EARLY ON A sun-dappled morning in December, a large blue-and-yellow parrot flew through the high canopy of a Caribbean swamp forest and landed in a cocorite palm. Then came another, lighting on a nearby wild nutmeg tree. Then another. Then two more, their deep raucous calls filling the forest.

Blue-and-gold macaws share a pomerac inside the acclimation flight in Nariva Swamp on the island of Trinidad.

The birds, a dozen in all, were wild blue-and-gold macaws enjoying their first day of freedom after being released into Trinidad's Nariva Swamp. Once indigenous to the swamp, their species had disappeared from it 40 years earlier, wiped out by poachers and industrial rice farming.

But someone remembered the blue-and-golds. And wanted them back.

That someone was Bernadette Plair. A researcher at the Cincinnati Zoo's Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW), Plair remembered the blue-and-golds from her childhood on Trinidad in the 1950s, even though she saw them only once, while visiting her grandmother in a town near the Nariva called Sangre Grande. Six or seven of the large parrots passed high overhead. She remembered the sun glinting off their gold feathers as they called to one another.

"They belong there," she says. "Anyone can see they belong there."

Bringing back the blue-and-golds
Plair left Trinidad in 1963 on a scholarship to study biology at Mount Saint Joseph College in Cincinnati. She met her husband, Norman, there and raised three children.

She then returned to school, earning an M.S. from the University of Cincinnati. That led to her current job at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden where she has done reproduction research on both plants and animals. But she never forgot the parrots.

For the past 10 years, Plair has worked to recreate her childhood memory. In so doing, she has become one of a handful of scattered efforts around the world to use reintroduction to bolster faltering parrot species. So far, she is succeeding, beyond her wildest dreams.

Starting with research
When she began, Plair was not a bird expert. However, she could do research, and she had the backing of the zoo, which had an aviculture division and a mission to conserve species in the wild.

By 1993, Plair and the zoo had the reintroduction project underway, aided by Plair's own Trinidad-based Centre for the Rescue of Endangered Species of Trinidad and Tobago (CRESTT). Numerous public and private donors have pitched in since then and various experts have traveled back to Trinidad with Plair to help.

Conservationist Bernadette Plair heads for the blue-and-gold release site of Bush Bush Island, a remote area reachable only by boat.

For the December release of blue-and-golds, only the second since the program began, Plair's entourage included a veterinarian, a Trinidad bird breeder, a lawyer-turned-toucan breeder, a behavioral psychologist, a veterinarian, and a zookeeper.

It also included me. The previous April, I had spent four days at Asa Wright, Trinidad's famed bird sanctuary, and three days in Tobago. At the hotel in Tobago, I found a lone blue-and-gold macaw named Trini living in a tree next to the hotel dive shop. A guide informed me the bird was the pet of the dive shop, and then mentioned Plair and her project in the Nariva.

When I called Plair six months later, she was making plans for the December release, and invited me to come see for myself. On December 11, I met Plair for the first time at the Miami airport and flew with her to Trinidad, my second trip there in a year.

The most southerly of the Caribbean islands, Trinidad lies just seven miles east of Venezuela. Its sister island, Tobago, is 21 miles to the north. Once part of South America, the island's flora and fauna are similar to that of the mainland.

Well-known for the variety and beauty of its tropical birds, Trinidad boasts some 350 species, including 17 kinds of hummingbirds. But it has never had many parrots. Orange-winged Amazons, blue and yellow-headed parrots and three kinds of parrotlets inhabit both islands. A small but stable population of red-bellied macaws lives in the Nariva Swamp.

Before they vanished in the early 1960s, the island's blue-and-golds also called the Nariva home.

A unique and remarkable wetland located on the island’s east coast, the swamp is a sprawling 15,400-acre tapestry of freshwater marsh, sandy elevations, mangrove swamp and tropical forest.

It harbors an estimated 171 species of birds and 57 species of mammals, including red howler and capuchin monkeys and the rare West Indian manatee. Green cascadou grass covers much of the open water from which moriche, roystonea and cabbage palms emerge to stand stark against the sky. In lusher places, mangroves cluster to form dim enclaves. On drier land, thick forests of silk cottons, palms and hardwoods filter the sun.

Children from the Plum Mitan Primary School perform at the blue-and-gold release ceremony.

