by Tony Juniper
I was especially pleased that Iolita was there. I hoped to find out more about the momentous decision taken by the Brazilian Government in July 2002, just as Spix’s Macaw was first going to press. This decision was to permanently terminate the official Recovery Committee. Following the meltdown at the meeting in Brasília in February 2000 (because of the unauthorised sale of birds by Antonio de Dios to Sheikh Al-Thani), the Brazilians had considered various options for restructuring the recovery effort. They had circulated proposals to the various owners on possible ways forward. With the exception of Loro Parque, they did not even reply (such is their contempt for Brazilian claims over birds stolen from that country and now in their custody).
The lack of cooperation from the various keepers of the last Spix’s Macaws in Switzerland, the Philippines and Qatar had finally convinced the Brazilians that a different and harder line was needed. This decisive point in the fortunes of Spix’s Macaw had been accompanied by a call from Brazil that the birds in private hands be returned to them. At least one government had responded: Switzerland, essentially to say that birds in that country were legal and that Brazil had no right to insist on their return. That morning in the casino appeared to be the ideal moment to see if Brazil’s new and controversial proposal was supported by a major cross-section of the world’s parrot-keeping elite, if not by key governments or the nominal ‘owners’ of the macaws.
Many people at the Parrot Convention in Tenerife quite correctly asked if there was the capacity inside Brazil to care properly for such rare birds, breed them and manage a successful reintroduction attempt. After all, São Paulo Zoo had never bred them and official monies available for conservation in Brazil were always insufficient. It was clear that any programme undertaken by the Brazilians would need considerable external assistance. Whether this would be forthcoming remained to be seen. In the absence of an answer to that question, and as I drew my presentation in the casino to a close, I prepared to conduct the vote from the podium.
I asked the Convention participants first of all how many of them believed that the Brazilian policy of taking control of the birds themselves was the correct way forward. About six hundred hands were raised. I then asked who believed the birds should stay where they were, in the various private collections. A handful of hard-core parrot collectors and dealers signalled their support. A few more said they did not know or abstained.
It was an overwhelming endorsement from the parrot world for Brazil’s new approach. But whether signals like this would sufficiently isolate or pressurise those with birds in their custody to hand them back was a quite different matter. One unrepentant figure was Harry Sissen.
As the meeting closed and the participants dispersed, he followed me into the grounds of the casino, where he berated me for what he saw as my incomplete understanding of the issues and harangued me for what he had evidently received from my lecture as an attack on private parrot keepers. He told me how he believed the Brazilians could never pull off a proper conservation programme and how birds like Lear’s Macaws were better off with breeders like him. If they were left out in the wild, they would be shot, trapped, and their forests were being destroyed anyway, he said.
Harry had recently been released from prison where he had served time for illegally importing critically endangered Lear’s Macaws into the UK. As we heatedly exchanged views, he set out some large sheets of paper on a low wall for me to look at. I found myself contemplating the most exquisite drawings of Lear’s Macaws I had ever seen. Harry had used his time in captivity to create images of his beloved macaws for posterity. The drawings were in pencil, beautifully detailed, expressive of the bird’s unique character and in gorgeous proportion. As he talked me through the pictures, tears welled up in his eyes. He quivered with rage and sadness at the fact that his most precious macaws were now kept by the British authorities in conditions that he felt were quite inappropriate. They had been there for two years, ever since they were seized from his Yorkshire farm in 2000, and were still the victims of complex international legal wrangles between Brazil and Britain.
I made my departure and strolled away down the hill towards the town centre wondering why it was that people’s love of wild creatures could sometimes prove so destructive. People’s tendency to possess, own and control, it seems, is often stronger than their ability to let go of their own immediate and personal desires to collaborate for the greater good. Although this kind of love is essentially selfish and for the benefit of the adorer, people can still somehow convince themselves that it is noble and good. Listening to Harry reminded me how humans have an incredible propensity to convince themselves that they are right and just, no matter how strong the evidence to the contrary. And he was convinced that he was right.
As I navigated the narrow streets of Puerto de la Cruz, my thoughts drifted away from the events of the morning and back to those of the previous evening. I had found it fascinating to share stories over poolside drinks with the gathered parrot clans. As usual there was a good deal of gossip and rumour. And as usual in such company, the gossip involved the Spix’s Macaw. I had heard again rumours about birds held in the USA. Although none had ever come out into the open there, it was a consistently strong story. The claims sounded convincing, but without hard evidence not much could be done about them.
A couple of weeks later I was in the city where the Spix’s Macaw’s ultimate demise had been sealed: Asunción, Paraguay. I had arrived for a meeting with my colleagues from Friends of the Earth International, hosted by our excellent local people in the country. While I was there I thought a great deal about what had happened in the 1970s and 1980s, about how one of the world’s rarest birds had been trafficked unnoticed through the city from Brazil and exported to destinations worldwide via the little international airport. My Paraguayan colleagues told me stories about their environmental campaigns. They gave me a full briefing on what it was like to press for the protection of the dwindling forests in a country with a military government and what it was like to work with corrupt officials and rigged elections. Their stories made me think that our Friends of the Earth campaigns back home in England were, by comparison, rather straightforward.
