Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  Most of the best tree holes in the creek were accounted for in some way. The woodpeckers, black vultures, the other parrots, like the maracanas, and even snakes liked to use tree cavities as well. Lately, bees introduced from Africa had also moved into the creek. Swarms of these insects were especially dangerous when they wanted to take possession of a tree hole. They had killed parrots, stung them to death, so as to take over a prime site.

  With the arrival of the wet season, the birds spent more time around the nest hollow, both to defend it from unwanted squatters and to prepare themselves for breeding. A couple of weeks later, in mid-December, the female bird stayed inside during the day. She had laid three white eggs; they rested in the bottom of the hollow where she would now devote most of her time to maintaining the correct temperature and humidity for the tiny embryos to grow and then hatch.

  One night, when the two parrots were asleep with their eggs in the nest hole, the drone of a vehicle was heard once more in the creek. The birds would not venture out; owls were a real danger after dark. They sat tight even when they heard scraping sounds on the outside of the tree. They heard whispering human voices by the hole and huddled silently. But when they felt a presence come inside, they fled. The female made her move for the entrance first. In the darkness all she could see was the gloomy disc of the pre-dawn sky. She made for it, climbing the inside of the tree trunk, a familiar enough task in the day but in the near-total darkness unnatural and frightening. As she made her exit, and spread her wings for flight, she became constrained. She was in a net. Something powerful, hard and unyielding grasped her body. As she struggled to free herself from her captor, her mate struggled past and fluttered free of the hollow. He found his wings and took off down the creek into the darkness as fast as he could.

  In the nest the three eggs lay smashed. The two trappers had reached inside for young birds in the hope that they could take baby macaws too; they would fetch an even better price than the sleek adult bird. They were too early for that, however, and their clumsy groping in the dark broke the fragile white shells and spilled the contents into the base of the hollow. The blood-streaked yolks slowly congealed in the wood shavings at the bottom of the nest chamber. Disappointed not to find chicks, the trappers were pleased that they at least had caught one of the adult macaws before someone else did. It was Christmas Eve 1987. The capture of the blue parrot would certainly brighten the trappers’ festivities.

  The macaw soon found herself in a crate ready for loading into the back of the four-wheel-drive vehicle. It was now daylight and the men prepared for departure along the long dusty track that led back the main tarmac road. Just before leaving, they saw a man approaching on foot. He approached and then stopped to ask what they were doing.

  The stranger seemed harmless enough, certainly not a policeman, so the trappers boasted about the valuable creature they had taken that morning. The man asked to see it. The chief trapper opened the rear door of the jeep and pulled an old blanket to one side revealing the blue bird in its crate. It recoiled at the sudden bright light and shrank back into the shadows. The man was impressed, he asked if he might take a photo of the gorgeous blue creature. After the trapper had shrugged his consent, the man took a Polaroid camera from his green bag, carefully composed his picture and pressed the shutter. He waited a few moments then peeled back the paper backing from the print to reveal the image of the caged parrot.

  He did not know it, but the image that was gradually appearing on the Polaroid as it dried in the warm morning air was of the last wild female of the blue caatinga parrots. After her capture, only her partner remained. He was the last Spix.

  2

  The First Spix

  On 3 June 1817, Dr Johan Baptist Ritter von Spix and his travelling companion and fellow scientist Dr Carl Friedrich Philip von Martius set sail for the Atlantic Ocean from Gibraltar. They had arrived in the bustling port some weeks previously from Trieste in the Adriatic. Along with fifty other vessels of various sizes their ship had waited for the right weather conditions for their voyage to South America. This day brought the easterly winds necessary to propel them from the Mediterranean Sea on the 6,000-kilometre voyage to the southern hemisphere and their destination, Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the Portuguese colony of Brazil.

