deutschmarks to make two separate robbery attempts from the same collection. The initial theft was of twenty-three parrots, including Hyacinth Macaws and spectacular Palm Cockatoos. The valuable parrots were taken from their cages and removed in cloth bags. The thieves went back ten days later to steal the rest. By this time however the owner had fitted alarms. The police were called and the Germans were hunted down with dogs in a nearby wood. The bird burglars were arrested and right away described to the police the man who had paid them to do the job. Messer’s premises were immediately raided and the stolen parrots were found and recovered. A Swiss newspaper ran the story under the headline, ‘Parrot-Gang Caught: Now they Sing’. Messer confessed and was sentenced to nine months in prison and fined.

  Hämmerli claimed that he had given the birds to Messer on the condition that he cooperate fully with the Recovery Committee. But in reality Hämmerli knew full well that he could no more insist that Messer cooperate with survival efforts for the species than the Brazilian Government could have required Hämmerli himself to abide by his earlier promises not to sell his birds. In the end, the agreement entered into between the owners and the Brazilian state was really only a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’, not hard law, and to that extent it was unenforceable by Brazil. It was moral leverage only, and morals were hard to identify in the Hämmerli – Messer transaction.

  Certainly Hämmerli didn’t give his birds away; he sold them. Messer paid a total of 340,000 Swiss Francs (about US$160,000) for fifteen Spix’s Macaws and a handful of Blue-headed Macaws (Ara couloni) that Hämmerli insisted were part of the package. Messer took delivery first of five Spix’s Macaws and then of ten more with the Blue-headed Macaws thrown in. This price was quite low given world black-market prices for these birds. However, since Hämmerli would have found it extremely difficult to secure the CITES paperwork necessary for an international sale, he was forced to sell inside Switzerland.

  Hämmerli claimed that he had become frustrated at repeated offers from bird collectors who wanted to buy Spix’s Macaws from him. He said that a sheikh had offered him US$200,000 for a pair of birds and that when he had declined the offer an additional US$100,000 was put on the table. But according to Messer, Hämmerli had become depressed by attacks against him in the Swiss media criticising him for not doing more to save the species from extinction.

  Neither man mentioned another possible reason for Hämmerli’s wish to dispose of his birds. Shortly before the transfer to Messer, Hämmerli was investigated by the Swiss customs authorities, who were interested in the source of Hämmerli’s birds so as to establish whether his original breeding stock had been illegally imported. No conclusion was reached on that question at the time because details of the birds’ history had been lost in the many years since they arrived in Switzerland. According to the Swiss authorities, the difficulties of tracing evidence on the birds’ real origin was compounded by the fact that Leumann, the breeder who Hämmerli claimed had supplied him his original birds, died of cancer just as the investigation began.

  However, forged export papers prepared in Paraguay and now in my possession confirm that Joseph Hämmerli was the end recipient of birds exported from that country in September 1986. The same wildlife exporter’s house in Asunción was the one raided the following March by Villalba-Macias, when two young Spix’s Macaws were seized. Whether Swiss customs officers had access to these documents during their investigation is not known. And whether all this was the real reason for the sale, Hämmerli put to Messer a take-it-or-leave-it offer to buy the parrots. Messer took it, and handed over the cash necessary for him to buy the privilege of owning and controlling animals that were among the rarest and most precious creatures on earth.

  Nor was this the full extent of Hämmerli’s betrayal of the Recovery Committee’s trust. Simultaneously, he transferred the other five of his twenty birds to another unknown destination. The birds changed hands for undisclosed sums and promptly went underground.

  One person who was widely believed to have taken at least some of Hämmerli’s five other birds was a Swiss parrot collector called Adolf Indermauer. He was already known to some of the Recovery Committee members. He had turned up to a meeting held in Brazil in 1996. Loro Parque’s David Waugh was there too. Waugh remembered how ‘Hämmerli had suggested that Indermauer should come along and represent both him and de Dios at the meeting. The Brazilians knew about this curious request, but they hadn’t told anyone else.’

  Indermauer did not make a good impression. ‘How he behaved caused problems,’ said Waugh. ‘He showed pictures of young blue macaws that he had back home in Switzerland, including Lear’s Macaws. There were real questions as to whether he had any understanding at all as to what the Committee was about. He seemed to think it was a trading operation and to have seriously misjudged what he should be doing there. He was probably there to help soften up the Committee to the idea that Hämmerli was going to sell some of his birds to other keepers.’

  Indermauer never attended another Committee meeting and later denied that he had received any Spix’s Macaws.

  Later on there were different rumours about the fate of these five lost macaws. It was said that birds had turned up in the USA via Canada. Some thought that these might have been all or some of the five birds that had disappeared from Hämmerli’s collection in Switzerland and rumoured to have been smuggled out of Europe on an executive jet. If they were, then they were still outside the control of any coordinated recovery plan and underlined just how very far Spix’s Macaw remained from salvation.

