Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  Since the world was alerted to the plight of the disappearing parrots in 1988, the situation has continued to deteriorate. The most recent ‘Doomsday Book’ called Threatened Birds of the World has more than ninety species of parrot listed as at risk of extinction.34 Wilson, in common with many other experts, believes that our species has itself initiated a new mass extinction episode, the sixth in the earth’s long history. Like the canaries once taken into coalmines to warn of dangerous gas, the parrots are shrieking the alarm.

  Nigel Collar’s work in documenting the plight of endangered birds leads him to reach a similar conclusion.

  We spend billions of dollars in the quest for evidence of life on other planets when we have it here in superabundance and at levels of sophistication that we have barely even begun to comprehend, all of it haemorrhaging out into oblivion as we turn our faces to the dead night sky and our backs on the rainforests and the reefs, the deltas and the deep. In our life-times the natural world will have shrunk by a greater amount than any human before us has ever witnessed. Fairly soon, at this rate, in 100 years time perhaps, our teeming earth will end up as a sterile, sanitised gridwork of concrete and crop-fields.

  This time, the rapid disappearance of different life forms is being precipitated by the direct exploitation of wildlife, large-scale habitat loss and rapid climate change brought about mainly by the combustion of fossil fuels. Humanity’s blind hunger for ever greater quantities of still cheaper raw materials and farm produce drives the now supercharged engine of destruction.

  In contrast to some other environmental challenges facing the world at the start of the twenty-first century, the loss of the earth’s biological diversity is irreversible, certainly in terms of any timescales comprehensible to people. And once birds like the Spix’s, Lear’s and Hyacinth Macaws are gone, they can never come back. They will be gone for good. How in years to come future generations of humans will react to their passing is a matter for conjecture. Perhaps they will lament human folly as we have done at the passing of the Dodo; perhaps our children will invent fantasies about how they could bring them back – a kind of avian Jurassic Park; or maybe they will invent computer-generated reconstructions to show how beautiful, graceful and intelligent such birds were?

  In 1990 for the Spix’s Macaw this last question was still premature; only just, but still premature. One still lived, a symbolic last wild bird alone in the remote north-east of Brazil. Not yet lost to the world, but as close as it could get. Hanging on at its beleaguered post in the shattered caatinga, the blue parrot had not yet gained the notoriety of the Dodo in becoming a modern-day icon of people’s indifference to the irreplaceable diversity of our planet. On the contrary, there was good reason to believe that it could instead become a new symbol of hope, better still proof, that the black harvest of extinction was not inevitable. It could become a new image for a new age, a time when people’s unthinking exploitation of nature was replaced with careful husbandry and thoughtful coexistence – an era when the value of life’s diversity was not measured only by money but seen as worth keeping for its own sake.

  The Spix’s Macaw, if it survived and recovered, could inspire the world to see what was possible through cooperation and determined efforts to save the earth’s natural riches. In that respect, the last-minute rescue of the blue caatinga parrot could be a flagship, a vessel of hope and encouragement. If the captive birds could be bred, released and restored in the wild, Spix’s Macaw could become a symbolic phoenix rising from the ashes of a ruined world.

  7

  Private Arks

  Where there’s life there’s hope – at least that is what some conservationists think. One such person was Dr Juan Villalba-Macias. On 25 March 1987, armed with a search warrant and accompanied by five patrol cars, twenty police officers and the Paraguay Director for National Parks and Wildlife, he stormed the house of a wildlife dealer in the Paraguayan capital Asunción. He hoped this drastic move would contribute to saving the Spix’s Macaw from extinction.

  Villalba-Macias was a Uruguayan zoologist and the Director of TRAFFIC South America. He had been following the illegal shipment of rare parrots with keen interest. TRAFFIC, an international organisation established in 1976 by the World Wildlife Fund and the World Conservation Union, monitored the trade in endangered species. Villalba-Macias was in the house in Asunción that day to recover two Spix’s Macaws, the two baby parrots who were the last offspring of the lone bird from the Melância Creek. Nine months later on Christmas Eve, that last bird would lose his partner to the trappers, and their last three eggs would be smashed.

