Spix's Macaw

by Tony Juniper

  But time was passing. By October 2000, the last wild male had been out in the creek on his own for about thirteen years. This link in the wild could obviously not be relied on to last for ever; each day that he flew safely up the creek the research staff breathed a sigh of relief. Now was the time to try a release of Spix’s Macaws from captivity.

  A meeting of the Recovery Committee took place at Houston Zoo in late 1999 where Antonio de Dios had agreed to provide five young Spix’s Macaws for release into the galleried woodlands of the Melância Creek. The birds would be carefully selected so as not to jeopardise the genetic base of the captive population. There would be three females and two males. With the wild male, there was the prospect of three pairs at liberty in their natural habitat.

  This was more like the size of population needed to begin a recovery in the wild. Meanwhile, the 1990s concluded on a positive note in relation to the captive population also: there were now over sixty captive birds and numbers were steadily increasing. Yves de Soye from the Loro Parque Foundation remembered a feeling of optimism. ‘The situation we had in September 1999 was good. We had finished the reintroduction pilot experiment, we had established that the hybrid pair had reproductive value, and for the first time ever we had a captive population that was large enough to think about reintroduction.’

  It was time to change gear. A draft timetable was set out that foresaw the reintroduction taking place at the end of 2000 or in early 2001. This would allow for the necessary permits to be granted, the birds to be quarantined and preparations to be made for the planned release of a small population of Spix’s Macaws back home. It would be the first definite demonstration that a real step back from the precipice of extinction in the wild was achievable.

  10

  Betrayal

  The fifth of October marks an important anniversary in the history of the caatinga. That was the day in 1897 when government troops of the new Brazilian Republic finally put down the two-year-long rebellion led by the religious leader Antonio Conselheiro.

  Conselheiro’s movement that rose in the parched and forgotten lands of the north-east was a loose coalition of disaffected bandits, landless peasants and rebels. They prepared to wage war against the government and the urban civilisation of the coast. To the backland peasants, the government was a reason for their poverty and misery and the rebellion was in defence of their right to self-determination and equality. The uprising made its headquarters in Canudos, a remote settlement by the banks of the river Vasa Barris, about 150 kilometres south east of Curaçá. As more and more of the caatinga’s people moved there to join the campaign of resistance against the government and the hegemony of the cities, a huge shanty town of more than 5,000 houses grew up on the slopes of Mount Favella.43

  Certainly the inhabitants of this makeshift town would have seen Lear’s Macaws. These spectacular parrots still live there today. But perhaps they would have spotted Spix’s Macaws too. In those days the Spix’s population might have extended along the course of the river Caraiba, a seasonal tributary of the Vasa Barris named after the tall trees that fringed its course.44

  For two years the rebels ranged over the caatinga from their stronghold, fighting guerrilla actions against the police and army detachments. They plundered ranches and looted and attacked towns. On one occasion many of the inhabitants of Juàzeiro evacuated the town thinking their homes were about to be ransacked by the insurgents.

  In early October 1897, after two years of struggle, war and misery, 6,000 federal troops made their final assault on Canudos. The army had laid siege to the fortified town for three months. Despite their advantage of imported Krupp machine guns, in that time they advanced only 100 metres. Weeks of bitter hand-to-hand fighting had taken place among the wood and mud huts in a battle later compared to the monumental struggle for Stalingrad.

  But the generals were determined this would be their last advance; there would be no more military humiliation, and there would be no mercy. This time the troops would finish the job.

  At the end, only two able-bodied men, a boy and an old man remained. These four souls resisted to the last but, on 5 October, federal government bayonets finally silenced them. Canudos never surrendered; it fell. The heroic resistance of the caatinga natives was over.

  On 5 October 103 years later, in the first year of the new millennium, another symbol of resistance in the caatinga finally succumbed to the overwhelming odds it had contested for so long.

  The field team working at the Melância Creek had noticed that during the dry season the single Spix’s Macaw would make longer flights in search of food and water, sometimes ranging up to 60 kilometres from his favourite haunt in the creek to find scattered fruit trees. On these longer trips the macaw would vanish from his usual creekside domain for up to two weeks. There had been tense moments in the past when he had disappeared for extended periods. In 1996 it was briefly feared that he was dead, but he had turned up again. In October 2000, it was different.

  Despite the local people’s continuing vigilance and keen interest in the parrot, no one had seen him since 5 October. As time went by, the possibility that he had finally fallen grew and grew. Local people were organised into search parties, and a dragnet operation was launched across the caatinga. Remote farms and houses were visited and everyone encountered by the search parties was interviewed and shown pictures of the precious blue parrot. Posters were displayed with phone numbers to report any sightings. Days and then weeks went by, but there was no trace, no report of the blue parrot. The research team refused to give up hope.

  Although his little green partner was still to be found near their nest hole, it was suggested that he might have paired up with a different maracana and taken up residence in another part of the creek. Perhaps he had made some long-distance migration and would return later on. Or maybe he had lost his way on one of his long flights and would reappear when he recovered his bearings. These were desperate hopes.

