Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird

The son of a Bavarian doctor, Spix was born in 1781. Awarded his PhD at the age of only nineteen, his early academic career included studies in theology, medicine and the natural sciences. He qualified as a medical doctor in 1806. In 1808 he was awarded a scholarship by King Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria to study zoology in Paris, at the time the world’s leading natural sciences centre. Here the young Bavarian mixed with the leading biologists and naturalists of the time, including the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the intellectual giant who proposed a mechanism of evolution that would challenge (unsuccessfully as it turned out) the theory of natural selection developed some decades later by Charles Darwin.

In Paris, Spix’s abilities as a scientist grew; in October 1810 the King once again acknowledged his growing reputation, this time with an appointment in the Bavarian Royal Academy of Sciences where he was charged with the care and study of the natural history exhibits. Martius was a gifted academic too. Thirteen years younger than Spix, his interests were mainly botanical, especially palms.

The two scientists found themselves aboard one of two Brazil-bound ships as members of an expedition mounted in the name of the Emperor Francis I of Austria, whose daughter was to marry the son of John VI of Portugal. King John had been forced to live in Brazil following the invasion of his homeland in 1807 by Napoleon Bonaparte of France. The Austrian Emperor had invited a group of Viennese scientists to join the royal party that was to travel to Brazil. Maximilian had agreed that two members of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences should go with them.

Spix was to concentrate his effort on animals, the local people and geological recording, including the collection of fossils. Martius was to devote his energies to botanical investigation, including soil types and the study of how plants spread to new lands. The King was a bird collector in his own right and hoped that the two men would bring him novel and unique prizes from their expedition in the New World. ‘After everything possible was got ready, and the books, instruments, medicine chest, and other travelling equipage sent off direct to Trieste, we set out from Munich on 6 February 1817, for Vienna.’ At Trieste they joined the ships, two naval frigates, the Augusta and the Austria. Both were substantial vessels equipped with forty-four guns and a crew of 240 sailors.

On 29 June they crossed the equator and on 13 July Cabo Frio was sighted, ‘and soon after the noble entrance of the bay of Rio de Janeiro’.1 The arrival in South America made a big impression on the travellers.

Towards noon, approaching nearer and nearer to the enchanting prospect, we came up to those colossal rock portals and at length passed between them into a great amphitheatre, in which the mirror of the water appeared like a tranquil inland lake, and scattered flowery islands, bounded in the background by a woody chain of mountains, rose like a paradise full of luxuriance and magnificence … at length the capital of the infant kingdom, illuminated by the evening sun, lay extended before us.

A sensation, not to be described, overcome us all at the moment when the anchor struck the ground at another continent; and the thunder of the cannon, accompanied with military music hailed the desired goal of the happily accomplished voyage.

The travellers decided to spend some time initially in the relative cool and comfort of the south east of the country, first in Rio de Janeiro and then in São Paulo and Curitiba. Spix and Martius explained, ‘it seemed most expedient to journey first to the southern Captaincy of S. Paulo, mainly to acclimatise ourselves gradually to the hot conditions we would encounter during our travels and acquaint ourselves with this more temperate southern zone. From the Captaincy of S. Paulo we planned to travel through the interior of Minas Gerais to the S. Francisco River and Goyaz, before continuing either down the Tocantins to Pará or across the interior to Bahia and the coast, where we would arrange transport of our collections to Europe before penetrating the interior of the Captaincies of Piauhy and Maranhão to arrive finally at Pará, the goal of our desires.’

To a twenty-first-century traveller, such an itinerary would be demanding enough, entailing a journey of thousands of kilometres, mainly on rough tracks and by river. Although the Bavarians enjoyed the small luxury of letters of recommendation from the Portuguese – Brazilian Government that would help smooth their path with colonial administrators, they could carry only basic equipment, much of which was for scientific purposes rather than their personal comfort. They had incomplete maps, primitive medical supplies and could rely only on mule trails and rivers to cover the vast distances that lay ahead of them. In those times, natural history exploration was a hazardous business. Disease, attack from native people or wild animals, climbing and firearms accidents, starvation and even the use of dangerous chemicals for scientific purposes, like arsenic, all took their toll on the early naturalists.

Despite the dangers, it was with great enthusiasm and apparently little thought for their impending discomfort that on 9 December 1817 Spix and Martius set out from the coast for the interior of Brazil. Although misgivings about their venture were expressed by Brazilian friends, the Bavarians happily set off with a team that included a guide hired in Rio de Janeiro, a mule man, a drover, a ‘newly bought Negro slave’ and eight mules, two for riding and six more for their bags and equipment.

They met several early setbacks. In addition to being assailed by a huge variety of fleas, ticks, flies, mosquitoes and other biting and disease-carrying insects, the scientists’ guide decided to go his own way. He left one night, when everyone was asleep, never to be seen again. He had taken most of their valuables. Spix and Martius were forced to recruit new help and to replace stolen equipment before they resumed their journey through the recently colonised landscape.

