Spix's Macaw
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7 See Dyke, G. J. and Cooper, J. H. (2000). ‘A new Psittaciform bird from the London Clay (Lower Eocene) of England’. Palaeontology, Vol. 43, Part 2, pp. 271–85 for a review of key early parrot fossils.
8 India and Africa broke away first from the great landmass of Gondwanaland, perhaps before the ancestors of modern parrots had appeared. These birds have since colonised Asia and Africa from their ancient stronghold but not reached the diversity seen in the places where they have a far longer evolutionary history.
9 These are the El Oro Conure (Pyrrhura orcesi) from Ecuador, the Amazonian Parrotlet (Nannopsittaca dachilleae) from the Andean foothills of southern Peru and northern Bolivia and the White-faced Amazon (Amazona kawalli) of the central Amazon basin.
10 There are exceptions to the vegetarian rule. The Australian rosellas and cockatoos for example take a great many insects, including grubs from logs and trunks. This is an interesting fact given that woodpeckers are absent from Australia. It appears that the niche occupied by these birds elsewhere has left an ecological vacancy now taken in part by parrots. Some South American species like insects too, for example the gorgeously-marked Pyrrhura conures.
11 See for example Pepperberg, I. M. in Animal cognition in nature: the convergence of psychology and biology in laboratory and field. Edited by Balda, Pepperberg and Kamil. Academic Press, 1998.
12 See Cruikshank, et al., ‘Vocal mimicry in wild African Grey Parrots Psittacus erithacus’, Ibis 1993, 135: 293–9.
13 Brouwer et al. provide a useful summary of captive parrot longevity records. Their survey finds the oldest documented parrot in a zoological collection to be a Moluccan Cockatoo (Cacatua moluccensis) that lived to be 65 years old at the San Diego Zoo in California. See International Zoo Yearbook No. 37, London Zoological Society, London, 2000.
14 The Fulmar (Fulmaris glacialis) is a common seabird found around North Atlantic coasts that is related to albatrosses. This species has been recorded to live for in excess of sixty years in the wild. Some larger species of albatross have lived longer than that.
15 Parrots: Their Care and Breeding, Rosemary Low, Blandford Press, Poole, 1992.
16 For example, before Spain and Portugal entered the European Union in 1987 and later became bound by its CITES regulations, these countries were a common port of entry for rare wildlife into Europe. Once the borders tightened there, the wildlife traffickers went east, with Yugoslavia emerging as a popular first entry point for banned exotic wildlife ultimately destined for Western Europe. More recently, Yugoslavia became a problem for the importers because of its progressive isolation by the West, culminating in the NATO air raids and the trade blockade during the Kosovo war. At that time, the locus moved east again, to Russia, where corruption and organised crime were already seriously out of control and where wildlife was added to the growing range of freely traded commodities available at the right price. Despite the official import ban on wild birds to the USA, rare parrots continue to enter the country at different points along the Rio Grande, via Caribbean islands including Puerto Rico or are simply smuggled in air freight.
17 ICBP was renamed BirdLife International in 1993.
18 Birds to Watch, International Council for Bird Preservation Technical Publication No. 8. ICBP, Cambridge, 1988.
19 These extracts are from d’Orbigny’s Voyages dans l’Amérique Méridionale, published in parts between 1835 and 1847.
20 See Yamashita and Valle (1993), On the linkage between Anodorhynchus macaws and palm nuts and the extinction of the Glaucous Macaw. Bulletin of the British Ornithological Club, 113 (1), 35–60.
21 See for example Sick, H., Teixeira, D. M. & Gonzaga, L. P., ‘Our discovery of the land of the Lear’s Macaw (Anodorhynchus leari)’, Anais Acad. Bras. Cienc. 51 (1), 1979.
22 See Yamashita, C., ‘Field observations and comments on the Indigo Macaw Anodorhynchus leari, a highly endangered species from north-eastern Brazil’, Wilson Bulletin 99 (2), 1987.
23 The survey was instigated by CITES to establish the parrot’s status in relation to international wildlife trade rules.
24 See chapter 4, p. 85. There is no suggestion that his employer at Loro Parque or any of his colleagues there had any knowledge of Silva’s illegal parrot-smuggling activities.
25 Queen of Bavaria’s Conure is a name often used in avicultural circles. The species is more commonly known to ornithologists in English as the Golden Parakeet.
26 The charge sheet prepared for Silva’s and his co-defendants’ hearing mentions Spix’s Macaw as among the eighteen species of parrot illegally shipped into the USA.