  The son of a Bavarian doctor, Spix was born in 1781. Awarded his PhD at the age of only nineteen, his early academic career included studies in theology, medicine and the natural sciences. He qualified as a medical doctor in 1806. In 1808 he was awarded a scholarship by King Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria to study zoology in Paris, at the time the world’s leading natural sciences centre. Here the young Bavarian mixed with the leading biologists and naturalists of the time, including the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the intellectual giant who proposed a mechanism of evolution that would challenge (unsuccessfully as it turned out) the theory of natural selection developed some decades later by Charles Darwin.

  In Paris, Spix’s abilities as a scientist grew; in October 1810 the King once again acknowledged his growing reputation, this time with an appointment in the Bavarian Royal Academy of Sciences where he was charged with the care and study of the natural history exhibits. Martius was a gifted academic too. Thirteen years younger than Spix, his interests were mainly botanical, especially palms.

  The two scientists found themselves aboard one of two Brazil-bound ships as members of an expedition mounted in the name of the Emperor Francis I of Austria, whose daughter was to marry the son of John VI of Portugal. King John had been forced to live in Brazil following the invasion of his homeland in 1807 by Napoleon Bonaparte of France. The Austrian Emperor had invited a group of Viennese scientists to join the royal party that was to travel to Brazil. Maximilian had agreed that two members of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences should go with them.

  Spix was to concentrate his effort on animals, the local people and geological recording, including the collection of fossils. Martius was to devote his energies to botanical investigation, including soil types and the study of how plants spread to new lands. The King was a bird collector in his own right and hoped that the two men would bring him novel and unique prizes from their expedition in the New World. ‘After everything possible was got ready, and the books, instruments, medicine chest, and other travelling equipage sent off direct to Trieste, we set out from Munich on 6 February 1817, for Vienna.’ At Trieste they joined the ships, two naval frigates, the Augusta and the Austria. Both were substantial vessels equipped with forty-four guns and a crew of 240 sailors.

  On 29 June they crossed the equator and on 13 July Cabo Frio was sighted, ‘and soon after the noble entrance of the bay of Rio de Janeiro’.1 The arrival in South America made a big impression on the travellers.

  Towards noon, approaching nearer and nearer to the enchanting prospect, we came up to those colossal rock portals and at length passed between them into a great amphitheatre, in which the mirror of the water appeared like a tranquil inland lake, and scattered flowery islands, bounded in the background by a woody chain of mountains, rose like a paradise full of luxuriance and magnificence … at length the capital of the infant kingdom, illuminated by the evening sun, lay extended before us.

  A sensation, not to be described, overcome us all at the moment when the anchor struck the ground at another continent; and the thunder of the cannon, accompanied with military music hailed the desired goal of the happily accomplished voyage.

  The travellers decided to spend some time initially in the relative cool and comfort of the south east of the country, first in Rio de Janeiro and then in São Paulo and Curitiba. Spix and Martius explained, ‘it seemed most expedient to journey first to the southern Captaincy of S. Paulo, mainly to acclimatise ourselves gradually to the hot conditions we would encounter during our travels and acquaint ourselves with this more temperate southern zone. From the Captaincy of S. Paulo we planned to travel through the interior of Minas Gerais to the S. Francisco River and Goyaz, before continuing either dow
n the Tocantins to Pará or across the interior to Bahia and the coast, where we would arrange transport of our collections to Europe before penetrating the interior of the Captaincies of Piauhy and Maranhão to arrive finally at Pará, the goal of our desires.’

  To a twenty-first-century traveller, such an itinerary would be demanding enough, entailing a journey of thousands of kilometres, mainly on rough tracks and by river. Although the Bavarians enjoyed the small luxury of letters of recommendation from the Portuguese – Brazilian Government that would help smooth their path with colonial administrators, they could carry only basic equipment, much of which was for scientific purposes rather than their personal comfort. They had incomplete maps, primitive medical supplies and could rely only on mule trails and rivers to cover the vast distances that lay ahead of them. In those times, natural history exploration was a hazardous business. Disease, attack from native people or wild animals, climbing and firearms accidents, starvation and even the use of dangerous chemicals for scientific purposes, like arsenic, all took their toll on the early naturalists.

