Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  Another Spix’s Macaw sat alone in a separate aviary. If this bird had any inkling of the predicament of her species, there was nothing she could do about it. A few months earlier in December 2000, one of the four Spix’s Macaws then at Loro Parque died. It was the old male bird from the original pair bought by Wolfgang Kiessling in 1985. A post mortem found that he was infertile, probably because of old age. His younger female partner, however, was a prolific egg layer and had produced seven clutches. None had hatched. Now she had no mate at all. With the simple, natural death of an elderly parrot another bird was left abandoned, the genetic diversity of Spix’s Macaw further reduced and the entire genus of unique birds brought one step closer to complete annihilation. It might have been a quiet death, but the consequences were momentous.

  Because of the collapse of the Recovery Committee in February 2001, there would for the foreseeable future be no male joining this lone bird. The Loro Parque Foundation requested that the studbook keeper make a recommendation for a new pairing. The relationship between Natasha Schischakin and Loro Parque was, however, now very poor and she did not reply. Since she had failed to arrange crucial pairings of single birds and had contributed to the deep divisions and difficulties that now dogged the Recovery Committee, in September Houston Zoo terminated her role as studbook keeper. But this did not immediately help the Spix’s Macaw: the female sat all alone; so did a male bird in Recife, two others in São Paulo and more in Switzerland with Roland Messer. It would not be until March 2002 that a new studbook keeper was appointed. Brazilian Carlos Bianchi got the job.

  Despite Schischakin’s departure, the Brazilian authorities tried to press ahead with new pairings of various scattered captive birds. With new transfers being considered by the Brazilians, Roland Messer made a trip to Brasilia in October 2001 to meet government officials. The meeting, however, made it clear how setting up new pairings between the different owners was still a highly problematic process. Far from making an unconditional commitment to cooperate, the Swiss collector offered two Spix’s to Brazil in return for a pair of critically endangered Lear’s Macaws. He also asked what price the Brazilians would be willing to pay to purchase Spix’s from the owners.48 Although on both counts the Brazilians refused to negotiate with what they saw as quite unacceptable proposals, the incident again highlighted the difficulties arising from private owners controlling such rare creatures: even when the owner in question had previously said he would never sell his Spix’s Macaws!

  Under these circumstances, not only was a proper captive-breeding programme further stalled, but the unravelling of the recovery effort had by now led the Loro Parque Foundation to suspend its funding of the work in the creeks. With the last wild bird gone and only very limited Brazilian funding to continue community work in the bird’s natural range, contacts between the macaw’s wild home and attempts to save the species in captivity were severed. The lowest point in the history of Spix’s Macaw had been reached.

  The final collapse of the Spix’s Macaw recovery programme was accompanied by a trade prohibition notice issued by the Brazilian Government that restricted any movement of Spix’s Macaws except with their permission.49 Brazil had direct control over only eight birds50 and the notice put out to other CITES countries would at least stop the parrots moving from where they were. The Brazilians’ firmer approach applied not only to Spix’s Macaw, but also another of the country’s critically endangered parrots, the Lear’s Macaw. From 2000 onwards, if any of these birds turned up in international trade without proper paperwork, a swift challenge from Brazil would soon follow, accompanied by a demand that the birds be returned to their native land.51

  In April, and again in May 2000, the British Customs and Excise authorities raided Harry Sissen, widely known in British avicultural circles for his self-proclaimed success in breeding macaws. An extensive collection of 140 rare parrots that he kept in aviaries on his farm at Northallerton in Yorkshire in the north of England was confiscated. The raids had taken place because the authorities believed that Sissen had bought and illegally imported some Lear’s Macaws.

  During the 1980s Sissen was the only British parrot keeper believed to have Lear’s Macaws. He had obtained them from zoos that had failed to breed them and who had decided to transfer them to private owners. The parrots were old and probably beyond their reproductive time, but because they came from reputable zoos they did at least have proper CITES permits and were therefore above-board. Sissen kept them openly at his aviaries. It was one of these birds that had been wrongly announced in 1991 to have been a Glaucous Macaw.

