Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird. Tony Juniper
trio were the adult male parrot who had first made the call, and a pair of young adults. More chatter followed, then the birds indulged in friendly fencing with their hooked black bills. Their sharp yellowish eyes regarded one another carefully, their dark pupils dilating. Then once more scanning the surrounding land, the first bird began to climb down the caraiba tree. Beneath it was a pool of muddy water.
As the first bird went lower, his companions nervously followed, very quiet now, anxious not to attract unwelcome attention. Going to the ground to drink was dangerous. It was a necessary daily chore, but they didn’t like it. Not only were hawks still a threat but snakes and other predators could catch them down there. There had recently been a population explosion among the local wild cats, and the parrots needed extra caution. They tilted their heads to get a better view of the ground, paying particular attention to the bushy cover at the edge of the creek.
They stopped once more and again checked for danger, then fluttered one by one the last five metres to the moist sandy ground of the creek bed. As they landed and cast shadows over the margins of the pool, tadpoles scattered into the murky brown water at the centre. Whether the larvae of the frogs would progress to a terrestrial existence depended on more rain. This pool would evaporate soon under the hot tropical sun.
The parrots drank deep and fast. Taking their fill in seconds, they immediately flew back up to the bare top of the tree. They called once more, and then took off again down the creek calling loudly. Two kilometres upstream they stopped to perch in another of the tall trees. They knew that they would find food here. It was late in the day and dusk would soon fall but a meal of the caraiba’s seeds would see them through the night.
When the baking sunshine of the day was extinguished a suffocating cloak of warmth rose from the parched earth. It was time to roost. Two of the birds, the pair, would spend the night in a hollow in one of the tall trees. They regularly slept there and felt safe. Their companion, the single male bird, perched atop a tall spiny cactus.
The tall trees that bordered the seasonally flooded creeks formed a rare green oasis. The rest of the woodland, if you could call it woodland, was mostly low and composed of tangled thickets of spindly thorn bushes and cacti. There were baked open areas where little at all grew. It was a melancholy landscape, especially in the heat of the dry season when the stillness and quiet gave a paradoxically wintry feeling. In all directions its vastness rolled in endless undulations towards an ever-receding horizon. Located in the interior of north-eastern Brazil, these dry thorny woodlands, the ‘caatinga’, occupied an immense area, some 800,000 square kilometres in all – considerably larger than the US state of Texas or about three times the size of the island of Great Britain. Amid sharp rocks, viciously spined cacti, the lance-like thorns of the bushes and brutal unrelenting heat, this peculiar place felt lonely, an isolated and forgotten corner of the world.
Drought turned the forest into a desolate and brittle chaos. Animals could hide in the shade, but the plants could not. Adapted to the desiccating climate, the plants eked out the precious water in whatever way they could. Some had thick waxy leaves, others potato-like tuber roots or fine hairs to scavenge moisture from the air. Most trees and shrubs were deciduous and even those said to be evergreen lost their leaves in the worst droughts. And when the droughts dragged on, as they frequently did, there was death. Creatures that succumbed didn’t rot; the dry heat drained their body fluids and mummified them. Sheep and goats killed by lack of food and water lay like specimens preserved for museum display.
The energy in the winds was small and the airstreams that came brought little rain. It was a harsh place and had become known as the backlands: a forgotten country scorned by the outside world as a desolate wasteland fit only for goats and sheep.
In the good years, dark clouds spawned violent thunderstorms that brought relief from the unforgiving drought. As the lifeless desert was for a short time banished, the caatinga became a brief paradise of green dotted with white, yellow and red flowers. When the first rains fell, it was as if the drops of moisture were hitting the face of a red-hot iron. Flashed back into vapour, the first specks of water could not penetrate the earth. If the rain continued to fall, the baked red soil would first become darkly stained, damp and then moistened. Tiny rivulets formed, then streams and finally substantial bodies of water accumulated in the creeks.
What little rain there was fell in a four- or five-month period, generally from about November to April. Most of the year, even in ‘wet’ years, it did not rain at all. But because the creeks that drained the land during the brief annual deluges retained some of the moisture in their deep fine soils, ribbons of tall green trees grew there – little streaks of green in the great dry wilderness.
In this uncompromising environment, the blue parrots had made their home. Tested and honed by the punishing climate, their bodies and instincts had been moulded into the alert exotic blue creatures that flew there now. Perhaps, like many other animals found in these tough lands, they had first evolved in kinder and wetter conditions but now found themselves driven by thousands of years of climatic change to the precious few areas of moister habitat within the caatinga. The tree-lined creek was one such place.
Exquisite blue creatures some 60 centimetres long, darker above, slightly more turquoise below, their heads were paler and greyer and at a distance sometimes appeared almost white. Depending on the angle and intensity of light, the birds sometimes showed a greenish cast. When they fluffed out their head feathers, they took on a different appearance and looked almost reptilian, an impression enhanced by their intense bare faces. Their outward resemblance to small dinosaurs reinforced the impression that these curious birds were descended from a remote past.
At first light next day the trio of blue parrots collected together once more at the top of the huge bare-branched tree and resumed their daily routine. Their first port of call was a fruiting faveleira tree down the creek towards the main river. As the parrots approached their destination and breakfast, they were greeted by a screeching flock of Blue-winged Macaws, a type of small macaw known locally as maracanas. These birds were already feeding in the dense green foliage of the fruit tree’s crown. Despite their bright green plumage, their striking white faces and red and blue patches, to an observer on the ground or even an aerial predator they were almost invisible.
These smaller and mainly green macaws shared the creekside woods with their larger blue cousins. Relations between them were generally quite amicable, unless one of the smaller macaws sat on one of the favourite perches of the bigger ones. If they trespassed in this way, they would be angrily driven off. Although there were several other species of parrot living in the creek, the little maracanas were the only other kinds of macaw. They were also the only other birds the bigger blue species deigned to have any social contact with.
Amid the chattering and bickering of the busy maracanas, a distant growl registered in the blue birds’ finely tuned senses. The sound grew closer. It was a rare sound in this remote place – the sound of a vehicle. The blue parrots knew that the approaching sound often meant trouble. On top of the hawks, wild cats and snakes, the three blue macaws had come to know a still more deadly predator. And that lethal hunter was on the prowl again now. This predator stalked his prey by both night and day. This predator never gave up: if one method of capture failed, he tried a new one. He took babies from their nests and even stole eggs.
The birds fled upstream once more until they arrived at a tall caraiba tree with dense foliage covering the branches in its crown. They had already eaten well and felt able to rest. As the dazzling sun grew hotter, the parrots melted into the shadows, to doze, preen and chatter. They disappeared into the dappled light and shade cast by the long waxy leaves of the caraiba tree. Just as they relaxed, the birds were shocked to full alertness by a startling shrill screeching sound. It was the scream of a distressed parrot, a panic-laden cry made by a wounded bird facing a predator. The macaws’ curiosity was aroused. They were compelled to respond to the call.
They fluttered to an opening in the caraiba’s dense canopy to gain a better view of the creek. Finding no line of sight to the source of the sound they cautiously flew towards it. The noise was coming from some distance away on a bend in the creek. The three birds approached. As they drew nearer they could see on the ground a struggling parrot. It appeared unable to move from its place on the creek bed even though it