Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird. Tony Juniper
Parrots are surprisingly like people and can bring out both the best and worst in humans. From love and loyalty to greed and jealousy, the human qualities of parrots can provoke the most basic of our human responses in their keepers. Perhaps that is why for centuries parrots have been our closest and most cherished avian companions.
There are hundreds of kinds of parrot. The smallest are the tiny pygmy parrots of New Guinea that weigh in at just 10 grams – about the size of a wren or kinglet. These minuscule parrots creep like delicate animated jewellery along the trunks and branches of trees in the dense, dark rainforests of New Guinea. The heaviest parrot, the rotund nocturnal Kakapo (Strigops habroptilis) of New Zealand, grows up to 300 times larger. These great flightless parrots, camouflaged so they resemble a huge ball of moss, can weigh up to 3 kilos.6
Some parrots are stocky with short tails, others elegant with long flowing plumes. The smaller slender ones with long tails are often known as parakeets (the budgerigar, Melopsittacus undulata, is one), while it is the stouter birds that most people would generally recognise as ‘parrots’. The mainly white ones with prominent crests are called cockatoos and the large gaudy South American ones with long tails macaws. Despite this remarkable diversity, all of them are instantly recognisable, even to lay people, as members of the same biological family. The unique hooked bill, and feet, with two toes facing forwards and two backwards, identify them straight away.
Where the parrots came from is a baffling biological question. Many different ancestries have been suggested, including distant relationships with birds as diverse as pigeons, hawks and toucans. Even with modern genetic techniques it has not been possible to unravel the ancestral relationships between parrots and other modern birds. What is known, however, is that parrot-like birds have been around for a very long time.
The oldest parrot is known from a fossil found by a Mr S. Vincent in 1978 at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex, England. The tiny fragile clues that these diminutive birds ever existed were painstakingly investigated by scientists who identified the species as ‘new’: they named the creature Pulchrapollia gracilis. ‘Pulchrapollia’ translates literally as ‘beautiful Polly’, and ‘gracilis’ means slender.
This ancient parrot was small and delicate – not much larger than a modern-day budgie. Its remains were found in Early Eocene London Clay deposits dated at about 55.4 million years old. More remarkable than even this great antiquity is the suggestion that parrots might have been around even earlier. A fossil bird found in the Lance Formation in Wyoming in the USA might be a parrot too. If it is, it would demonstrate the presence of such birds in the Late Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago, thereby confirming that parrots coexisted with the animals they are ultimately descended from: the dinosaurs. Awesome antiquity indeed.7 To place this ancestry in perspective, the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens) are believed to have appeared only about 200,000 years ago.
Across the aeons of biological time since the first parrots appeared, the group has evolved into one of the world’s largest bird families. Of the 350 or so species of parrot known today, some are widespread, others confined to tiny areas. In either case, most species are found in the warm tropical latitudes. Some do, however, brave freezing temperatures in high mountains in the tropics, for example the high Andes, or extend into cooler temperate areas, such as New Zealand and southern South America. The Austral Conure (Enicognathus ferrugineus) for example toughs out a living in the raw cool climate of Tierra del Fuego, while the Antipodes Parakeet (Cyanoramphus unicolor) occupies the windswept outpost of Antipodes Island and neighbouring rugged islets in the Pacific well to the south of New Zealand. The Andean Parakeet (Bolborhynchus orbygnesius) has been recorded on the high montane grasslands at over 6,000 metres in the high Andes.
The majority of the world’s parrot species are found today in South America, Australia and New Guinea. The single country with most species is Brazil: over seventy different kinds are known from there. In mainland Asia from Indochina to Pakistan and in Africa there are remarkably few. This uneven distribution appears to be linked to the break-up of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland.8 Whether people have as yet documented the existence of all the living parrots is an open question. Three species of parrot new to science have been found since the late 1980s.9 All are from South America and amazingly have waited until the Space Age to be noticed, let alone studied.
Though we still know little of these birds’ place in nature, parrots have become uniquely familiar to humans and have been closely associated with people for centuries. The oldest document in the literature of the Indian subcontinent is the Rigveda, or Veda of the Stanzas, of about 1,400 BC. This ancient work, written in Sanskrit, remarks on the great fidelity of parrots and records how in the mythology of that time they were symbols of the moon.
The Ancient Greeks were also well aware of parrots. The historian and physician Ctesias travelled widely in the East in around 400 BC. As well as holding the great distinction of producing the first published account of unicorns, he also brought news to Europe of curious human-like birds kept by the natives in the lands he visited. Aristotle wrote some 100 years later about a parrot, but he may not have seen it himself because he described it, presumably on the strength of its hooked bill, as a kind of hawk.
During his conquests of the fourth century BC the Macedonian general Alexander the Great marched through Afghanistan to the Indus valley in modern-day Pakistan. There his men acquired parrots that were later brought home with their other spoils of war. Alexander was probably the first person to bring live parrots to Europe. They were medium-sized green parakeets marked with black on the face and with maroon patches on the wings. They had long tails and a shrill cry. They are today known as Alexandrine Parakeets (Psittacula eupatria).
After Alexander’s conquests, the expansion of trade between the Greek city states and the Orient ensured that Europeans would soon become more familiar with parrots. In the second century BC the earliest known picture of a parrot was produced in a mosaic at the ancient Greek city of Pergamum.
The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote in 50 BC about parrots he had seen in Syria. Since no parrot is native to that country today, they were most likely imported; probably from Africa. In AD 50 Pliny described parrots that he said were discovered by explorers sent to Egypt. Although these birds are not known to occur naturally in Egypt now, they might have been imported from the savannas beyond the desert, or it might have been that the desert was less extensive than it is today. Other accounts of the same birds gave their origin as India. Since there is only one parrot in the world that has a natural distribution that embraces both Africa and India it is very likely that these birds were Ring-necked Parakeets (Psittacula krameri). This species is one of the most widespread, adaptable and common parrots in the world today, and has a long history of living with people.
Ring-necked Parakeets were, for example, prized in Ancient Rome where they were kept as pets. So valuable did they become that they were often sold for more than the price of a human slave. Demand was intense, so a brisk trade built up with birds brought into Europe in large numbers. They were kept in ornate cages made from silver and decorated with ivory and tortoiseshell. Noblemen carried the birds through the streets of Rome as a colourful accessory. The statesman and philosopher Marcus Cato wrote, ‘Oh, wretched Rome! What times are these that women should feed dogs upon their laps and men should carry parrots on their hands.’ Some parrots, however, found a less fortunate fate in Rome. During the rule of Emperor Heliogabalus from 222 to 205 BC they became a table delicacy. Not only that but they were fed to his lions too, along with peacocks.
With the decline of Rome and its excesses, parrot keeping faded in Europe. A few Ring-necked Parakeets made it back with Crusaders and merchants during the Middle Ages and Marco Polo came across cockatoos in India, although they are not native