  For several weeks before Villalba-Macias’s raid, investigators had been following the movements of the two young Spix’s Macaws. A dealer in Petrolina had transferred the precious creatures to a middleman in the south of Brazil for US$10,000, a fortune in the north-east. The second trafficker, based in the city of Curitiba, in turn supplied the parrots to the wildlife trader in Paraguay for US$20,000.

  The birds had been traced to the house in Asunción. The dealer there planned to ship the birds overseas. His name was Koopmann, the man whose daughter was prosecuted in 1994 for her part in assisting Tony Silva in the illegal shipment of Hyacinth Macaws into the United States, and who had also been involved in the shipment of Spix’s Macaws to Europe. (see chapter 4). Paraguay borders Brazil and, although landlocked, had become a notorious exit route to world markets for illegally captured Brazilian wildlife. It was intended that the two macaws should travel via Switzerland to a West German importer who had agreed to pay US$40,000 for them. Once in Europe, the birds would be worth twice that.

  Meanwhile, CITES officials in Switzerland had detected that the export papers from Paraguay were forgeries. The smugglers’ flawed papers were obvious: there weren’t any Spix’s Macaws in Asunción Zoo, so none could have been bred there! Villalba-Macias was alerted and travelled straight away by plane from Montevideo to Asunción. On the morning of the raid he met with the Paraguayan minister responsible for CITES enforcement in the country. He explained that the birds were illegal exports from Brazil and should not be traded internationally. On hearing the evidence, the minister immediately ordered the police search of the premises where the birds were said to be held captive. By 1 p.m. the house was surrounded.

  To the surprise of the authorities, there was no sign that the birds had been there. No cages, no bird food, no macaws. At first it seemed that there had been a tip-off, but then Villalba-Macias noticed a second floor door close abruptly. He ran upstairs to investigate and found in the room a servant with a travelling case in her hand, preparing to flee across the rooftops. Before she could leave, Villalba-Macias took the bag and opened it. Huddled inside ready for shipping were the two baby parrots. Had the raid taken place an hour later, the macaws would never have been found.

  The fluffy blue birds had hatched a couple of months earlier from eggs laid in the great hollow caraiba tree by the Melância Creek. They were the offspring of the last wild pair. Tiny and vulnerable, they were miniature versions of their parents – only with shorter tails, pale rather than dark bare faces and with a light stripe running the length of the hooked upper mandible. A few of their longer plumes were still partly sheathed in the hard plastic-like cases that would soon burst open to reveal their first full set of fresh blue flight and tail feathers.

  Villalba-Macias had expected to find bird food suitable for the young macaws at the house but did not, and the furious dealer refused to advise on what the birds should eat. Fortunately, Villalba-Macias had taken the precaution of packing a box of Quaker Oats. He mixed the cereal with water and was delighted to find that the young parrots happily fed on it.

  Koopmann was arrested and following the seizure the birds were immediately transferred to the Brazilian Embassy where asylum was sought for them. Like important government dignitaries seeking diplomatic immunity from persecution by a hostile foreign power, the birds sheltered there whilst waiting to be sent home to their native country. T
hat afternoon, the Brazilian Government applied for their repatriation and the necessary papers were duly granted. The following day, the young macaws were in transit once more, not en route to a European bird dealer but with Villalba-Macias on a plane to São Paulo.

  Villalba-Macias remembered how ‘On our arrival at São Paulo we noticed an incredible number of journalists, photographers and cameramen, so that we first thought they were waiting for a rock star or someone from the international jet set.’ But the press pack had gathered to meet the parrots. A chaotic press conference followed. ‘Their performance was impressive – they showed themselves to be true stars as they strolled across the desk – one of them pulled a rubber stamp from its stand with its beak while the other flew on to my shoulder and, perhaps annoyed because I was telling the journalists his family history, he bit my ear.’ This friendly nip was captured by the photographers and broadcast and printed worldwide.