  However, Sissen’s story began to take a darker turn when he woke up one day to find his precious Lear’s had been stolen. Not only that but the thief who took them had apparently tried to blackmail Sissen by selling the birds back to him. Where they went was a mystery. Gutted by the loss of his unique parrots, Sissen set out to replace them.

  When he was offered more of the endangered parrots, he jumped at the chance. In 1997 Sissen packed up his car and drove to Yugoslavia to collect two Lear’s Macaws. He then drove on to Slovakia where he purchased six Blue-headed Macaws from a second dealer. He crossed back into the European Union at the Austrian border and from there drove back to the French port of Calais via Germany and Belgium. Sissen made a second trip in 1998, following a similar smuggling route, to obtain a third Lear’s Macaw.

  To conceal the true origin of the macaws he craved, Sissen created a trail of false documentation to cover his tracks. But his attempt to disguise his activities prompted a lengthy investigation called Operation Palate. This led to the raid in May 2000 – one of the most important rare wildlife enforcement efforts ever seen in the UK.

  Sissen’s farm was the end point of a smuggling operation that began in the remote north-east of Brazil and took its main route via eastern Europe. The birds were gram for gram more valuable than heroin, with a pair of them fetching a staggering £50,000. The prosecution lawyer at the trial said that Sissen had a ‘particular obsession with owning Lear’s Macaws’.

  Macaw expert Carlos Yamashita was flown in from Brazil to testify for the prosecution on the rarity of the macaws and to speak about the threat they faced from trapping. Nigel Collar was called on to outline the rarity of the birds and their status under international law. A third prosecution witness was William Hague, then leader of the Conservative Opposition in Parliament. It happened that Hague was Sissen’s local Member of Parliament and that he had been lobbied by the disgruntled parrot breeder following the raid on his premises by Customs and Excise.

  In court, the Conservative leader said that he wouldn’t make any parrot jokes, and asked that the trial be taken seriously. In response, the Sun newspaper, one of the UK’s mass circulation tabloids, ran a front page photo montage showing Hague’s head on the body of a parrot. The paper compared his political fortunes to the dead parrot in the Monty Python sketch.

  Hague contributed to a surreal scene in court where the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition peered over the heads of a pair of stuffed Lear’s Macaws removed from Sissen’s home by customs officers. Hague said in court that Sissen had admitted to him that he had smuggled three Lear’s Macaws into the UK from Yugoslavia. His testimony helped to convict Sissen. It was a modest gesture, but still one of the more important contributions to environmental protection that Hague would make in his four years as Opposition leader.

  Sissen was found guilty of illegally importing Lear’s and Blue-headed Macaws. The trial judge pointed out that Sissen had previous convictions for bird smuggling and described him as ‘A devious and scheming man who as a result of the verdicts is both liar and a hypocrite’; he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison and ordered to pay £5,000 costs. Sissen appealed but the case against his conviction was dismissed.

  According to the Brazilian authorities the macaws were sovereign property of their nation. They argued that the birds had been taken from the wild against Brazilian and international law and should go back. At t
he time of the trial there were very few Lear’s Macaws in captivity and very few had been bred in confinement. This meant that Sissen’s birds had almost certainly been caught from the wild. The only Lear’s Macaws held legally outside Brazil were two at Busch Gardens in Florida, USA. A similar stance successfully secured the return of two other Lear’s Macaws seized in Singapore. These were transferred to São Paulo Zoo after a bird smuggler, Kuah Kil Choon, was jailed for trafficking the species in November 2000. This policy of insisting on repatriation was new.52 The different approach highlighted the extent of Brazilian frustration at negotiating with the ‘owners’ of rare wildlife illegally procured from their country. Also it once again demonstrated the centrality of the ownership issue in attempts to save the Spix’s Macaw.

