Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  A tool commonly employed to prevent inbreeding while maximising the potential of the captive population is a studbook. Studbooks record details of who is related to whom, how old each member of the breeding programme is and what their reproductive history has been. The proper recording and use of this kind of information is the very foundation of scientifically conceived conservation breeding programmes.

  Studbooks were first used during the eighteenth century to render more systematic the selective breeding of domestic stock. There was at the time no understanding of the science of genetics as we know it today, but in order to pass favoured traits between generations animal breeders realised that it was necessary for proper records to be kept. The first official studbook was the General Studbook for Thoroughbred Horses set up in England in 1791. The name is thus derived from the stud, a horse-breeding establishment. More than 130 years later, the first studbook for a wild animal kept in captivity was opened. It was established to save the European Bison.

  In 1922, the last wild population of the northern subspecies of European Bison (Bison bonasus bonasus) was exterminated in Poland. Seven years later, the Caucasian race (Bison bonasus caucasicus) went the same way. Fearing that the small captive population would disappear too, a meeting was held at Berlin Zoo to establish a coordinated captive-breeding programme. In 1932 a studbook was prepared. In some instances it charted the lineage, and therefore the relatedness between individual animals, back to 1880.

  The breeding plan derived from this first studbook for an endangered species worked; the captive population did not die out, bison bred in zoos were released back into the wild, and thriving populations now live at liberty in Poland and the Caucasus. Today the studbook is maintained by Polish scientists based at the Bialowieza National Park in Poland, where the animals were released and once again breed in their natural habitat.

  There was a steady increase in the number of conservation studbooks, with a sharp rise during the 1980s and 1990s as more and more species faced the spectre of extinction in the wild. The captive populations of rhinos, tigers, bears, gazelles, great apes and a host of other animals are today carefully monitored through computer programmes comparable to latterday Arks.

  The majority of participants in modern conservation studbooks are official zoological associations. Their common purpose, through breeding loans and swaps, sharing of information and collaboration in reintroduction efforts, is to achieve self-sustaining captive populations and to provide, where necessary, individuals for release back into the wild. This last aim was of vital importance to the Spix’s Macaw.

  When it came to the captive Spix’s Macaws, however, ‘collaboration’ and ‘sharing of information’, let alone birds, were not going to be straightforward. Aside from the legal issues, the birds were expensive collector’s items. Most of the known captive birds did not belong to reputable breeding zoos, they belonged to individuals with no institutional responsibilities. Most of them had been bought privately – and mostly illegally – for large sums of money, and were thus jealously guarded prizes, the centrepieces of private collections. There was uncertainty over, for example, who would own the offspring produced as a result of birds from different collections being paired. And although most people who had these rarest of parrots said that they wanted to join a breeding programme, no one wished to lose sight of his own birds to another breeder, not least because of the intense jealousy, rivalry and suspicion between them. The collectors were going to be even harder to pair than the parrots. Thus politics threatened to take precedence over genetics.

  A debate surrounded whether birds should be seized from their ‘owners’ by the authorities in different countries on the grounds that they had been traded illegally. Some conservationists believed that this would be the only way to gain effective control of any future breeding programme. Others disagreed, including the Houston Zoo official, Natasha Schischakin, who would later be given control of the Spix’s Macaw studbook. She sided with the owners and argued that the seizure of birds would result in legal wrangling that could last for years, thereby wasting yet more precious time during which birds would languish with customs authorities, where they might not be properly cared for and would certainly not breed. In the end, moves to seize Spix’s Macaws kept or traded against the law were not pursued. Instead of coercion, the conservation bodies sought cooperation. The decision to pursue a collaborative tone rather than to press for the seizure of birds was a very significant watershed.

  In 1987, the location of some of the captive birds was quite well known, and Wolfgang Kiessling offered to host a meeting of the owners at Loro Parque in Tenerife. Kiessling paid for fifteen people from all over the world to attend. But despite his efforts, the meeting that took place on 17 and 18 August 1987 missed some key people. Antonio de Dios was too busy in the Philippines with his trucking business and sales of heavy road-building equipment. Officials from the São Paulo Zoo and Brazil’s conservation agencies could not leave the country because of a government-imposed ban on foreign travel by public servants introduced for financial reasons. Walsrode declined the invitation because their curator was transferring an endangered Red-necked Parrot from their German centre to the Caribbean. Even the Chair of the World Conservation Union’s Parrot Specialist Group was forced to cancel at the last moment.

  But despite the failure of key people to show up, an agreement was drafted and circulated to the then confirmed owners, who between them had seventeen birds: seven in Brazil and ten outside. Some other birds that were earlier believed to have existed in captivity had not materialised, some others had died. Any more Spix’s, if there were any more Spix’s, still only existed in rumours.