The countryside was sparsely settled but in some places the clearance of the native vegetation was already well under way. They wrote that ‘From Ytú we advanced N.W. by the side of beautiful thick woods, and enjoyed a delightful view of the valley of the Tieté, which is now entirely cleared of the forests, and planted with sugar cane, beans, maize and so on.’ It was in this area that their slave decided to follow the earlier example of the guide and make an unscheduled departure himself.

According to Spix and Martius the slave ‘did not know how to appreciate our kind treatment of him, and embraced the first favourable opportunity to abscond’. He was, however, brought back to them next day by professional runaway slave hunters the men had engaged locally. The naturalists wrote ‘we followed the advice of our host, treating him, according to the custom of this place, very kindly … giving him a full glass of brandy.’

In addition to the departure of their staff, flooded roads, swollen streams and cold mist dogged their progress. But despite the difficult conditions the two scientists earnestly persisted with their scientific work. ‘If in the evening we at length met with an open shed, or dilapidated hut, we had to spend the greater part of the night in drying our wet clothes, in taking our collections out of the chests and again exposing them to the air.’ On drier days they would spend twilight and hours after dark ‘writing notes in the journals, in preparing, drying and packing our collections’. Despite the hardships, they recalled how ‘This simple mode of life had its peculiar charms.’

To early Portuguese visitors, Brazil was known as the land of parrots. Spix and Martius came across plenty of them as well. In August 1818, in the region of Januária in Minas Gerais in the upper reaches of the river São Francisco, the Bavarian travellers happened upon what were almost certainly Hyacinth Macaws in a ‘magnificent forest of buriti palms’. The large cobalt-blue birds circled over the travellers in pairs with their croaking calls echoing in the still and peaceful surroundings. A few days later, Martius and Spix briefly split up. Martius set off into the dry semi-arid forests that fringe the river São Francisco. Here he found forests of indaja palms, which, because of the much drier conditions, were the first palm groves that they had found ‘where we dared to roam around with dry feet and safe from giant snakes and alligators’.

Martius observed with fascination how the local Hyacinth Macaws greedily ate the palm fruits. ‘The large nuts of these palms with their very fine rich oil make them the favourite trees of the large blue macaws which often flew off in pairs above us. As beautiful as this bird’s plumage is, its hoarse penetrating call assaults even the most insensitive of ears and if it had been known in ancient times, would have been regarded an ominous bird of deepest foreboding.’

For the Hyacinth Macaw, the arrival of the Europeans was indeed a compelling omen of ill fortune. Martius’s party themselves captured some of the birds. He later remarked, ‘the small menagerie of these quarrelsome birds, which we took with us chained to the roof of a few mule loading platforms, played a special role in that their continuous noise, which could be heard from afar, indicated the location of the caravan, which we usually left far behind in our forays to investigate the region.’

Martius and Spix most likely knew about the Hyacinth Macaw before they arrived in Brazil. That species had by then been described to science by a British ornithologist, Dr John Latham. He had spent years cataloguing museum collections, including the birds collected during Cook’s eighteenth-century voyages in the Pacific. In 1790 he was the first to grant a scientific name to the giant blue parrots. But the two Bavarians were the first to note the relationship between these magnificent blue birds and different kinds of palms, upon the fruits of which they dined.

By November Spix and Martius reached the coast of eastern Brazil and the town of Salvador in Bahia. The grinding travel schedule had taken its toll, so they rested there until mid-February 1819 to recover their strength. They then set out north through the harsh drought-prone north east of Brazil. They suffered extreme hardships, notably lack of water, and often travelled in uninhabited country. By May they had reached the banks of the river São Francisco at Juàzeiro.

Along the north and south shores of the great river they found the thorny caatinga woodlands. This dry country stretched in all directions to the horizon and beyond. It was sparsely settled and mainly used for sheep and cattle pasture. In this strange dry land Spix spent some time collecting birds.

Among other things, it was here that he shot a magnificent long-tailed blue parrot for their collection. The bird was taken from some curious woodlands found along the side of creeks seen in that part of the caatinga. The specimen of the parrot was tagged and brief notes were made about it. Spix recorded that ‘it lives in flocks, although very rare, near Juàzeiro in the region bordering the São Francisco, [and is] notable for its thin voice.’ Spix didn’t realise that he had just taken the very first specimen of a bird that would one day symbolise how human greed and ignorance were wiping countless life forms from the record of creation.

From Juàzeiro the pair travelled through the parched woodlands north along the river Caninde to Oeiras in Piauí, close to the modern city of Floriano. Martius wrote ‘The caatingas mostly consisted of sparse bushes and in the lowland areas, where there was much more water, the carnauva palms formed stately forests, the sight of which was as strange as it was delightful. Blue macaws, which live in the dense tops of these palms, flew up screeching above us.’ It seemed that the travellers had happened on more Hyacinth Macaws or perhaps their rarer and smaller cousins, Lear’s Macaws – one of the ‘four blues’ exhibited in Berlin in 1900 (see chapter 4).