We spent an evening walking on a hill in the city overlooking the Rio Paraguay. Downstream from where we stood was once the home of the now extinct Glaucous Macaw. On the opposite shore of the river was the great open vastness of the inland basin of the Chaco. A huge expanse of grassland, swamp, forest and palm savannah, it is one of the world’s great empty wildernesses. An area the size of Germany, it has a human population of only about 100,000 souls, many of them indigenous people. Upstream was the huge Pantanal, another largely unspoilt ecosystem that comprises the world’s largest freshwater wetlands.
The weather had been intensely hot, reaching 46°C during the day, and there had been a prolonged drought – more signs of the rapidly changing climate, we speculated. A bluish haze hung across the vast horizon. My Paraguayan colleagues casually explained that the haze was smoke and that the Pantanal and Chaco were on fire. They were being burnt to open up more land for cattle and to improve the existing grazing lands. It seemed that not much had changed since our search for the Spix’s Macaw back in 1990. The last frontier wildernesses were still being cleared, destroyed and degraded in a never-ending search for wealth and prosperity. And it still was not working. Most people in Paraguay remained poor, and they would be poorer still once their natural treasures were stolen by international banks, transnational corporations and the country’s corrupt political elite.
We retired to town for dinner and then I returned to my hotel and prepared to leave for London. During my journey home I called my wife from São Paulo Airport, the site of the famous press conference in 1987 where Juan Villalba-Macias had triumphantly arrived with the two baby Spix’s he had wrested back from the traffickers in Asunción. My wife told me that a message had been left at home concerning the seizure of a single male Spix’s Macaw in the USA. I was astounded. Rumours
were one thing, a real bird quite another. This was in early October 2002.
I sat in the airport lounge awaiting my connection to London. I wondered where this surprise player might have come from. It could have arrived in the USA via several different routes. It might have been the last wild male that lived in Melância Creek – not dead at all, but like the other last Spix’s Macaws spirited away by trappers and dealers. After all, no corpse was ever found. It might alternatively have been one of the Spix’s Macaws that crossed the Atlantic from the UK, having briefly been in the custody of British bird trafficker, Gordon Cooke. These birds were sent there back in the late 1970s, so if it was one of those, it would have been old. It could conceivably be one of their offspring, I thought.
More likely, I mused, it was one of the birds allegedly imported by Tony Silva in the late 1980s. These would have been among the last wild members of the species and would have come to the USA (if they were indeed trafficked by Silva and his accomplices) via Asunción. It also quite plausibly might have been one of the five birds that Joseph Hämmerli previously had owned and passed on to unknown keepers. It might have come from somewhere else altogether. But wherever it came from, there was the exciting prospect that this precious live bird might carry genetic uniqueness crucial for the rescue of the entire species.
The Brazilians were notified and responded immediately. They insisted that the bird went back to Brazil. It was a sign that the policy really had changed. The diplomatic niceties of the Committee did, indeed, seem to be in the past. The mood was now more determined and more concerned with recovery and custody than with the often fruitless negotiations with rare bird collectors. Happily, and unlike previous cases where birds had surfaced outside Brazil, this one was soon on its way home.
The person who first raised the alarm about the bird was Mischelle Muck. She was the one in the vet’s office who had answered a call from a woman claiming to have a Spix’s Macaw in the living room of her house in a Denver suburb. Muck thought the woman was mistaken and that her story was most unlikely to be true, but she made a visit anyway. She was stunned and delighted to find the blue parrot there, but was appalled at the conditions it was being kept in. Its cage was too small, it could not perch comfortably because of the unsuitable cage furniture and it was surviving on an unsuitable diet of commercially produced bird pellets.
Muck alerted the US authorities, who in turn spoke to their Brazilian counterparts. Muck took the macaw away and cared for it herself. The blue parrot was kept in virtual isolation to avoid any risk of infection. Due to its poor treatment, the bird needed care and attention to help it recover and build its strength for the journey home. San Diego Zoo paid a visit to collect blood and feather samples, with which they confirmed it was a male.
From Denver, the bird flew with Muck to Miami. The pair sat in economy class with the macaw safely stowed inside Muck’s shirt. At Miami Airport, Iolita Bampi from IBAMA was waiting to return the precious macaw to Brazil. He first went to São Paulo Zoo, and then on to the hot, dry north-east to join the breeding programme.
