Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  Pressing on, we drove into the rugged Gerais and finally approached our destination. The vegetation was less disturbed and wilder. In contrast to the new farmlands we’d seen to the south, colonisation was still in its early stages. Chunks of intact forest clothed the sides of the ridges. But people were moving in, mainly poor landless people, including drought refugees from the caatinga in the east who had been driven here by the punishing climate to scratch a subsistence living from the land.

  In a small settlement composed of half a dozen shacks strung out along the dirt track, people scattered in all directions at the arrival of our unfamiliar vehicles. A small blonde-haired child with a deep dark tan, perhaps the descendant of some long-since-dead Dutch or German colonists, was the only one to remain at the trackside. Wearing only a pair of dirty ripped shorts, he chewed on a stem of sugar cane. The poor rural people believed that rubbing sugar cane on young teeth helped to clean them. The child’s teeth were already black.

  Marigo got out of the Land Rover and looked around for someone to talk to. In his khaki trousers and grey field jacket, he appeared to the locals rather like the pistoleiros who came and threatened violence as a prelude to taking control of the land. The frontier of large-scale mechanised farming was nearby and any flat land that could handle big machinery was in demand. The clearance of peasant farmers from their smallholdings by gunmen working for city-based land speculators was a routinely brutal activity.

  The poor farmers who had arrived here from some other even worse predicament had no official title to their farms. They couldn’t even read. The police weren’t interested in their problems, so they had to fend for themselves. The best they could do was to cower in their rough little huts and hope that they wouldn’t be beaten up or have their homes burnt down in another cruel attempt to move them on.

  Despite their poverty and endless vulnerability, caatinga people are generally friendly and welcoming. They often greet strangers with a question. ‘What are you looking for at the end of the world?’ Marigo and Pontual told them. The inhabitants of the nameless little hamlet found it difficult to believe that five men had driven from Rio de Janeiro to look for a parrot; one had even come from England! But despite their nervous incredulity, they tried to be helpful.

  A man invited us indoors. He asked if we would like to share his water, dispensed from a tall and unglazed earthenware vessel. He carefully ladled the precious fluid into a chipped china cup. We took it in turns to drink. A younger man hovered in the doorway. He gesticulated frantically for us to look at a small black withered object he held in a scrap of rag. It was a little fish taken from the nearby river.

  The locals relaxed as they realised we were not joking and really were looking for a parrot. There was some discussion, but no recognition of the blue bird in the photographs. A little confused, the people in the small settlement came outside and bade farewell to their curious brief visitors. Amid a cloud of dust, the two vehicles swayed off deeper into the bush.

  Towards the Santa Isabela ranch the dirt road gave way to sandy tracks that in turn were replaced by barely discernible mule trails. The odd wooden-framed hut plastered with mud and covered with palm fronds was the height of civilisation in this forgotten place. It was getting dark, so we pitched camp. Marigo walked a few hundred metres to a nearby dwelling to let the locals know what was going on, lest any more fear and confusion be caused by our presence. Reassured, the man and his wife who lived there said that for a tiny price they would provide hot coffee in the morning. With hammocks secured we went to the river to swim, to be refreshed by the cool clear water and to contemplate the staggering beauty of the sharp starlit sky.

  Before dawn, the local couple appeared in the middle of the mule track. They squatted on the ground and made a fire. A blackened coffee pot was produced and a brew made. The dark liquid was almost unrecognisable; like most other items of value, Brazil’s best coffee beans were exported. The dark potion was gratefully consumed all the same; then we asked for some more.