  The Tenerife agreement proposed a so-called ‘Consortium for Propagation’, to be composed from expert agencies, a representative of the Brazilian Government and those with custody of the birds. The Consortium would direct the breeding programme to ensure the best pairings of birds. A husbandry guide would be produced too with the aim of setting out best practice for keeping and breeding the creatures in captivity. A vital aspect was to determine the sex of those birds where this basic but vital information was lacking. These details, along with what was known about age and genetic relationships between the different birds, would be used to compile a studbook and breeding plan.

  Beyond these practical arrangements, there were some very sensitive political issues touched on by the agreement. One concerned the ownership of offspring produced by the breeding programme. If for example Kiessling and de Dios provided an adult bird each for a pairing that produced three babies, who would own them? Since young birds had been changing hands among other collectors on the black market for upwards of US$30,000 apiece, this was a very real issue. Another delicate matter concerned the supply of birds for reintroduction in the wild. Whose birds would be involved, how they would be selected and how their recovery programme and release would be funded remained open questions.

  Since the breeding programme was to save an endangered species and not a commercial arrangement, a clause to prohibit the sale of birds was included: there were to be no financial transactions for bird transfers. Perhaps the most sensitive issue was who ultimately owned the existing birds. An early draft of the agreement said that the birds were owned by Brazil; another said they belonged to their present owners. So polarised were views on this point that nothing was said at all in the final document from Tenerife. Ownership remained an unresolved issue. But since ownership is nine-tenths of the law, there was little the Brazilians could do but insist that the Spix’s Macaws were the sovereign property of their country.

  Both Kiessling and de Dios signed the agreement, but the Tenerife initiative was soon to lose impetus and stall. The loss of momentum happened mainly because Brazil was not involved – it had in the end turned into a private breeders’ initiative only. Without the Brazilian Government’s authority, the agreement could not be implemented. It was time to change tack.

  A second effort was launched
in September of the following year, 1988. A new agreement was drafted between the São Paulo Zoo and a couple of the international conservation agencies, and put to the Brazilian Government’s official forestry department that would be expected to chair the new body. Like the mired Tenerife initiative, the main objective of the accord was to breed the birds in captivity with a view to future reintroduction to the wild.

  Compared with the agreement negotiated in the Canary Islands, however, there were some important differences. For a start, this time, the Brazilian Government’s forestry institute, which was responsible for conservation policy, had been involved from the outset. Also the CITES authorities, who would need to approve and support future transfers of birds between countries, were there too. Cooperation would be sought from the owners outside Brazil but they would be bound by the decisions of the committee.

  The agreement was then passed to the meeting of the Parrot Specialist Group39 that took place the following month in Curitiba in the south of Brazil, and on 18 October 1988 the plan was endorsed by leading conservation experts. But even this was not without incident. A blazing public row broke out between an official from São Paulo Zoo and one of the private Brazilian owners. Each accused the other of poor bird-keeping standards and insisted that the other’s birds would be better off with them. This was not the atmosphere of cooperation needed to pluck the Spix’s Macaw from the teeth of extinction.

  Nigel Collar from ICBP witnessed the outburst. ‘The argument at Curitiba showed how hard it was doing to be to get the holders to agree to exchange birds. These people had after all paid big money for the rarest parrots in the world. They did it either for personal prestige or because they genuinely believed in conservation or because they wanted to make money out of it. But whichever it was, their sense of collective responsibility was depressingly absent.’

  Nevertheless, exactly two months later, Brazil’s forestry institute officially declared that it would participate in the new working group. This was a major breakthrough, but in the following months there was a radical restructuring of Brazil’s environmental agencies.40 Although this again substantially delayed the start of the recovery plan for the Spix’s Macaw, on 22 September 1989, more than two years after the Tenerife meeting, a new law was passed in Brazil. This set out the arrangements for the new body officially established by the Brazilian Government – its legal mandate was simple: save the Spix’s Macaw from extinction.

  Despite the initial frustrations and delays, there had been at least one concrete outcome of these early deliberations between Brazil’s official bodies. The São Paulo police declared that they would assist in the recovery programme as necessary. A directive was circulated to ninety-seven police offices detailing the enforcement actions necessary to help the Spix’s Macaw. Although by then all of the known wild Spix’s Macaws were assumed captured and the initiative very much a case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted, it did demonstrate growing formal involvement of Brazilian Government agencies in the bird’s cause, and to that extent it was very welcome.

  And the new Brazilian law set up a group of experts, including ornithologists and captive-breeding specialists, who would work alongside government officials and zoo representatives for a limited period to determine the structure and rules for a permanent committee. Under the new law they were given sixty days to complete that job. The temporary committee was also given the utterly unrealistic task of appraising the situation of the species in the wild, establishing an agreed rescue plan for its recovery and making sure that the birds in São Paulo were finally sexed. Paul Roth had spent three years on this first job and failed to reach a firm conclusion, while the question of getting the birds sexed had defeated even the most determined efforts. As for sorting out a rescue package without the full participation of the breeders outside Brazil, who were not yet members of the new Brazilian committee, the participants had no chance.

