Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird. Tony Juniper
colour pictures, maps and clear descriptions what birds he might encounter on his travels through the interior of Brazil. Even now, at the start of the twenty-first century, there is still no handy field and identification guide for Brazilian birds, although Helmut Sick’s 1993 Birds in Brazil provides a comprehensive overview of birds occurring in the country. It is worth noting that many dozens of guides are available for European birds, a portion of the globe with far fewer endangered species.
With no manual to rely on, it was not a straightforward business for Spix to recognise new species, let alone ones that had already been collected by other museums or expeditions. For a start, any naturalist seeking to catalogue a vast and diverse country like Brazil, even for a relatively obvious and distinctive group of animals like birds (even large blue parrots), would need a basic understanding of what had already been collected and what typical geographical variations might be expected over different species’ sometimes vast ranges. Such knowledge in early nineteenth-century Bavaria was, as elsewhere, extremely scarce.
It was not until 1832, six years after Spix’s death, that the magnitude of his error became apparent. The blue parrot he had collected in the caatinga, and so carefully transported all the way back to Munich, was utterly unique, unlike anything else ever catalogued: Spix had found a new species. It later emerged that not only was it a species new to science, it was a representative of a whole ‘new’ genus.
Spix’s mistake was noticed first by another Bavarian naturalist, his assistant Johann Wagler. Wagler, a Professor of Zoology at the University of Munich, realised that the bird collected by Spix was smaller than the birds previously described as Hyacinth Macaws and was a different colour too. It had a greyish head, black bare skin on its face, instead of the yellow patches seen in the Hyacinth, and it had a smaller and more delicate bill than the bigger Hyacinth Macaw and its relatives.
In his Monograph of Parrots published in 1832, Wagler paid tribute to the bird’s collector in the naming of a ‘new’ species after him; Sittace Spixii, he called it – a name basically meaning ‘Spix’s Parrot’. Wagler, like Spix, completed his bird book just in time. That same year, Wagler was involved in a shooting accident. He peppered his arm with small shot while out collecting birds. He contracted blood poisoning, amputation was fatally delayed and he died in the summer, aged thirty-two.
Following Wagler’s realisation that a species new to science had been found, the French naturalist Prince Charles Bonaparte proposed in the 1850s that it be placed in a new genus called Cyanopsittaca. Bonaparte, the son of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Lucien, was a passionate ornithologist who had a special interest in parrots. Since this bird was unlike the other blue macaws in several important respects, Bonaparte believed that a whole new genus of parrots was warranted. He took the Greek word for blue, Kyanos, and the Latin for parrot, Psittacus, to denote a new genus literally meaning ‘blue parrot’.
In the 1860s in a monograph of parrots compiled by the German ornithologist Otto Finsch there is an everyday German name that translated means ‘Spix’s Blue Macaw’. Finsch wrote that the small blue macaw was easy to distinguish from the Hyacinth Macaw because of its smaller size and more bare skin on its face and around its eyes. He concluded that it was ‘An exceedingly rare species and found in few museums. Discovered by Spix on the river São Francisco at Juàzeiro’. Significantly, he wrote that, ‘Other travellers do not mention it at all.’
Three decades later, the Italian zoologist Count Tommaso Salvadori compiled the Catalogue of the Parrots in the Collection of the British Museum. Salvadori completed his two-year task in 1891. He retained Spix’s bird in a genus called Cyanopsittacus. The fact that no other birds quite like it had been discovered meant that it remained in the genus on its own, thereby signalling that it was quite unique with characteristics seen in no other bird.
The second half of its scientific name was spixii. From now on, the bird collected in 1819 by the river São Francisco would be known in its scientific Latin form as Cyanopsittacus – or more commonly today Cyanopsitta spixii, and in English as Spix’s Macaw.
The fact that the species was now officially recorded was, however, to prove a mixed blessing. It intrigued not only scientists, but also conservationists and collectors, the former seeking to save the species, the latter to own and possess the most sought-after of all birds. But the blue caatinga parrots were to prove an elusive quarry for all concerned.
Astonishingly, Spix’s Macaw effectively disappeared from the eyes of naturalists and travellers, and was not observed in the wild for eighty-four years after Spix had first encountered one. The fact that Spix’s Macaw was a rare bird was not lost on the early cataloguers and naturalists. Indeed, no European recorded one alive in the wild again until the start of the twentieth century when Othmar Reiser saw Spix’s Macaws during an expedition of the Austrian Academy of Sciences to north-eastern Brazil in June 1903.
He wrote, ‘As I knew that Spix had discovered this rare and beautiful parrot in the area of the river São Francisco near Juàzeiro, I made sure to keep an eye out for it in the area described. Unfortunately without success. Any enquiries made to the local people were also negative.’ Finally, at the lake at Parnaguá in the state of Piauí, more than 400 kilometres to the west of Juàzeiro, Reiser and his companions were rewarded with two sightings of the elusive blue bird. They reported one sighting of three birds and another of a pair. ‘They arrive apparently from a long distance and the thirsty birds at first perch, calling, on the tops of the trees on the beach to survey the surrounding area as a precaution. After flapping their wings for a few times they fly down to the ground with ease and drink slowly and long from pools or the water at the bank.’2
Reiser tried to approach but found the birds nervous and not tolerant of people. His attempts to shoot the macaws in order to obtain a specimen failed. ‘So it was that the parrot species most desired by us was the only one to be observed, but not collected’, he wrote. The only other encounter with Spix’s Macaw noted during this expedition was a captive bird shown to the party in the town of Remanso. Reiser tried to buy it, but lamented that it was not for sale.
But other Spix’s Macaws were for sale. Despite the lack of scientific observations by naturalists working in the field, the blue parrots were certainly leaving Brazil for a life in captivity overseas.
In 1878, the Zoological Society of London at Regent’s Park had obtained a live bird for its collection from Paris. It died and so the zoo set out to get hold of a replacement. In November 1894, a second bird was procured for the Society by Walter Rothschild: that one lasted until 1900. A third was held at the London Zoo from June 1901 but expired after just a year. These individuals were among a steady trickle that by the late nineteenth century were being exported to meet a growing demand for live rare parrots. In common with other rare species, when these birds died they were often included in museum collections. Following the demise of the first Zoological Society specimen, its skin was preserved and placed in the collection held by the British (now Natural History) Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire. The second London bird’s skin is now kept in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And it wasn’t only the large zoological institutions like London that were interested in owning them. In late Victorian England, as in other parts of the world, aviculture was growing in popularity, and private bird collectors certainly knew of the Spix’s Macaw as a rare and desirable addition to a parrot fancier’s aviaries.
In the December 1897 issue of Avicultural Magazine, a journal for serious bird keepers, the Honourable and Reverend F. G. Dutton from Bibury in Gloucestershire wrote, ‘Have any of our members kept a Spix? I have seen only two – one that our zoo acquired some years ago from the Jardin d’Acclimatation [in Paris], and one bought by Mr Rothschild … They were both ill tempered: but as the first had a broken wing, it had probably been caught old. I was greatly tempted by the offer of one from Mr Cross the other day, but there are so many calls on a parson’s purse, that he cannot always treat himself to expensive parrots. I ought to have been keeper at the parrot-house in the zoo.’ Although he does not mention a price, it is clear that even in the late nineteenth century Spix’s Macaws were the preserve of the more discerning and wealthier bird collectors.
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