27 See for example Sick, H., Ornitologia brasileira, uma introducão, Brasilia: Editora Universidada de Brasília, 1989.
28 Police raids on outdoor city markets where wildlife is illegally traded have since become more routine. During one 1999 foray thirty members of the Rio forestry battalion donned flak jackets, packed rifles and raided two Rio markets seizing illegally captured animals including 174 live wild birds.
29 These smaller parrots were Blue-winged Macaws (Propyrrhura maracana). See chapter 1.
30 Data on the creekside vegetation and the apparent reasons for its scarcity was published by Juniper, A. T. and Yamashita, C. in ‘The Habitat and Status of Spix’s Macaw, Cyanopsitta spixii’, Bird Conservation International 1 (1), 1991.
31 International Council for Bird Preservation, Putting Biodiversity on the Map: Priority Areas for Global Conservation, Cambridge, UK: International Council for Bird Preservation, 1992.
32 Very few scientists have devoted serious effort to the study of the caatinga. There is however a body of material that describes the main characteristics. For a summary in English see Moody et al., Seasonally dry tropical forests, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1997. Andrade-Lima, D., ‘The caatingas dominium’, Revta. Brasil. Bot. 4: 149–53, 1981. Both authors provide routes into the Portuguese language literature. Andrade-Lima also gives a useful account (in Portuguese) of some caatinga plants in Plantas das caatingas, 1989.
33 See chapter 5. See also Susan George’s account of the debt crisis. This provides a good summary of the origins and effects of huge external debts on countries like Brazil. See George, S., A Fate Worse than Debt, Penguin Books, 1989.
34 BirdLife International, Threatened Birds of the World: Lynx Edicions and BirdLife International, Barcelona and Cambridge UK, 2000.
35 These details and other important material were published in ‘Cyanopsitta spixii: A non-recovery report’, written by Thomsen and Munn in Parrotletter, 1, pp. 6–7.
36 Although clandestine, some of the trade was quite blatant. Even in the early 1980s, over five years since the Spix’s Macaw was added to Appendix I of CITES and in the face of a 15-year-old ban on the capture and export of native species, the trade in rare wildlife from Brazil was quite open. For example, a letter from the São Paulo-based Flora and Fauna Inc. to likely buyers in South Africa offered ‘the following animals for sale, trade and breeding loan’ including ‘Harpy Eagles, Golden Conures, Hawkhead Parrot, Spix Macaw, Caninde and Scarlet Macaws, Bell Birds, Toucans’. The list went on to offer rare mammals and reptiles too.
37 For example, the British aviculturist and veterinarian George Smith wrote about a meeting he and fellow bird keeper Tony Silva had in Paraguay in 1988, by which time – apart from the one remaining individual – Spix’s Macaw was extinct in the wild. Smith said he interviewed a young trapper bringing birds in from Brazil. The trapper said he knew of three or four breeding pairs of Spix’s Macaws and could supply the parents and chicks if they wanted. The price would be US$7,500 for an entire family group delivered to Paraguay. Alternatively, if the foreigners travelled with him in Brazil and paid the expedition expenses, the price would drop to US$2,500 per nest if they contained eggs, more if there were babies. The reason for the lower fee was because cross-border smuggling would not be the trapper’s responsibility, neither would be the death of any birds in transit after capture. Smith said he didn’t p
ursue the offer, so whether it was real was never proven, although it would appear implausible given the conclusions of the 1990 expedition. He said he was subsequently offered another adult bird taken from the wild in early 1990. Again, no concrete proof was produced to demonstrate its existence.
38 Antonio de Dios said that he received his wild-caught pair of Spix’s Macaws in November 1979. Assuming these birds were the ones that appeared in Singapore Aviculture, then the photos were taken at least four years before publication.
39 The Parrot Specialist Group was an expert body of scientists and conservation biologists established under the auspices of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (now known as the World Conservation Union). Its role was to set a strategic framework for parrot conservation and to assist with the conservation of the most threatened species. It did not, however, have any official or legal function that could require governments or individual owners of birds to act on its recommendations.
40 Brazil’s official forestry institute, Instituto Brasileiro de Desenvolvimento Florestal (IBDF), was terminated and its environmental protection responsibilities were adopted by the new environmental and natural resources agency called Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis (IBAMA).
41 The Permanent Committee for the Recovery of Spix’s Macaw was formally established under Brazilian law (Portaria no. 330) in March 1990. Its statutes were set out in a separate decree (Portaria no. 331). This was nearly four years after the first attempt to agree a plan to save the species. The Committee adopted the acronym CPRAA (derived from the Portuguese title for the institution: Comitê Permanente para a Recuperação da Arahinha Azul) but for the sake of simplicity and brevity is referred to here as the Recovery Committee or the Committee.