  Yamashita took out a packet of Lucky Strikes and tapped one of the cigarettes on the outside of the red-and-white box. He looked thoughtfully around at the trees now visible in the early morning light and shook his head. ‘There are no Spix’s Macaws here,’ he said in a barely audible voice. The rest of us pretended not to hear his unwelcome analysis. Although we all knew birds well enough, Yamashita was the one who really knew about Brazilian macaws. ‘These woodlands are all wrong,’ he explained. ‘This is not the caatinga forest they prefer. There are macaws here, but not Spix’s,’ he added. On cue, macaws appeared high overhead. A couple each of Green-winged (Ara chloroptera) and Blue-and-gold Macaws (Ara ararauna). They croaked gruffly as they made their way off to breakfast in some fruit trees. ‘No, not here,’ repeated Yamashita, drawing on the cigarette and shaking his head.

  Marigo and Otoch would not be swayed, however: they believed that the expedition’s information was reliable and insisted that the Santa Isabela area be properly researched. Yamashita gave a shrug of indifference and smiled. I was concerned. Had I really travelled to the other side of the world and spent thousands of dollars in a vain search for a bird that no longer existed?

  Moving deeper into the wild palm swamps, rugged hillsides and dense cerrado woodland the going got very slow. The Toyota became stuck in a sandy depression. As we struggled to free it, two mules led by a young boy came past. Laden with crates filled with bottles of Coca-Cola the little caravan passed by on its leisurely way towards some outlet for the fizzy drinks even more distant from the tarmac road. Although there was no running water, sanitation or electricity, amazingly Coca-Cola’s reach extended to even the remotest settlements. Once Coca-Cola had arrived, how far behind was the ecological obliteration and social dislocation that came in the guise of ‘development’ was anyone’s guess.

  A couple of hours of sweating and cursing followed as we struggled with the Toyota before we resumed our trek. A little further and contact was made with the local cowboys who worked on the Santa Isabela ranch. They were lean men with dark skins who, half-starved and overworked, looked older than their true years. They listened politely to our request for details on any blue parrots nearby and were well aware of the value of big macaws. But they had no knowledge of the Spix’s, just the blue-and-yellow ones that flew high overhead most days. They spoke with some amusement about those birds. They had evidently tried to catch them, but failed; a grudging respect for the creatures’ guile was in their faces.

  From a new camp we prepared to conduct several days of early morning and evening searches of the area around the Santa Isabela ranch. Rugged escarpments that gave way to elevated tablelands flanked the broad valleys where the cattle were grazed. The landscape resembled the backdrop to a Western film; only the flat-topped hills were covered with cerrado woodland. In the wetter areas of the valley bottoms grew lush groves of buriti palms.

  The palm fronds made dense tufts at the top of their tall bare stems, providing sparse but welcome shade in the otherwise open grassy areas. Some parts of the ranch had been lightly burnt to improve the pasture but otherwise the place remained beautifully wild. Despite the remote location, the search revealed only a few of the more common parrots, including darting flocks of little green Red-bellied Macaws (Orthopsittaca manilata), a kind of maracana. Yamashita’s mutterings became more convincing. ‘The information we have is for the little green macaws. In some lights they look bluish. It’s a mistake, there are no Spix’s here.’

  Lacking any positive leads, we decided to invest in the services of a local guide to better chart the few routes that penetrated deeper into the rugged landscape. On our fourth day in the Gerais, while struggling at walking pace along a sandy track, our vehicles came upon a man on a bicycle, with three little cages strapped to his rickety machine. The rider was a bird trapper heading south. He was friendly and seemed happy to take a break from his journey so as to have a chat with us.

  He explained that his general routine was to visi
t a network of small farmers who would supply him with young parrots taken from nests on their land. In this way, the most valuable species were sucked from even the remotest corners of the interior. Most would be sold on to dealers, although he would obtain the rarer birds to order for individual collectors. His usual itinerary was to travel south with several cages loaded on his bicycle, before he passed the birds on to dealers in the towns. The man was very open about his illegal work. He seemed pleased that anyone was interested and cheerily discussed his business. He quite obviously regarded the risk of arrest and prosecution as negligible.