  The seizure of the birds was a symbolic turning point. Villalba-Macias said later that ‘…just as the Giant Panda symbolises all the species threatened with extinction, for us in South America this sky-blue parrot is an emblem … our aim of saving it from extinction started the moment we opened that case at Koopmann’s and found those two cute chicks … we felt deep inside the commitment to rescue them from extinction just as we rescued them from the hands of an unscrupulous trafficker.’

  The baby birds were, however, too young to be released back into the wild. Instead they were taken to São Paulo Zoo to be housed in aviaries hidden from public display and set among the extensive forested gardens at the edge of the city’s vast concrete sprawl. At the zoo they would join three adult Spix’s Macaws already in residence. These had been seized as well, way back in 1976.

  The seizure in Paraguay was, however, a rare victory. Apart from one or two isolated actions, including the detection of two Spix’s Macaws illegally imported to the UK in 1979, the bulk of the traffic had gone unchallenged for years. The ones that came to Britain were brought into London Heathrow via Madrid from Paraguay with documents falsely claiming that they were a blue mutation of a commoner South American species. The bird trader responsible was the first person prosecuted under Britain’s new endangered species laws and the authorities made an example of him. Bird trader Gordon Cooke was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and all of his licences to import and export wildlife were revoked, thereby putting him out of that business for good.

  Cooke’s Spix’s had spent a few weeks in the UK before being dispatched along with a shipment of Hyacinth Macaws to a collector in Colorado in the United States. The British authorities only learned that the birds had been in the UK after they had already been exported and, despite the successful prosecution, they were never heard of again.

  By the late 1980s the available evidence pointed to one dealer in Paraguay as the principal source of birds shipped to international markets. As far as the trapping was concerned, most Spix’s Macaws making their way to bird collectors during the 1980s had been supplied by just two dealers. One was based in the town of Petrolina in the north-east Brazilian state of Pernambuco, the other in Floriano in neighbouring Piauí. ‘Carlinhos’, the Pernambuco dealer, had, between 1984 and 1987 traded eight Spix’s: four adults taken in 1984 and 1985, two young in 1985 to 1986 and the two youngsters taken from the nest who were recovered in Paraguay in the 1987 raid. The trader gave no details about the birds he had moved in the years preceding 1984.35

  The Floriano trader ‘Nascimento’ had caught fifteen Spix’s between 1977 and 1985, thirteen of them as adults. Both said that all the birds they had sold – between them a total of twenty-three – had come from near Curaçá. It also emerged that the two babies taken from the wild in each breeding season from 1984 to 1987 had come from the same nest – that of the last breeding pair. It was their last two chicks that had been picked up in Paraguay during the raid on the trafficker’s house.

  Paul Roth had been told that the first nesting attempt of the last breeding pair in the 1985–6 breeding season had met with failure when trappers had tried to raid the nest too early. The eggs had not yet hatched and were destroyed when the trappers poked glue-covered twigs into the nest hole in their attempt to take the young. The adults made another attempt to breed some four kilometres from the first nest. This time the trappers came back at night when the parents were in the nest and blocked the hole in an effort to take out the whole family. The wily adult birds escaped through a second entrance that the trappers had not seen, but again the eggs were broken. The adult pair were determined to breed, however, and successfully produced two chicks. But despite their resolve to ensure they produced young, the babies were trapped in infancy and taken away.

  Roth had also discovered that the traders from Petrolina and Floriano were not the only ones to have been taking birds from the only place the Spix’s Macaws were known to live. The bird trapper who’d originally directed him to Curaçá, had taken some too. One estimate was that at least 150 of the macaws lived in the creeks during the 1960s and Roth had worked out from interviews with locals that in the early 1970s the population at Curaçá had stood at about thirty pairs. The stories of the population’s decline were unremittingly grim.