  Wherever those five unaccounted-for birds went to, Roland Messer was very angry that some of the birds he had obtained from Hämmerli turned out not to be the individuals he expected to buy. At the first Recovery Committee meeting he attended in Houston in 1999, he requested that a series of changes to the sexes and birth dates of birds previously held by Hämmerli be made in the official records held on the specimens in captivity. He also wrote to Hämmerli after the sale to say that ‘two of the fifteen bought Spix Macaws are not the ones mentioned in the certificates.’ One of the genetically most important birds had gone somewhere else, and therefore outside the reach of the Committee. Messer declared in a letter to Hämmerli, ‘I request animmediate exchange of the wrong birds since this is of great significance for the continued existence of the species and I insist on it!’

  Hämmerli replied by suggesting that he and Messer should in future conduct their communications via lawyers. Messer retorted with a reminder to Hämmerli of his past dealings in the birds. Messer wrote, ‘I would like to draw your attention to th
e fact that I am the only Swiss National who can prove where and how you bought the two first Spix Macaws.’ Messer said they were not, as Hämmerli had claimed, from Leumann, but from Paraguay.

  Messer at least professed a strong personal conviction to playing his part in saving the species and had been to Recovery Committee meetings. ‘I know what I have to do in my heart for the Spix’s Macaw. I am for these birds one hundred per cent. I will never fail these birds,’ he said. Messer said that he would never sell his birds and that his interest was only in the conservation of Spix’s Macaw.

  Nevertheless, Messer had his own very strong views about what was the best way forward and had decided early on that he would ‘go his own way not looking right or left’ with the birds that he bought. He believed he had no need to be bound by the demands of committees, governments or wider recovery efforts. His plan was to breed the birds, cooperating with other owners as necessary, especially Antonio de Dios. The Filipino breeder had male macaws that it was vital for him to put with unpaired females in his group. To this end Messer met with Antonio de Dios and the studbook keeper, Natasha Schischakin, in Switzerland in April 2001. They also met with Swiss CITES officials.

  Messer’s view was that there should be no reintroduction attempt until there were at least 250 in captivity. Even if there was a proper studbook and effective survival strategy, that would take a long time, if it happened at all. His scepticism about releases was matched by a criticism of the community work at Curaçá. He thought it had been a waste of time and money.

  In any event, in April 2001, in a small village on the western plain of Switzerland some 30 kilometres from the capital city Bern, was housed the world’s second largest concentration of Spix’s Macaws. Behind the fences and hedges of a typical rural Swiss house was a rank of eight aviaries belonging to Roland Messer. In addition to a couple of pairs of threatened St Vincent Parrots, these little structures contained a quarter of the entire world population of the blue caatinga macaws. Under the grey spring sky in a chill lingering from winter, the exotic parrots looked dramatically out of place. It was hard to imagine a situation more alien or inappropriate for the blue birds of the hot wild thorn bush. Their calls battered against the misty stillness. There was no reply.

  If these creatures had been pterodactyls or tyrannosaurs or some other prehistoric animal believed to be extinct that had been rediscovered still alive somewhere, such an inappropriate setting would never have been tolerated. They would rightly have been treated as an irreplaceable treasure and the heritage of the world. They would have been guarded and cherished. There would be an international debate about what to do with them. Conservation agencies would send their best experts to look after them and plan their future; governments would invoke international law to ensure they were secure. Detailed plans would be laid and money provided.

  But here was a priceless piece in the jigsaw of life on earth, beyond the calculation of any financial value in terms of their replaceability, dropped into the middle of the Swiss countryside with no sense of urgency, no sense of global responsibility or purpose. Seeing such rare birds in these circumstances felt rather like struggling to appreciate the glory of a van Gogh or da Vinci painting that had been left out in the rain.

  Although Messer pledged never to sell his Spix’s Macaws, he regarded these scarcest of rare parrots as his own personal property rather than the sovereign territory of Brazil, the heritage of humankind or a wild species that must be returned to nature as a matter of moral imperative. He had personally and unilaterally decided through the purchase of Hämmerli’s macaws that his own back garden would be the front line against the irreversible loss of one of the world’s most beautiful and unique creatures. There was a spine-chilling sensation in the still mist that these macaws would never return to their home in the caatinga.