  Despite the dangers, it was with great enthusiasm and apparently little thought for their impending discomfort that on 9 December 1817 Spix and Martius set out from the coast for the interior of Brazil. Although misgivings about their venture were expressed by Brazilian friends, the Bavarians happily set off with a team that included a guide hired in Rio de Janeiro, a mule man, a drover, a ‘newly bought Negro slave’ and eight mules, two for riding and six more for their bags and equipment.

  They met several early setbacks. In addition to being assailed by a huge variety of fleas, ticks, flies, mosquitoes and other biting and disease-carrying insects, the scientists’ guide decided to go his own way. He left one night, when everyone was asleep, never to be seen again. He had taken most of their valuables. Spix and Martius were forced to recruit new help and to replace stolen equipment before they resumed their journey through the recently colonised landscape.

  The countryside was sparsely settled but in some places the clearance of the native vegetation was already well under way. They wrote that ‘From Ytú we advanced N.W. by the side of beautiful thick woods, and enjoyed a delightful view of the valley of the Tieté, which is now entirely cleared of the forests, and planted with sugar cane, beans, maize and so on.’ It was in this area that their slave decided to follow the earlier example of the guide and make an unscheduled departure himself.

  According to Spix and Martius the slave ‘did not know how to appreciate our kind treatment of him, and embraced the first favourable opportunity to abscond’. He was, however, brought back to them next day by professional runaway slave hunters the men had engaged locally. The naturalists wrote ‘we followed the advice of our host, treating him, according to the custom of this place, very kindly … giving him a full glass of brandy.’

  In addition to the departure of their staff, flooded roads, swollen streams and cold mist dogged their progress. But despite the difficult conditions the two scientists earnestly persisted with their scientific work. ‘If in the evening we at length met with an open shed, or dilapidated hut, we had to spend the greater part of the night in drying our wet clothes, in taking our collections out of the chests and again exposing them to the air.’ On drier days they would spend twilight and hours after dark ‘writing notes in the journals, in preparing, drying and packing our collections’. Despite the hardships, they recalled how ‘This simple mode of life had its peculiar charms.’

  To early Portuguese visitors, Brazil was known as the land of parrots. Spix and Martius came across plenty of them as well. In August 1818, in the region of Januária in Minas Gerais in the upper reaches of the river São Francisco, the Bavarian travellers happened upon what were almost certainly Hyacinth Macaws in a ‘magnificent forest of buriti palms’. The large cobalt-blue birds circled over the travellers in pairs with their croaking calls echoing in the still and peaceful surroundings. A few days later, Martius and Spix briefly split up. Martius set off into the dry semi-arid forests that fringe the river São Francisco. Here he found forests of indaja palms, which, because of the much drier conditions, were the first palm groves that they had found ‘where we dared to roam around with dry feet and safe from giant snakes and alligators’.

  Martius observed with fascination how the local Hyacinth Macaws greedily ate the palm fruits. ‘The large nuts of these palms with their very fine rich oil make them the favourite trees of the large blue macaws which often flew off in pairs above us. As beautiful as this bird’s plumage is, its hoarse penetrating call assaults even the most insensitive of ears and if it had been known in ancient times, would have been regarded an ominous bird of deepest foreboding.’

  For the Hyacinth Macaw, the arrival of the Europeans was indeed a compelling omen of ill fortune. Martius’s party themselves captured some of the birds. He later remarked, ‘the small menagerie of these quarrelsome birds, which we took with us chained to the roof of a few mule loading platforms, played a special role in that their continuous noise, which could be heard from afar, indicated the location of the caravan, which we usually left far behind in our forays to investigate the region.’