  Moreoever, the question of who owned the birds was not only of great importance for the last Spix’s Macaws. It was an example of a new and growing phenomenon – ‘biopiracy’.53 Modern-day buccaneers seek booty in the form of valuable species stolen from the countries where they evolved. These are replicated and then sold on with no benefit to the nation of origin. The macaws trapped in Brazil, bred overseas and then traded for large sums, were an example of the modern-day biological plunder.54 Like the captains of pirate vessels marauding the Spanish Main in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the practitioners of this new pillage know that there are fortunes to be made from scarce natural resources – centuries ago it was gold, while today rare birds are included in the priceless loot.

  The fact that the Brazilians could do so little to prevent Spix’s Macaws being sold confirmed that they had lost control. It was now too late to implement a policy similar to that now being pursued in respect of Lear’s Macaws, and there could be no reliable coordination of the breeding stock. The birds sitting alone in Tenerife, Switzerland and Brazil demonstrated the defeated position of Spix’s Macaw – no one could agree to save the species.

  But if control could somehow be achieved, then not only would the prospects for the isolated birds be transformed, so too would the future for an entire species and unique genus. Experience from other parts of the world demonstrated how, even on the edge of extinction, the possibilities were considerable. One unlikely source of inspiration came from the island where the Dodo once lived.

  By the late twentieth century only a few of the original bird species that were unique to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius survived: the Mauritius Pink Pigeon (Nesoenas mayeri), the Mauritius Kestrel (Falco punctatus) and the Echo Parakeet. In common with the Spix’s Macaw, these rare birds had been driven by farming and human settlement into a small patch of remaining natural habitat where very low numbers clung on.

  Last-ditch efforts to save them were initiated during the 1970s, at the last imaginable moment: by 1974 the kestrel had been reduced to six birds and the pigeon wasn’t doing much better. With the support of Gerald Durrell’s Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, captive-breeding programmes were started. The birds were reared in cages where intensive methods of hand-rearing were employed. When numbers were built up, releases took place. It worked; both species recovered and re-established growing wild populations.

  Partly because of the intensive effort employed to save the pigeon and kestrel, there was at first little attempt made on behalf of the Echo Parakeet; its numbers continued to fall. By 1988 the total population in the wild was estimated at eight individuals (five of which were males). In captivity there was just a single pair and their two offspring, and the history of captive-breeding attempts that went back to the 1970s had not been impressive. In the early 1990s, the World Parrot Trust joined the Jersey team in bolstering assistance to the Mauritian Government.

  All of the remaining birds lived in Mauritius and belonged to the country. There were no private owners to negotiate with and no far-flung collections to coordinate. Under these circumstances, the team trying to save the species could freely use different methods to breed the parrots and get them established in the wild. One of the most important techniques they used was down-brooding. The parakeets generally have two chicks, sometimes even three, but they can rarely rear more than one, especially if the food supply is bad. So the idea was either to take them into captivity to assist with the breeding programme or to move a spare chick to another wild nest that was not successful and let the unsuccessful parents rear a chick from somebody else.

  The team went to straight hand-rearing: taking birds from nests, hand-feeding them and putting them back out again. Reintroduction of captive birds back to the wild began in the late 1990s and involved training young birds to cope with life at liberty. The young parrots were taken up to a big release cage in the forest and kept as tame free-flying parrots. They were trained to recognise nest boxes as home and to take parrot pellets out of hoppers. In this way they would be released with close support for their most important needs – enough food and safe places to lay their eggs and rear young. The birds slowly worked their way back into their natural habitat.

  There was also intensive control of the predators introduced centuries before from passing ships. Rats, cats, monkeys and mongooses that plundered nests and killed the adults were trapped and the nest boxes and nesting trees fitted with protection measures. Not only did the rats take eggs from nests but they also stole the birds’ food. Black rats lived in the trees and ate a lot of the forest fruit, as did the monkeys. By providing nest sites and sufficient food, controlling disease, predators and competitors and releasing birds reared in captivity, by early 2001 the wild population of Echo Prakeets had reached about 120 with twenty more in captivity. The interventions had been a resounding success.