  His disappearance coincided with prospecting activities by a mining company. The ironically named Caraiba Minerals had begun searching in the area for viable ore lodes. The company was cutting trails, drilling boreholes and digging trenches in the caatinga in search of lead, copper, chrome, cobalt and diamonds. The resulting disturbance might have made the Spix leave. It might have been a quite different reason. Perhaps the trappers had come back and taken him. Whatever the cause, the fact was that he had gone.

  As the weeks without news added up, so did pressure for an official comment on the situation. On 1 December 2000, the Brazilian Government agency leading the Spix’s Macaw Recovery Committee issued a statement. ‘World’s rarest parrot disappears from the wild’, said its headline. The press notice was, inevitably by now, downbeat and pessimistic, but it refused to abandon all hope that the bird might even at this late stage resurface somewhere. It didn’t. By early 2001, the widely held view was that he was dead.

  One unsubstantiated claim was that he had been caught to supply an order placed by a very rich Middle Eastern bird collector. Officials however believed that, because of the strong local support for the recovery plan, ‘if the last wild bird disappeared, it is due to natural biological causes and not to trappers.’ No corpse was ever found.

  The last Spix’s Macaw had been alone for thirteen years; he had become globally famous as the world’s loneliest bird. Grimly clinging to existence through droughts, he had miraculously found enough to eat and drink for every one of the 5,000 or so days of his solitude. He had outwitted cunning predators and second-guessed the determined poachers who had repeatedly sought to claim the huge price on his head. There was no more wily a bird than that last macaw. He had become a regional symbol of resistance, surviving in that harsh place against the interfering and uncaring outside world, against those who would take him away and against the rigours of the testing physical environment.

  He had inspired even the tough and independent people of the caatinga, a feat managed by few human leaders. Despite his val
iant solitary resistance, like the last rebel at Canudos he had given way to the inevitable. And with this last blue-feathered fighter had gone the world’s total knowledge and experience of the Spix’s Macaw in the caatinga. He was probably eighteen or nineteen years old. Now the blue parrots had crossed a threshold from which there might well be no return. Spix’s Macaw was now destined to be officially categorised as ‘Extinct in the Wild’.

  Before our eyes, the most closely observed extinction of a wild species ever to take place had just occurred. But while news bulletins broadcast images of the Afghani Taliban blasting with anti-tank artillery unique thousand-year-old Buddha statues carved into an ancient mountainside, the world heard hardly a murmur about the loss of Spix’s fabulous blue macaw. It was one more reminder of the human propensity to regard the destruction of its own creations as tragic and immoral while the annihilation of creation raises hardly an eyebrow.

  Yara Barros, the Brazilian scientist leading the efforts in the Melância Creek at the time, described the bird’s loss as ‘a terrible situation’. She was guilty of understatement: it was a disaster. For the first time in hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of years, there were none of the special blue parrots in the hot dry bush.

  The implications for the whole recovery effort were calamitous. Only two weeks before the last Spix disappeared, the Brazilian media had reported the news from the Houston meeting that five of the macaws would be shipped from the Philippines to be released to join the single bird in the Mêlancia Creek. Those plans were now torn up. And with the death of the wild parrot, plans to place young Spix’s Macaws hatched from a captive pair were irrelevant too. There could be no reintroduction attempt through the hybrid nest either.

  More than ever before, any recovery effort for the Spix’s Macaw rested with the captive birds. But serious problems were now brewing.

  Compared with the number of captive Spix’s Macaws at the time of the Fort Lauderdale meeting in 1994, the population had by 2000 doubled to over sixty. Captive-breeding successes at Hämmerli’s aviaries in Switzerland and Antonio de Dios’s facilities in the Philippines in particular had lifted the roll call to the point where it had been decided that five birds could be spared for the release attempt agreed in Houston in September 1999. But although numbers had continued to expand, all was not well among the captive birds.

  The population was becoming swamped with offspring from the same few parents. Of the twenty birds held in Hämmerli’s aviaries in 1999, at least eleven (and perhaps sixteen) had the same parents. These were an older male bird caught from the wild in 1974 and the young captive-bred female transferred from de Dios on the SwissAir jet from Manila. The uncertainty about the parentage of the other five birds arises from the loss of records available to the author (and indeed the Recovery Committee itself) following the transfer of five birds outside the control of the agreed decision-making structures.

  At de Dios’s facilities, where there had been a build-up of numbers to twenty-six birds, nineteen were from two pairs. One couple was the original adult birds he had obtained via Singapore. They had hatched twelve young; one of these was the female half of Hämmerli’s successful partnership. The second pair (which had produced seven babies) were not only brother and sister but also offspring from de Dios’s first pair. Nearly half of the captive population was therefore descended from just six parents, who were in turn mainly related to one another.

  Because no one person or institution had been able to gain effective control over most of the birds, some pairings had been negotiated rather than determined by the best genetic information.45 The fact that the parrots had not been kept in a flock but widely dispersed as single birds or non-breeding pairs meant that the parrots could not choose their own partners. Thus even when transfers had the best genetic intentions, the birds had sometimes proved incompatible and had not bred. How many more breeding pairs there might have been if they had been kept at a central facility where they could have chosen their own partners (or have been paired on the basis of least relatedness between partners) was a matter for speculation. But as time went by, the question of ownership and control of the world’s most valuable parrots had become more and more sensitive.