  Martius and Spix most likely knew about the Hyacinth Macaw before they arrived in Brazil. That species had by then been described to science by a British ornithologist, Dr John Latham. He had spent years cataloguing museum collections, including the birds collected during Cook’s eighteenth-century voyages in the Pacific. In 1790 he was the first to grant a scientific name to the giant blue parrots. But the two Bavarians were the first to note the relationship between these magnificent blue birds and different kinds of palms, upon the fruits of which they dined.

  By November Spix and Martius reached the coast of eastern Brazil and the town of Salvador in Bahia. The grinding travel schedule had taken its toll, so they rested there until mid-February 1819 to recover their strength. They then set out north through the harsh drought-prone north east of Brazil. They suffered extreme hardships, notably lack of water, and often travelled in uninhabited country. By May they had reached the banks of the river São Francisco at Juàzeiro.

  Along the north and south shores of the great river they found the thorny caatinga woodlands. This dry country stretched in all directions to the horizon and beyond. It was sparsely settled and mainly used for sheep and cattle pasture. In this strange dry land Spix spent some time collecting birds.

  Among other things, it was here that he shot a magnificent long-tailed blue parrot for their collection. The bird was taken from some curious woodlands found along the side of creeks seen in that part of the caatinga. The specimen of the parrot was tagged and brief notes were made about it. Spix recorded that ‘it lives in flocks, although very rare, near Juàzeiro in the region bordering the São Francisco, [and is] notable for its thin voice.’ Spix didn’t realise that he had just taken the very first specimen of a bird that would one day symbolise how human greed and ignorance were wiping countless life forms from the record of creation.

  From Juàzeiro the pair travelled through the parched woodlands north along the river Caninde to Oeiras in Piauí, close to the modern city of Floriano. Martius wrote ‘The caatingas mostly consisted of sparse bushes and in the lowland areas, where there was much more water, the carnauva palms formed stately forests, the sight of which was as strange as it was delightful. Blue macaws, which live in the dense tops of these palms, flew up screeching above us.’ It seemed that the travellers had happened on more Hyacinth Macaws or perhaps their rarer and smaller cousins, Lear’s Macaws – one of the ‘four blues’ exhibited in Berlin in 1900 (see chapter 4).

  By the end of 1819 Spix and Martius had worked their way inland about 3,000 kilometres further west, mainly by river, penetrating deep inside the seemingly limitless rainforests of the Amazon basin. From here they split up and travelled further into the vast interior of South America. They finally arrived nearly 3,000 kilometres further downstream at the port of Belém in Pará at the mouth of Amazon on 16 April
1820. Their collection of specimens and live animals was loaded aboard the Nova Amazonia and they set sail for Lisbon. They travelled through Spain and France to arrive back in Munich on 10 December 1820, nearly four years after they had left.

  Throughout their extensive travels Spix and Martius made careful observations and notes on the wildlife they encountered. They were also careful to note details of the local economy in the places they visited, especially mining and agriculture, and in so doing they painted a picture for those who would follow of investment, trading and other commercial opportunities. It is no coincidence that the greatest concentration of German industry anywhere in the world today is still in the Brazilian super metropolis of São Paulo. Certainly this fact is linked to the historical relationships between the two countries and the commercially significant information provided by early travellers. Thus commenced centuries of encroachment into the world’s biologically richest and remotest places – a process that continues today, only now hugely accelerated and more often with the aid of remote sensing from spacecraft than with the assistance of mules.

  Spix and Martius recorded their travels in three substantial volumes published in 1823, 1828 and 1831 in which they dedicated their great scientific achievements to their royal patron. ‘Attachment to Your Majesty and to the sciences was the Guardian Genius that guided us amidst the danger and fatigues of so extensive a journey, through a part of the world so imperfectly known, and brought us back in safety, from that remote hemisphere to our native land,’ they wrote. But only the first volume was a joint venture. Martius completed volumes two and three alone following the death of Spix in 1826. He was forty-six and had never really recovered from extremely poor health that resulted from the privations and sickness he experienced in Brazil. Martius went on to write a classic work on palms that he completed in 1850. He died in 1868.