  Strapped to the bicycle in the cages were three Blue-fronted (Amazona aestiva) and a couple of Yellow-faced Amazon parrots (Amazona xanthops). These, he said, would be exported from the country; a handful of songbirds he would sell locally. But it was what he knew rather than what he transported that was of most value to us. When shown a photograph, he instantly identified the bird pictured in it. ‘Spic Macaw’, he called it. He assured us it could be found only far to the east, by the river São Francisco near to Juàzeiro, more than 600 kilometres away. This, he insisted, was the only place it lived. Yamashita smiled and nodded.

  There seemed to be little point in continuing the search around the Chapada das Mangabeiras. No one in the area knew of Spix’s Macaws there and the only person who seemed to know what he was talking about had said we should go to Juàzeiro, the same place where Spix himself had found the birds more than 170 years before. The search in the Gerais was abandoned in favour of heading towards Juàzeiro.

  In the drier lands to the east, the clearance of the forest to make way for cattle had caused catastrophic soil erosion. The grazing animals had eaten most of the vegetation, leaving the bare earth vulnerable to the effects of the rare but heavy rains. Deep gullies scarred the land. Little grew. There were few trees, fewer birds and no parrots. It was a ruined and ecologically bankrupted landscape supporting only a few skinny cattle.

  A brief diversion was made to search around Parnaguá where Reiser’s Austrian expedition had reported the birds in 1903. There was still some natural woodland left and contact was made with some experienced hunters who knew the place well. They were certainly aware of the local parrots, but no one could recall little blue macaws with the long tails.

  We pressed on towards Juàzeiro rather subdued. Our leads had failed to turn up any Spix’s Macaws and we were all very well aware that the only known birds near to Juàzeiro, the ones found by Paul Roth at Curaçá in the mid-1980s, had all been trapped. Since we had few leads in these easterly lands, we decided to visit the owner of the farm where the three Spix’s Macaws had lived. He had a town house in Petrolina, a city on the opposite shore of the river to Juàzeiro and was happy to meet us.

  It quickly became clear that he was very familiar with Spix’s Macaws. He insisted the birds lived only in tall trees by creeks, sometimes coming down to drink but otherwise staying in the high branches. The gallery woodland habitat at his farm, he maintained, was very rare. Tall trees grew in very few places in these dry lands. His belief was that the remaining ribbons of caraiba woodlands were a remnant of the primeval caatinga that once fringed the valley of the São Francisco River. He finished off by casually remarking that Spix’s Macaws still lived there. This was stunningly unexpected news.

  The little town of Curaçá lay about ninety kilometres further down the river north-east of Juàzeiro. The countryside between Juàzeiro and Curaçá was very different from the places we had searched in the west. Instead of dense woodlands there was dry thorny scrub, cacti and open bare dusty areas. In this degraded and drought-ravaged land the places with better soils near to the river valley had been converted from over-grazed caatinga to vast irrigated farms growing maize, soya and sugar cane.

  Our search party scanned left and right for signs of the tall trees and the ribbons of gallery woodland that might still support some Spix’s Macaws. There was only one place where the tall caraiba trees came near to the road that ran parallel to the river on its south shore. It was a place called Riacho Barra Grande. Riacho was the local word for creek and the woods along its fringes formed a precious green oasis in the midst of a vast expanse of low thorny scrub and colossal desolate irrigated fields. Just beyond lay Curaçá.

  Curaçá was a backwater compared to the larger upstream cities. A settlement of around 10,000 souls, the town was a transit point for the long-distance buses and trucks that bounced over the unmade roads of the interior, and a supply and market centre for the scattered rural settlements that lay around in the caatinga. The broad channel of the São Francisco lay on the north side of the town, which supported a few shops and bars and a couple of hotels.

  Lunchtime saw Marigo propped up at the bar in a small restaurant looking at his bird book. Otoch, Pontual and I were seated at a table with a cold beer each; Yamashita smoked a cigarette and sipped his iced Coke. We were quiet and thoughtful. A man approached. He was curious to know what strangers were doing in town, was it something to do with birds?