  This was not the whole story, however. The forests found by the first Europeans who arrived on the island had nearly gone. Like the Spix’s Macaw’s creekside woods, there was very little native flora left and what did remain was in bad shape. This vital natural home of the native birds had been cleared away for farming or damaged and degraded by introduced plants which, like the rats and cats, had aggressively spread over the island. If the birds were to have a long-term future, something had to be done about that as well.

  Although captive breeding could not repair habitat destruction and general ecological impoverishment, the build-up of numbers of birds in cages did help. In direct response to the successful breeding and release efforts for the island’s endangered birds, the Mauritian Government created a national park in the Black River Gorges. The island’s authorities also paid for out-of-season sugar-cane workers to fence off and weed large blocks of the remaining native forest. The introduced deer and pigs were also kept out so all of the native tree seedlings could regenerate.

  The trees that grew in these improved and ‘renaturalised’ patches of forest proved much better for the birds than those in the degraded areas. The wild birds found more fruit. The forest improvement work has been on a trial basis but, having established the principle, it is clear that larger areas of habitat can be restored. In this respect the parrot had given protection to an entire ecosystem and within it a whole host of other endangered species. If this could be achieved on the island of the Dodo, the place where the very symbol of extinction originated, what could be done elsewhere? Could similar treatment be achieved for the endangered gallery forests of the caatinga by putting the Spix’s Macaw back there?

  It is attractive to think that it could and should be a quite straightforward matter. But ten years of failure suggest otherwise. Despite vast resources and effort devoted to research in the Melância Creek, no details have been published in scientific papers on, for example, the habits of the last bird. Yet such findings will be vital for future reintroduction attempts. Even in 2001 the only map available of the remaining caraiba gallery woodlands was the sketch produced in a few days in 1990 by the ICBP team. And there was still no official protection for the woodlands and no long-term plan to combat the ecological damage caused by excessive grazing. IBAMA (Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis) initially sig
ned an agreement with the local landowner (the owner of the Concordia farm) but this expired after five years. A proposal to purchase the most important areas was drafted in that period but had not been acted upon as of 2001. Some fencing of important areas of woodland took place but there is still no long-term plan to combat grazing pressure and its effects on the Spix’s Macaw’s unique habitat.

  If the macaw’s habitat were restored, and it is certainly straightforward to do that, other challenges would exist. Reintroduction is one thing with parrots like the surviving species on Mauritius, where there were at least a few wild individuals to help captive-bred individuals back to a natural existence. What happens when, like the Spix’s Macaw the species has become extinct in the wild? Many feared in the case of the Spix that once the precious last bird was finally lost, all hope of reintroducing the species would be lost with him. But again, experience from other parts of the world shows that such a terminal outcome is not inevitable.

  The Californian Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) was lost from the wild for a time but has now been successfully reintroduced following a carefully planned captive-breeding programme undertaken by the San Diego Zoo. Baby birds were famously reared by keepers using glove puppets in the shape of an adult condor’s head. In this way it was hoped that more of their natural, wild instincts would be preserved.

  Another remarkable example of an animal coming back to the wild from captivity is Przewalski’s Horse (Equus przewalski). This diminutive ancestor of the domestic horse with its pale brown coat and stiff brush-like brown mane was once widespread. Cave paintings from France for example show that animals similar to these lived in western Europe around 10,000 years ago. The last known population of wild horses was finally finished off in central Asia during the 1960s. The last ones were sighted at the end of that decade in south-west Mongolia. Their end came from habitat loss, cross-breeding with domestic horses and persecution from herdsmen who saw them as competition for the grass and water that their animals needed. Fortunately, before their total demise, a few had been taken into captivity.