  While the Tenerife accord had faltered because it did not include the Brazilian Government, the new one was in danger of going nowhere because it had so far excluded the owners of the birds outside Brazil. And the need for a programme that could involve everyone was now more urgent than ever. The bureaucratic and diplomatic cogs ground forward with agonising slowness. Collar remembered that

  it took ages, it was like watching rocks form or a glacier flow. There was no sense of urgency, I still can’t understand it. We needed a brisk and businesslike approach but instead got a series of painfully long silences punctuated by abrupt invitations to meetings at short notice. The Brazilian authorities were clearly overstretched and underfunded whereas the owners could each in his turn attempt to dictate terms, and were in no hurry whatsoever to act on anyone else’s behalf. It was crazy.

  Even when things did move more quickly, they did not go to plan. During the summer of 1989, Loro Parque was making moves to increase its complement of Spix’s Macaws from two to four. The proposal was that the single bird held by Walsrode and one of the seven now kept by Antonio de Dios in the Philippines be brought together in Tenerife. This plan would create a new pair from two singles and would increase the chance of breeding. In the case of the Walsrode bird, no money was to change hands but instead a swap was proposed with a rare Red-necked Parrot that Kiessling had in his collection. The Philippines bird was to go to Tenerife on breeding loan. However, both the World Conservation Union and the London Zoological Society, which were responsible for the approval of official international conservation studbooks, believed that such transfers should not occur in the absence of a proper breeding plan or without the agreement of the Brazilian Government. Because there was still no accord that included all the key players and still no person or organisation responsible for keeping a proper studbook, these organisations recommended that the transfer be blocked. It was.

  While on the one hand the conservationists were, with some good reason, holding things up, on the other they were getting desperate about the lack of progress. Considering the demonstration of national pride from Brazil and its claims of sovereignty over the Spix’s Macaw, the lack of effort at breeding the birds at São Paulo Zoo was remarkable. American conservationist Don Bruning was the chairman of an international group of parrot experts. He went so far as to write in a letter in early 1989 to the head of São Paulo Zoo to the effect that ‘I believe that it is long past time for the São Paulo Zoo to get a [breeding] facility built, get the birds’ sexes, and negotiate with the private owners to set up a cooperative breeding effort. If the São Paulo Zoo is unwilling to do this I believe they should arrange to send the last Spix somewhere else so that a real effort to breed them can be made.’ Bruning concluded his communication with a desperate plea: ‘Please help save the Spix Macaw. Time is running out.’

  Time really was against the Spix’s Macaw. Some of the captive birds were getting old. For any of them to be kept alone without a partner was disastrous from the point of view of the species’s vital long-term genetic future. Any single one of them dying could remove vital genes held by no others. Should the remaining birds gradually become inbred it might well be the end. There was no guarantee that there would be new wild birds to bolster the gene pool. Every opportunity had to be taken with whatever was available in the various collections.

  With a growing sense of urgency now bordering on desperation, further meetings of the informal group established under the new Brazilian law took place. The first discussed again the outstanding matter of sexing the birds in the São Paulo Zoo. Despite this job having been recognised as a priority more than two years earlier in the Tenerife agreement, the Spix’s Macaws there were still not known to be males or females. And now, following the death of one in September 1988, only four were left. More depressing still was the fact that the post-mortem had revealed that this macaw had died from a congenital heart defect, a possible sign of inbreeding. It was a wild macaw that had been taken from near Curaçá in 1976. It was a gloomy portent of genetic problems – evident when there was a far larger
population of wild Spix’s. Worse even than this, the four remaining Spix’s Macaws at São Paulo Zoo were not reproducing.

  Although the science of genetics was developing fast in the late 1980s, it was still usual to determine the sex of captive birds that outwardly showed no difference between males and females through use of a laparoscope. A laparoscope enables trained personnel to look at the internal organs of birds and in so doing to establish whether they have ovaries or testes. Although such a device had been loaned to São Paulo Zoo from the Bronx Zoo in New York, it had been returned to the owners unused. Concerns that the birds might be injured in surgery had led the staff at São Paulo to regard sexing by laparoscope as too risky a procedure to use on such irreplaceable creatures. Instead they wanted the sex of the birds to be determined from genetic material collected from the shafts of plucked feathers.

  Following more frustrating delays, it was finally decided that feathers would be collected from the São Paulo Zoo birds and flown to the USA for analysis. Following the granting of the necessary quarantine and other permits, feathers were collected. Tissue samples had to be delivered to the lab within 24 hours for the analysis to work. The feathers made it to the lab in Memphis in under 16. The examination of the samples revealed that the two birds seized in Paraguay in 1987 were males, while the other two, which had been confiscated by the authorities in 1976, were a male and a female.