42 These details are according to the minutes of the first meeting of the Committee.
43 Euclides da Cunha’s account of the Canudos war (in his famous book Os Sertões, Livraria Francisco Alves, Rio de Janeiro, 1902) gives a fascinating insight to life in the caatinga at the end of the nineteenth century. Samuel Putnam translated this volume into English under the title of Rebellion in the Backlands, University of Chicago Press, 1944 and 1985.
44 This is perhaps the locality mentioned by the planner with the Polaroid photo who met the ICBP team in 1990. He informed the search party about the patches of caraiba gallery woodlands that he knew about in the caatinga, one of which was in the catchment of the Rio Vasa Barris. Carlos Yamashita has travelled there frequently but could find no trace of Spix’s Macaws. They might well have occurred there in the past, however. Yamashita found remnant patches of caraiba woodlands in this area (for example south west of Uauá) but these are degraded and much less dense than those remaining near Curaçá.
45 The Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan 2000–2004 for the world’s parrots published by leading conservation groups in 2000 for example remarks that ‘New pairings [of captive Spix’s Macaws] are expected to increase breeding success from the presently low rate of captive reproduction. However, recent negotiations for movement of individuals among breeding facilities have often been tortuous.’ Snyder, N., McGowan, P., Gilardi, J. and Grajal, A., Parrots: Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan 2000–2004, IUCN: Cambridge and Gland, 2000.
46 The Great Auk (Alca impennis) was a flightless seabird allied to puffins and guillemots. It was hunted to extinction in its North Atlantic range during the nineteenth century. A significant contribution towards its final demise was the taking of birds for collections. The flightless moas were a family of birds once native to New Zealand. They were hunted out of existence by Maori colonists.
47 Standards laid out by the International Union of Directors of Zoological Gardens – the World Zoo Organisation (IUDZG-WZO) and the World Conservation Union Species Survival Commission (IUCN/SSC) require studbook keepers to update and distribute studbook data annually. No such document had ever been received by the International Zoo Yearbook editor whose responsibility it is to oversee and coordinate approved international studbooks. Natasha Schischakin, the Spix’s Macaw studbook coordinator, said that the studbook had not been published because of security concerns (even though the locations of all birds are quite well known). However, this position was not in line with other studbooks, where the sensitive locations of endangered animals have been hidden via the use of codes. In any event, the policy of keeping the Spix’s Macaw studbook secret was not one officially adopted by the Recovery Committee.
48 These details were included in a document (entitled Visit of Mr Roland Messer to the Fauna General Coordination/IBAMA) circulated in early 2002 to the former Recovery Committee members by the Brazilian authorities.
49 This request was issued in a Notification to CITES member governments from the CITES headquarters in Geneva. It followed the transfer between Antonio de Dios and Sheikh Saud Al-Thani that led to the final collapse of the Recovery Committee. ‘The Government of Brazil earnestly requests all [CITES] Parties not to issue permits or certificates for import, export or re-export specimens of Spix’s macaw’ before obtaining permission from Brazil, it said. This request followed a September 2000 letter from Brazil to the Philippines CITES authorities in which Brazil states its displeasure thus: ‘it was established that the Spix’s Macaws would not be commercialised, nor any transference would be done without the previous knowledge of the committee. Unfortunately this did not happen.’
50 These were the two at São Paulo Zoo (males transferred there from the Philippines five years before), three in Recife with Mauricio dos Santos (one male and his two offspring hatched in early 2001) and the three in Loro Parque. The Loro Parque birds had been returned to Brazilian ownership by the unilateral decision of Wolfgang Kiessling.
51 A special working group for the conservation of Lear’s Macaw was established by the Brazilian Government in 1992. It was modelled in some respects on the effort to save the Spix’s Macaw but was different in terms of the international ownership of birds being far more limited. Also the circumstances of the Lear’s Macaw in the wild were somewhat different.
52 The legal arguments that might have been used to recover Spix’s Macaws known in captivity outside Brazil in the 1980s and early 1990s would have been different and less clear than those used in the Sissen case. This does not, however, alter the fact that Brazil has chosen to pursue a quite different policy in the case of Lear’s Macaw.
53 In order to protect their sovereign rights over their biological resources, some nations have latterly adopted national legislation to combat bioprospecting (the search for useful compounds or species) and biopiracy. There is, however, no international legal code aside from general commitments included in the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
54 The international political controversy that has raged over control and ownership of wildlife species has mostly concerned the financially more important pharmaceuticals industry. In this case, tropical plant extracts used to manufacture drugs have generated billions of dollars in profits for some multinational drugs firms. But there has been no systematic recompense or recognition for the developing countries from which the plants came. Very expensive rare parrots bred in captivity are arguably a parallel of the same process of exploitation. Certainly the sale of birds aroused bad feelings in Brazil, born of national pride.
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