  Some of the birds were well and fit. Others appeared listless. One cage had a couple of old birds that looked out of condition with feathers missing. One had a bald head. In 2000, one of Messer’s pairs laid three eggs and one young bird was raised. It was different from the adults with the characteristic signs of a young Spix’s Macaw: a pale stripe along the length of the upper mandible and white rather than dark blackish-grey bare facial skin. It was housed with a single male bird which sat rather forlornly on a shelf. He couldn’t perch because his traumatised parents had bitten off his feet while he was a baby in a nest box at Hämmerli’s aviaries. The source of such pathological behaviour can only be guessed at – but its simplest interpretation must indicate the unnatural conditions faced by such birds in captivity. At least the most recent hatchling had survived. Including the new arrival, by early 2001 Roland Messer had sixteen Spix’s Macaws. He hoped and expected that more pairs would soon lay eggs.

  The Swiss Government took no action that would cause the birds to be returned to Brazilian ownership. Nor did it take steps to require that the people who owned them should join the international efforts to save an endangered species. Following the failure of the Swiss customs’ investigation into Hämmerli’s birds to reveal any wrongdoing, the official view was that birds born on Swiss territory were legal and above-board. Indeed, any legal action from outside would be met with stiff protection of Swiss nationals by the Swiss authorities. The only pressure that could be applied to Messer to save this endangered species was moral. The situation was rather similar to the official Swiss stance adopted towards gold and other treasure deposited in the country by the German Nazis during the Second World War. There was no political will to do anything: the birds stayed where they were, in the cold damp garden of the property developer.

  The Swiss experience demonstrated how individual owners could determine their own ‘conservation’ priorities. If those aims happened to be out of step with other key players, even the government of the country to which the birds belonged, then too bad. In this situation, the only negotiating currency that counted was birds, especially breeding pairs. Possession really was nine-tenths of the law. Antonio de Dios was about to underline the point.

  A few months after the Recovery Committee had met in Houston in 1999 to agree the release of the five Spix’s Macaws bred by de Dios in the Philippines, another unauthorised transfer of captive birds took place. Although de Dios had previously pledged himself to be ‘religiously in compliance with the Spix Committee’s program’, he now did something that would suggest to an innocent observer that his word had lost out to his wallet. Without the consent of the Committee – indeed, without even informing the Committee – Antonio de Dios shipped four birds to the aviaries of His Excellency Sheikh Saud bin Mohamed bin Ali Al-Thani at his Al-Wabra Wildlife Centre in Doha, Qatar.

  A highly educated member of the royal family of Qatar, the Sheikh completed a degree in International Law at Cambridge University in England and later came to represent his country on matters relating to art, culture and national heritage. He was also a rare wildlife enthusiast in his own right and had entertained plans of setting up a huge collection of rare animals in Qatar. His brother kept an outstanding collection of gazelles and the Sheikh himself had travelled the world to see endangered species; but his real interest was in birds, especially rare ones. Parrots had become a passion, and as his knowledge grew he became more and more interested in the very rarest.

  His attention became focused on blue macaws, and in the late 1990s he took delivery of nine Lear’s. These birds, originally smuggled into eastern Europe and then dispatched via the Middle East en route to Singapore, were smuggled into Qatar via Pakistan and Dubai – according to the Sheikh – without his knowledge. Along with other rare species seized by the Qatar authorities, they were transferred to the Sheikh’s private collection, the only place in the country that he regarded as having facilities suitable for housing such creatures. Since no Lear’s Macaws had been bred in captivity, it didn’t require a lot of imagination to work out from where they ultimately originated. But he had no intentions to breed Lear’s Macaws either, because ‘they were in good sha
pe in the wild’.

  Critically endangered Lear’s Macaws were one thing, a species believed extinct quite another. In 2000, he hired a leading parrot expert to make a search for Glaucous Macaws. The Sheikh said he didn’t plan to publish the findings of the work but evidently had his reasons for funding an expedition to check out continuing and persistent rumours that such birds still lived. And his passion didn’t stop there; he was also interested in Spix’s Macaws. On 25 January 2000, he struck a deal that would ensure he got some of these rarest and most valuable parrots. A transfer agreement was signed that day between the Sheikh and de Dios.

  Four birds were sent to the Sheikh’s aviaries in Doha. All were second-generation captive-bred birds: two males hatched in 1993 and two females from 1998. The agreement was heavily slanted towards the conservation of the species and said that the unauthorised transfer was ‘for the purpose of cooperative captive propagation for the benefit of the species’ survival in captivity’. Significantly, however, it made no mention of saving the macaws in the wild or of any future attempt to reintroduce the birds to their native woodlands.

  The deal was couched in terms of a breeding loan, but there was also a clause that said the Sheikh would make a donation to de Dios ‘in order to shoulder part of the costs connected with the captive propagation of the Spix’s Macaw’. It was de Dios’s view that since he was not allowed to sell his Spix’s Macaws (unlike the other rare parrots he bred with great success) the Committee was indebted to him for the expenditure he incurred in propagating and keeping the birds at his commercial facilities. The ‘donation’, although not specified in the memorandum, was rumoured to be US$80,000 per bird.