The World Parrot Trust, who had helped bring the bird into the open, soon released information about the macaw and where he had come from. Apparently, this macaw had been wild caught some 25 years previously and had been kept in Colorado for more than 20 years. These two facts strongly suggest that the macaw was one of the two shipped by Gordon Cooke from the UK in 1979 (see page 156). The Trust said that the bird, found in 2002, was the surviving member of a pair of birds originally shipped there; the other one had died in the early 1980s. Since then, this special parrot had been kept as a household pet. Like the last wild Spix’s Macaw, this ‘Rip Van Winkle’ of the bird world had paired up with quite a different species, in his case another pet bird, a Yellow-naped Amazon (Amazona auropalliata). When the Amazon parrot had died in the summer of 2002, the woman who owned these two pet parrots decided to find a new home for the Spix’s.
The previously unproven rumours of Spix’s Macaws kept in the USA had always struck me as being a little bit like the periodic claimed sightings of Elvis after his death: tantalising, almost believable, but never backed with hard evidence, until 2002 that is. It was, perhaps, appropriate that this bird was called Presley. Certainly his example will encourage me to take future rumours seriously. I would encourage anyone with hard evidence as to the location of any more ‘unknown’ birds to pass any details they have to the relevant authorities. Had Presley come into a breeding programme some years ago, it could be that his contribution to the salvation of his species would have been assured.
On his arrival in Brazil on 23 December 2002, Presley joined the breeding effort now under official government control. Although there are only nine birds in that Brazilian-led initiative (the rest being with the private owners who refuse to hand ‘their’ birds back), the genetic diversity of this little group is believed to largely represent that of the wider captive flock and thus this group is seen as viable for starting a separate breeding programme. Certainly the addition of the surprise bird from the USA is a great boost, assuming that at 25 years old he is still in breeding condition.
Out in the Melância Creek there were developments, too. In February 2002, the owner of the Concordia Farm decided to sell his land. A few months later, in June, the money available for the field-based activities finally ran out and the field project out in the hot, dry caatinga was officially terminated. Happily, there are moves to buy this key bit of territory for future recovery efforts and the Loro Parque Foundation has offered US$40,000 for this purpose.
Thus, at the start of 2003, there is a new glimmer of hope. Brazil has control of nine birds and in partnership with various other bodies, including Loro Parque, plans to begin breeding. At least some of the land where the birds last lived in the wild might be secured for a reintroduction attempt and there is clear and constant pressure on those outside Brazil to return their Spix’s Macaws to the country that owns them. There is now a draft recovery programme under serious consideration and there are plans to develop a breeding centre for both Spix’s and Lear’s Macaws at a location in the dry interior of Bahia, Brazil.
There is hope, but time is not on the side of this bird. Neither, apparently, are the various ‘owners’ who refuse to collaborate in ensuring its salvation. There are some more birds out there in some collection or other. If you know about them, pick up the phone to the relevant authorities and tell them all you know. You might just save an endangered species from oblivion.
Index
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Alexander the Great 38–9
Al-Thani, Sheikh Saud bin Mohamed bin Ali 240–50, 252
Al-Wabra Wildlife Centre, Qatar 240–1
American Museum of Natural History 29, 31
Amsterdam Zoo 67
Antwerp Zoo 67
Aristotle 38
Armstrong, Jim 244
Association of European Zoos and Aquaria 164
Astley, Reverend Hubert 73–4
Audubon, John James 136
Avicultural Society 73
Azara, Félix de 65
Barros, Yara de Melo 212, 214, 226
Bavarian Academy of Sciences 15
Berlin Zoo 60, 67, 71, 131, 174
Birds in Brazil (Sick) 24
Birds International Inc. 166, 200
Birds of America (Audubon) 242
Birds to Watch (Collar) 58
bison 173–4
Bonaparte, Prince Charles 26, 72
Brazil
ban export of native wildlife 34, 84
economic crisis 96–7, 100–2, 105, 144–6
Spix’s Macaw, attempts to protect 177–82, 184–5, 197, 215, 228, 239–40, 246, 256
Brehm, Wolf 166
British Library of Wildlife Sounds 33
Brooke, William 42
; Bruning, Don 182, 205
budgie 45
Buenos Aires Zoo 67
Butler, Paul 268–70
caatinga 21, 77, 239
attempts to preserve 263, 272
concentration of species in 140–1
economy 9, 143, 144–7
extinction rates 140
history 98–9, 222–5
people 105
Spix’s Macaw, local support for 196–8, 207–9, 222–3, 269–70, 274
Caatinga Nighthawk 140
Californian Condor 265
Canary Islands 141, 178, 219
Canudos 76, 225
Caraiba Minerals 224
Carvalhães, Alvaro 33
Catalogue of the Parrots in the Collection of the British Museum (Salvadori) 26–7
Cato, Marcus 40
Chapada das Mangabeiras 92, 95, 109–10
Chicago Zoo 33
Choon, Kuah Kil 259
Cincinnati Zoo 135
Coca-Cola 107
cockatoo 36, 40, 53
Moluccan 163
Palm 232
Red-vented 86, 185
Collar, Dr Nigel 57–8, 68, 89–90, 92, 149–50, 179, 180, 258, 267, 268, 271
Columbus, Christopher 40–1, 129–30
Control of Endangered Species Regulation (UK) 245
conure
Austral 37