Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird. Tony Juniper
specialists cash is not the primary motivation. Some collectors spend fortunes on their parrot-keeping facilities and there is no way they could regain their costs from the sale of birds. A small number are much more businesslike and breed rare parrots on a commercial basis.
And where there is valuable property and jealousy, there is theft. Rare parrots are frequently stolen from their owners. The rarest and most endangered parrots are most at risk. Puerto Rican Parrots (Amazona vittata) are one of the most endangered of all species. Some of these birds are kept in breeding aviaries run by the US Government at the Luquillo National Forest on their native island. In April 2001 bird thieves broke in and took several birds despite the careful attention of the biologists who had been working for decades to save them from extinction.
Until as recently as the late 1980s, the effect of trapping on many of the rare and collectable species in the wild was unknown. The driving force behind the demand for the birds was rarity in captivity. Parrots weren’t considered as real wild birds with natural habitats. So familiar a commodity had they become to the collectors that the idea of them disappearing from their native forests was not seriously considered. Even when the obvious rarity of some parrots was acknowledged and the impact of trapping logically seen as a threat, most enthusiasts denied they were connected to the plight of parrots in the wild. Collectors preferred to blame poor farmers clearing forests or developing-country governments rather than face the consequences of their own obsession.
But by the end of the twentieth century it was clear that many of the main target species taken for the elite collectors’ market were getting into serious trouble. They now comprised some of the rarest and most endangered birds in the world. Many of the worst-affected species occupied tiny ranges in the wild, often only a single small island.
When the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) came into force in 1975 (see page 34), thereby banning trade in some of the most threatened parrots, the smugglers tried every means possible to circumvent the treaty’s protective measures. Rare parrot laundering via countries with more open borders or less strict regulations, document falsification, disguising rare species as common ones and straightforward smuggling all occurred and still do.
Even in countries that had the will to enforce the Convention, the means used by the traders to evade detection grew ever more sophisticated. Parrots are packed inside sections of drainpipe, hidden inside vehicles’ spare tyres and put in plastic bottles to smuggle them past customs officials. Rare parrot eggs are taken on planes strapped against the body of smugglers to keep them warm, hatched in incubators, the babies hand-reared and the birds sold on for a fortune. Where detection of smuggling in some places has improved, the trade routes have shifted to exploit the next weakest point of entry.16
During the second half of the 1980s, the scale of the disaster about to overtake the world’s most familiar and popular birds finally became clear. One man was devoting his working life to the matter: Dr Nigel Collar at the International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP), a network of bird conservation groups from around the world headquartered at Cambridge in England.17 He had been writing about endangered birds for years and was the world expert on the subject. Collar had accumulated a vast global network of museum curators, academics and ornithologists who helped him piece together a picture of what was happening to the world’s fast-disappearing birds.
The results of this sifting through old manuscripts, field reports and collections, was the compilation of so-called Red Data Books. Collar’s great tomes systematically set out the situation faced by individual endangered species so that action to save them could be properly directed and prioritised. Basing his research on the collections and journals of the early natural history explorers like Spix and Martius, the fieldwork of top ornithologists and bird records compiled by different societies and academic bodies, Collar coordinated research that in 1988 led to the publication of Birds to Watch. It showed that more than one thousand species of bird out of a total of about ten thousand were in danger of disappearing for good.
One family was doing worse than any others – the parrots. Some 71 out of the 350 known species were then listed as at risk of extinction. Collar found that the principal reasons for this catastrophic decline were collection of birds for the pet and collector markets and destruction of the birds’ forest homes.18
Collar’s findings demanded that there was a change in the one-sided relationship between people and parrots. Hundreds of years of trapping and deforestation had taken their toll: there wasn’t much time to spare. Some of the most beautiful parrots were already at the very brink of extinction; for them the endgame was now in play. Just a few last moves were left as a final prelude to more than 50 million years of evolutionary memory being wiped away for good.
The group of parrots nearest to the edge was the blue macaws. Once seen in the flesh it is obvious why this group of spectacular blue parrots above all others should attract special attention from the trappers, dealers and collectors. Outstanding among even the parrots for charisma, charm and visual impact, the blue macaws – Spix’s among them – have been doomed by their unique qualities to become one of humanity’s most prized possessions.
Visitors to the Berlin Zoo in 1900 enjoyed a unique spectacle. The crowds filing past the cages didn’t know it, but they were the only people in history to have seen all four species of the spectacular blue macaw alive together. In addition to the rare Spix’s Macaw, captive Hyacinth, Glaucous and Lear’s Macaws were then held in the Berlin aviaries as well. All had been imported from South America. These highly coveted zoological treasures would never meet again.
Today, the three large and similar-looking blue macaws are included in the biological genus Anodorhynchus, the name coined by Spix. These macaws are larger than the Cyanopsitta macaw first collected by Spix. They also differ from Spix’s in having a proportionately larger bill and curious patches of bare yellow skin at the base of the beak and around the eyes. The function of the bright startling highlights is unknown but could be to aid recognition, some form of adornment that is important for bonding and breeding or a means to reduce their temperature when the birds get too hot.
The large, black, hooked bill of the Anodorhynchus macaws is uniquely adapted for eating the fruits of various palms. The largest nuts eaten by the largest species, the Hyacinth Macaw, are about the size of a golf ball. Even with a big hammer or heavy-duty bench vice, it is impossible for a person to break them open. The macaws are, however, experts. They rotate the nuts in their bill manipulating where necessary with tongue and foot to place the tough objects in exactly the correct positioning for peeling. Once they have removed the tough external skin, the birds make perfect transverse cuts with the heavy square chisel at the cutting edge of the lower half of the bill that enables them to split the nuts in two. Inside is the prize, a nutritious fatty kernel.
As the palm trees evolved tougher and tougher shells to prevent their seeds being eaten, so the big blue macaws advanced a larger bill to crack them. And so it went on: an ecological arms race that produced surely the most impressive of all bird bills. Remarkably, the huge and powerful bill of these macaws is rarely used in anger. Despite having the potential to remove fingers easily, the birds are the gentle giants of the parrot world.
Fieldworkers studying Hyacinth Macaws have described the effect of their work on palm nuts as resembling that of a machine tool or laser rather than that of a bird’s bill. Once opened, the coconut-like flesh of the nut is crushed into a paste that the birds find absolutely irresistible. Hyacinth Macaws are clever when it comes to cracking such tough nuts. One German aviculturist noticed that when his macaws were given Acrocomia nuts brought home from a visit to South America the birds used small pieces of wood to help grip the fruits firmly in their beaks. His macaws would shave a small piece of wood 3–4 millimetres long from their perch, position it inside the upper half of their bill and use it as a wedge to keep