  Marigo by now had a well-practised explanation. He mechanically showed the man pictures of the macaw. Surprisingly, the newcomer nodded and said that he would be back in a few minutes. He soon returned with a Polaroid. It was unmistakably a picture of a Spix’s Macaw. The bird was in a wire-fronted crate. The man explained that he had taken the photo a few years ago near to a farm about thirty kilometres from the town. He had heard that the bird had been sold to a collector in Recife. We learned that the picture was taken at the Concordia farm, the same one where Roth had found the birds, the same farm we planned to visit. Because of the timing of the capture and where the bird had been sent to, Yamashita was convinced that the photo was of the last female captured in 1987.

  It transpired that the man with the photo was a land-use planner who owned a farm to the south next to a little range of limestone hills called the Serra do Borracha. He had a good knowledge of the local area and was aware that the creeks with the tall trees were unique. He spoke of how he used to see the macaws in the trees at Riacho Barra Grande. Birds used to visit there from the Melância Creek, he recalled. These two creeks were the best places he knew of to find the tall caraiba trees that were so liked by the macaws. The planner explained in some detail that very little of the creekside woodlands remained, estimating that a total of about 2,500 hectares in the Barra Grande Creek and its tributaries and a further 1,000 hectares in the Vargem Creek system downriver from Curaçá were all that remained.

  The owner of the Concordia farm, the place where yet another witness now claimed the birds could still be found, had graciously offered us one of his vacant buildings to stay in. The alternative, the tents, were not an attractive option in the heat of the dry season. The building on offer was a partially complete farmhouse, small but compared to most people’s dwellings nearby quite comfortable. It lacked water or power but was cool in the day and there were fixtures for our hammocks. A few metres away was the dwelling of a cowboy and his family.

  The leather-clad cowboy was called Binum. He was slight, but wiry and strong. He was a native of the caatinga, and like the animals and birds well adapted for the rigours of life there. He worked for the farm owner and with the aid of dogs and horses looked after his few dozen cattle. His family also kept a few sheep and goats of their own and grew a few crops nearby. The cowboy’s wife agreed to cook for the search party while we stayed at the farm.

  The cowboy’s family home comprised a small kitchen and a bedroom that for now doubled up as store for a pile of little wizened heads of harvested maize. In the bedroom four children slept on mats and in hammocks. He and his wife had a corner of the little kitchen. She was pregnant once more, and cooking for the strangers would provide a welcome financial boost. However, although she could evidently produce miracles from primitive facilities, cooking for another five adults would not be easy. The only source of water was a rudimentary well and extra firewood would be needed for the stove. The only sign of the twentieth century was an
old battery-powered transistor radio.

  The house was a day’s ride on horseback from Curaçá, so their isolation was nearly complete. This family, like most rural people in the caatinga, lived on its wits. There was no social safety net, no one to fall back on in hard times. Just the brutal heat of the caatinga and its ever-present threat of prolonged drought followed by even worse destitution.

  Otoch said he would take the Toyota to town the next day so the woman could buy the supplies of flour, coffee and other basics that would be needed during our stay. The cowboy’s wife pointed towards a little brown-and-white goat that grazed nearby. Since she had nothing else ready it would be slaughtered for dinner. Marigo agreed a daily rate for cooking services and passed some folded banknotes to the woman so she could buy the necessary supplies in Curaçá.

  The woman was sturdy and healthy looking. As she stood outside her little house and conversed in Portuguese with Marigo, I mulled over the survival prospects in this place for the weak and sick. As I sensed the conversation was coming to an end, Marigo suddenly looked shocked – his eyes wide and mouth open. The wife had casually mentioned that she had seen one of the blue macaws that day. She spoke as though the macaw was a daily part of her life and taken completely for granted. Despite the complete poverty of her surroundings, it seemed she could claim one treasure that no rich person could match: she had shared her day with a wild Spix’s Macaw – the rarest privilege of all.