  The original deal had stipulated that while owners cooperated with the survival strategy for the species, they could keep their macaws. The moral responsibility (which later became direct pressure) to hand them back to Brazil had always been there but could not, under the agreement signed between the owners and Brazil, be insisted upon. The private owners couldn’t lose. They were able to keep their birds (including those procured illegally) and were encouraged to exchange them to avoid inbreeding. Owners were forbidden to sell their macaws, but they didn’t mind because they would much rather keep them anyway – at least initially, while they bred them and built up their flocks. In any event, if they really did want to sell their birds, who was going to stop them?

  By early 2001, only one owner had formally returned the ownership of his birds to Brazil. This was Wolfgang Kiessling. Although he kept his macaws at Tenerife, formal control of them had been transferred to the Government of Brazil in 1997. Despite this act of goodwill on the part of one owner, relationships between the Recovery Committee members began to deteriorate. And it was not just because of the ownership question.

  There had always been tension in the Committee arising from successful self-made men having to work in a group, which by definition needed to be collaborative and consensual. ‘These men got to where they are because of the way they operate,’ said David Waugh of the Loro Parque Foundation, who sat through many meetings and saw just how crucial it was. ‘They are driven men. For this kind of person compromise and consensus does not always sit comfortably. Some people round the table react badly to these robust types, some others react robustly in response.’

  The personality clashes were made worse by intense jealousy and personal pride. The owners were openly critical of one another’s methods and disliked the sight of success where they had failed, whether in relation to parrot breeding or wider business success. This further poisoned an already venomous atmosphere.

  Another crack had opened in the Committee because of Brazilian sensitivity at being dictated to by outside organisations who happened to have both the technical experts and money that they lacked. ‘We put forward lots of suggestions and technical advice to the Brazilian scientists on how best to handle the field experiments,’ said Waugh. ‘But it mostly wasn’t done. We got the feeling that there was a distinct element of piqued Brazilian national pride. It got a bit awkward.’

  A further problem emerged from what was seen by some as Loro Parque’s disproportionate influence over the Committee. This impression arose from the fact that it had funded nearly all of the fieldwork throughout the 1990s. By 2001, the Loro Parque Foundation had granted over US$600,000 in support of the work in the creeks and had devoted considerable efforts to breeding the birds in captivity. Although other funding agencies had contributed too, including the Government of Brazil, the Loro Parque Foundation had been by far the most important organisation bankrolling the field and community activities. This made the Brazilian Government uneasy. They wanted to have control of the funding so that they could determine their own priorities and to avoid any impression that they were subject to influence arising from a financial relationship with one of the owners. But Brazil had not found another benefactor to pay for the programme and had thus been forced to rely on Kiessling’s Tenerife foundation. This funding support also made some of the other owners uneasy since they felt, correctly or not, that Kiessling was in a strong position to gain special favour.

  Because of the money and expertise it had put into the programme, Loro Parque and its Foundation had not surprisingly developed a high public profile in the Spix’s Macaw recovery campaign. Among the dozen or so field programmes supported by Kiessling’s foundation, the Spix’s Macaw rescue work was his flagship. The macaw was adopted as the Foundation logo and its bulleti
n was titled Cyanopsitta. Intentionally or not, the impression was reinforced in some quarters that Loro Parque was in the driving seat. This in turn had created tensions, not least with Hämmerli and de Dios, who felt that their sustained efforts in successfully breeding the birds had by comparison gone unrecognised. Worse was to come.

  Hämmerli, like the other members of the Recovery Committee who owned Spix’s Macaws, had signed a statement promising that he would not sell his birds or transfer them without prior agreement. In 1991 he had gone further and committed himself in a letter to never going outside the requirements of the Committee. This promise was in relation to a request he made to a Brazilian official for support in a proposed swap of birds with Antonio de Dios. Hämmerli wrote that ‘As I will never trade or sell my Cyanopsittae, I would exchange with Mr de Dios only under the guidelines of the Committee for the Recovery of the Spix’s Macaw.’ He wrote in another letter to a Brazilian official that ‘I promise you that I am ready to comply with the Committee for the Recovery of the Spix’s Macaw, accepting the Management Plan.’

  Inbreeding is not only a potential problem in endangered species recovery programmes; it can also be a serious handicap for commercial breeders producing birds from a limited breeding stock for sale. Whether Hämmerli’s request to make the transfers was at the time for selfish reasons or genuinely intended to help save the species from extinction cannot be known. But whatever his motivation, in 1999 Hämmerli decided to leave the Committee, renege on the agreement and his earlier promises and sell most of his birds to a Swiss businessman called Roland Messer.

  Messer, a tough and sturdy figure, slightly balding with spectacles, had a long-standing interest in parrots dating from his time as a young man working in Central America. He bought some birds while he was abroad and took them back home with him. He found the trade quite lucrative. From his initial interest, he became a professional exotic wildlife importer. He developed other business interests too, and by the time he reached his early 40s he was a self-made millionaire, having amassed a fortune from property development.