Spix's macaw has disappeared from the wild.

Spix's Macaw: The Race to Save The World's Rarest Bird
By Tony Juniper
Atria Books, 287 pages, $15 at Barnes & Noble

IN MAY 1819, Bavarian scientist Johann Baptist Ritter von Spix shot a magnificent, long tailed blue parrot in the dry thorny woodlands of northeast Brazil known as the caatinga. Spix didn’t know it, writes Tony Juniper in Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird, "but he had just taken the very first specimen of a bird that would one day symbolize how human greed and ignorance were wiping countless life forms from the record of creation."

One hundred and sixty years later, Juniper, the executive director of the British environmental group, Friends of the Earth, was a member of an expedition that went back to the caatinga to look for the Spix's macaw. By then, the parrot was assumed to be extinct, decimated like so many others by habitat destruction and poachers seeking to earn fortunes by supplying wealthy parrot collectors with the rarest of the rare. The last known Spix's macaws in the wild, two parents and a chick, had been snatched from woods near the caatinga's Melancia Creek around Christmas 1987. Juniper’s expedition hoped to find another population.

But there was no other population. There was only a single bird, the last of its kind, holding out in the dying gallery woodlands of the caatinga. For 10 more years, this bird would haunt the remains of its blighted habitat while scientists, conservation groups, rich parrot collectors and politicians bickered and dallied over its future. It would then disappear, taking with it the world's best hope to save its species.

Part detective tale, part natural history and part homage to a doomed species, Juniper's book tells the compelling story of the 10-year struggle to save the Spix's macaw that began in 1990 with the discovery of that last lonely bird in the wild and ended in 2000 when it vanished forever.

Rich in detail and flawlessly written, Spix's Macaw is a parable for our time. In the 1960's, Juniper notes, an estimated 150 pairs of Spix's macaws lived in the caatinga. But poachers and traffickers ransacked their nests with impunity, smashing eggs, abducting chicks and trapping adult birds worth as much as $40,000 apiece on the black market in rare parrots. By the time the world noticed, there was only a slim chance of saving them. That chance, it turned out, would be squandered.

In chronicling this tragedy, Juniper examines the special qualities – beauty, intelligence, dexterity and the ability to mimic human speech -- that have led parrots to be called "the primates of the avian world." He demonstrates how those same qualities have caused the birds' downfall by making them attractive to human beings. From the ancient Greeks and Romans to the plunderers of the New World and the industrial interests and wealthy collectors of today, all have taken their toll on these beleaguered creatures.

In a particularly depressing chapter called "Legions of the Doomed," Juniper describes species after species pushed to the brink of extinction and beyond by human greed, indifference: and rapacity. The beautiful blue Newton's parakeet, the impressive Mascarene parrot, the Broad-billed parrot, the Rodrigues parrot, the Caribbean macaw, the Carolina parakeet, the Glaucous macaw – all gone forever. In some cases, dusty specimens survive in various museums. In most, all that remains are descriptions written by the few who noticed and appreciated what has since been lost.

A few months after the discovery of the last wild Spix's, the Permanent Committee for the Recovery of the Spix's Macaw was formed, consisting of government officials, conservation groups and the private owners of the 15 birds then known to exist in captivity (more were found after the Brazilian government announced that all owners of captive Spix's would be allowed to keep their birds if they came forward and agreed to cooperate with the recovery program).

The committee decided to leave the last wild Spix's in the caatinga as a tutor for reintroduced captive birds. The bird's sex was determined through a DNA analysis of one of its dropped feathers. Its mate, abducted by trappers some years before, was located and returned to the wild, only to die in a collision with an electric wire. In an especially poignant attempt at survival, the wild Spix's chose a member of another species – a green maracana parrot – as its mate. The pair became inseparable and produced eggs containing the DNA of both species. But the eggs never hatched.

In the end, the Committee for the Recovery of the Spix's Macaw collapsed in acrimony. Breaking their promise to Brazil, some Spix’s owners sold their captive birds to unknown parties who could not be traced. Scattered breeding attempts have raised the number of captive birds to about 60, but only four of the remaining birds have ever lived in the wild, and most are related to one another and may not have the genetic hardiness necessary for a reintroduction. Vulnerable to poachers and with no last wild Spix’s to teach them how to survive, it is unclear whether any released birds would make it in the caatinga.

"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," writes Juniper. In that respect, the last-minute rescue of the blue caatinga parrot could be a flagship, a vessel of hope and encouragement."

If only. Instead, its loss is a harbinger of bleakness.

Laura LaFay shares her home in Richmond, Va., with two monk parakeets, Gaspard and Coco. Her last story for ParrotChronicles.com was on parrot theft.

ParrotChronicles.com

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