  Roth learned how in 1984 the trapper from Floriano had taken ten Spix’s in one go. Against the will of a local landowner who had been misled by the trapper, seven adults and three babies were captured and removed. During transportation to Floriano, two of the adult birds had become stuck together with lime and one of them died. Some of this group were sold in São Paulo to Brazilian bird collectors where they fetched US$2,000 each, a very considerable sum at the time, especially considering that the comparable price inside Brazil for a highly prized Hyacinth Macaw was then just US$50. In addition to these details, Roth discovered how in 1985 one Spix had been killed by a local rancher. It had been shot in a failed attempt to wound it so that it could be caught and sold.

  Under these circumstances it was perhaps not surprising that the US$965 ‘watching service’ arranged by Roth and paid for by his Munich sponsors was no match for well-organised and armed bird robbers. They had been motivated to break the law and threaten violence by the huge sums offered for Spix’s Macaws in the underground international bird markets. By then the birds were changing hands for US$30,000 each. Even though local people had agreed to watch the one dirt track that took outsiders to the Melância Creek from the distant tarmac highway, they were not prepared to risk life and limb, no matter how rare the bird was. And no one could blame them. They just happened to be poor people living in the place where a little band of beautiful blue birds fought a last stand against greed.

  Following the seizure of the birds in Asunción, the Brazilian authorities did at last act and raided Carlinhos’s house in Petrolina. Although the commitment to protecting Brazil’s rare wildlife was strong enough in national government circles, the priority attached to upholding wildlife laws at the state level was patchy. In remote ‘frontier’ regions like the north-east, it was not easy to make sure that the law was respected. Violence, intimidation and corruption were commonplace and the area to be policed quite vast. Even if compelling evidence was brought against trappers and dealers, a conviction was not assured. In the end Carlinhos was acquitted by a local judge who saw it as his duty to protect citizens against what he saw as the country’s ‘crazy environmental laws’. He walked free to trap another day. And trap he did; among other rare species that he specialised in was Lear’s Macaw. And so, by 1990 only one wild Spix’s Macaw was left. The only hope for saving the world’s rarest bird now lay with the few scattered around the world in captivity.

  Almost all of them had been taken in the face of Brazil’s wildlife export ban introduced in 1967. It seemed that most had been shipped against the international trade ban introduced through the CITES treaty in 1975.36 Locating the present owners was urgent but not straightforward. The longer the start of a proper captive-breeding programme was delayed, the more perilous the plight of
the lone macaw in the Melância Creek and the more slender the chances of any recovery of a Spix population in the wild.

  The secrecy was compounded by rumours and counter-rumours about who had new birds for sale and reports of alleged sightings of birds in the wild.37 These stories abounded. They were short on hard evidence but provided endless grist for the rumour mill and kept the conservationists running in circles. But among the uncertainties, the location of a few captive birds was known for sure. Two were in the possession of a German-born parrot collector called Wolfgang Kiessling.

  He had arrived in Tenerife in the Canary Islands during the early 1970s; he was then thirty-three years old and in search of a business opportunity. He decided to open a wildlife park. At the edge of the green subtropical town of Puerto de la Cruz on the lush north coast of the island, Kiessling bought some land. At first he could only afford to buy a small plot planted with bananas. There was no room for large animals, so the young entrepreneur decided to start with parrots. He didn’t have a particular interest in the birds to begin with but was advised by his father that they made good business sense: people adored them, they lived a long time and didn’t eat every much. He soon fell in love with them and began to build up a collection.

  Loro Parque (Spanish for Parrot Park) opened in 1972. The business initially struggled but there was a breakthrough when a parrot show was introduced. Today the performing birds are still a great public attraction. In front of captivated crowds, brightly coloured macaws and cockatoos ride little bicycles and operate vending machines. Macaws fly low over the heads of the seated audience brushing faces with their long flowing tail feathers. One Blue-and-gold Macaw takes wooden shapes of the six main Canary Islands and on command expertly fits them the right way round into their correct slots on a large blue board. The birds seem to enjoy themselves and the crowds are charmed.