A friendlier swamp
The reintroduction of a species is not a simple endeavor.

One of the first tasks is identifying and analyzing the factors that led to its disappearance in the first place. Do those factors still exist? If so, what can be done about them? And if not, how will the reintroduced animals avoid the fate of their predecessors?

In decline for years prior to disappearing, the Nariva's blue-and-gold population probably never numbered above 150 at its peak. The birds vanished for two reasons: the devastation wrought by the the swamp's industrial rice farmers, and the results of overzealous hunting, trapping and poaching for the pet trade.

But in the years since, the fortunes of the swamp have turned. In 1993, it was declared a "wetland of international importance" under the Ramsar Convention. The first international, intergovernmental conservation treaty, the Ramsar Convention requires participating countries to plan and promote the wise use of their wetlands.

In Trinidad, this meant the gradual banishment of the rice farmers from the Nariva, the drafting of a long-term restoration plan and the designation of the swamp as protected. In addition, a 3,840-acre section of the swamp became the Bush Bush Wildlife Sanctuary in 1968.

The practical effect of these designations remains ambiguous. Hunting and fishing are still allowed by permit in all areas of the vast, labyrinthine wetland. And given the limited number of forestry workers on patrol, permit enforcement is a largely aspirational concept.

Still, the Nariva now is a much more hospitable place for blue-and-golds than when the last bird vanished.

Founder stock
Another key issue in reintroduction efforts involves the source of the founder stock - where to get the birds.

Most parrot reintroductions use captive-bred chicks because existing wild populations can't afford to lose any more members.

Captive-bred chicks have been raised and released in Tambopata, Peru (green-winged and scarlet macaws), various parts of Costa Rica (scarlet macaws), Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican Amazons) and Mauritius (echo parakeets). Other efforts, such as the ill-fated thick-billeds, released in Arizona in 1986, have used birds confiscated from illegal traders.

For the Trinidad project, Plair first planned to use macaw chicks bred and raised at the Cincinnati Zoo. But veterinarians there advised against it because of the risk of transferring unknown diseases from Ohio to Trinidad. So under the zoo's guidance, Trinidad's Wildlife Division began a breeding program on the island instead, using wild-caught blue-and-golds confiscated from illegal traders and birds from the Emperor Valley Zoo in the capitol city of Port of Spain. But once again Plair was stymied. Four years passed, with no results.

With no other option open, Plair felt she had to consider using adult birds. Considered threatened but not endangered, the blue-and-gold macaw is one of 15 remaining species of wild macaw. Once common in much of remote South America, it's disappearing from many areas, including parts of Ecuador and Columbia and all of southeastern Brazil, due to habitat loss and trapping.

One of the largest types of parrots, blue-and-golds can weigh up to 2 1/2 pounds and reach up to 36 inches in length. Their gentle, playful temperament makes them much sought after for the pet trade. Although the Wild Exotic Bird Conservation Act has banned the importation of wild-caught blue and golds (and all wild-caught parrots) into the United States since 1992, hundreds of thousands continue to be trapped and exported to Europe and Asia.

Plair knew that stable populations of blue and golds still inhabited the forests of the nearby country of Guyana. An added attraction was that fully-grown wild-caught birds with honed survival skills might stand a better chance anyway in the Nariva, where no wild adults remained to teach such skills to captive-bred chicks.

Caretaker Sham Ramsubaj feeds the birds and sleeps near their flight at night. He once saved them from a marauding anaconda, a large South American snake.

The blue-and-golds return
The first group of blue and golds bound for the Nariva - nine males and nine females - arrived in Trinidad in October 1999. All were in good reproductive health and had tested negative for a variety of diseases during a 28-day quarantine in Guyana.

After a second quarantine in Trinidad, they were rowed to a large wire mesh acclimation flight on the swamp's Bush Bush Island.

Lush, forested and isolated, Bush Bush Island is reachable only by boat. The birds spent several months in the enclosure there, becoming accustomed to the look, sounds and feel of the swamp. They ate the native fruits and seeds that would constitute their diet once released.

And they waited for their primary feathers to grow back. Despite Plair's best efforts to prevent it, Guyanese trappers had chopped the feathers off with machetes – an apparently common practice with birds meant for the pet trade.

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