By the end of 1819 Spix and Martius had worked their way inland about 3,000 kilometres further west, mainly by river, penetrating deep inside the seemingly limitless rainforests of the Amazon basin. From here they split up and travelled further into the vast interior of South America. They finally arrived nearly 3,000 kilometres further downstream at the port of Belém in Pará at the mouth of Amazon on 16 April 1820. Their collection of specimens and live animals was loaded aboard the Nova Amazonia and they set sail for Lisbon. They travelled through Spain and France to arrive back in Munich on 10 December 1820, nearly four years after they had left.

Throughout their extensive travels Spix and Martius made careful observations and notes on the wildlife they encountered. They were also careful to note details of the local economy in the places they visited, especially mining and agriculture, and in so doing they painted a picture for those who would follow of investment, trading and other commercial opportunities. It is no coincidence that the greatest concentration of German industry anywhere in the world today is still in the Brazilian super metropolis of São Paulo. Certainly this fact is linked to the historical relationships between the two countries and the commercially significant information provided by early travellers. Thus commenced centuries of encroachment into the world’s biologically richest and remotest places – a process that continues today, only now hugely accelerated and more often with the aid of remote sensing from spacecraft than with the assistance of mules.

Spix and Martius recorded their travels in three substantial volumes published in 1823, 1828 and 1831 in which they dedicated their great scientific achievements to their royal patron. ‘Attachment to Your Majesty and to the sciences was the Guardian Genius that guided us amidst the danger and fatigues of so extensive a journey, through a part of the world so imperfectly known, and brought us back in safety, from that remote hemisphere to our native land,’ they wrote. But only the first volume was a joint venture. Martius completed volumes two and three alone following the death of Spix in 1826. He was forty-six and had never really recovered from extremely poor health that resulted from the privations and sickness he experienced in Brazil. Martius went on to write a classic work on palms that he completed in 1850. He died in 1868.

Not only was the account of what they saw of great importance; their collection made a substantial contribution to the Natural History Museum of Munich. They brought back specimens from 85 species of mammals, 350 species of birds, 116 species of fish, 2,700 insects and 6,500 botanical specimens. They also managed to bring live animals back, including some parrots and monkeys. Many of their specimens were from species of animals and plants new to science.

Among the treasures brought home to Bavaria was the blue parrot shot by Spix near to Juàzeiro in the north of Bahia, not far from the river São Francisco. Since it was blue with a long tail, it seems that Spix believed he had taken a Hyacinth Macaw.

It was customary by this time for all species to be assigned a two-part name, mainly in the then international scientific language of Latin – but also Greek – following the classification system proposed during the eighteenth century by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, better known as Linnaeus. The idea was to avoid the confusion often created by the use of several different colloquial names by adopting a common international system. The first part of the name denoted the genus, that is the group of closely related creatures or plants to which the specimen belonged. The second half of the title was to identify the particular species.

Whether he knew about Latham’s name for the blue parrot or simply used the name in ignorance (this occurred quite commonly in the early years of natural history classification), Spix confusingly called the little blue caatinga macaw Arara hyacinthinus in his volume called Avium Brasiliensium Species Novae published in 1824–5. He also had specimens of the larger, and similarly blue, Hyacinth Macaws that he proposed be renamed Anodorhyncho Maximiliani. ‘Anodorhyncho’ was a new name proposed by Spix to denote the genus of large blue macaws to which it belonged, and ‘Maximiliani’ was in honour of the King who had sponsored his explorations in South America.

The confusion that Spix evidently experienced in naming his blue parrots was quite understandable. Unlike modern naturalists, Spix was not able to rely on a glossy field book that succinctly set out with accurate colour pictures, maps and clear descriptions what birds he might encounter on his travels through the interior of Brazil. Even now, at the start of the twenty-first century, there is still no handy field and identification guide for Brazilian birds, although Helmut Sick’s 1993 Birds in Brazil provides a comprehensive overview of birds occurring in the country. It is worth noting that many dozens of guides are available for European birds, a portion of the globe with far fewer endangered species.

With no manual to rely on, it was not a straightforward business for Spix to recognise new species, let alone ones that had already been collected by other museums or expeditions. For a start, any naturalist seeking to catalogue a vast and diverse country like Brazil, even for a relatively obvious and distinctive group of animals like birds (even large blue parrots), would need a basic understanding of what had already been collected and what typical geographical variations might be expected over different species’ sometimes vast ranges. Such knowledge in early nineteenth-century Bavaria was, as elsewhere, extremely scarce.

It was not until 1832, six years after Spix’s death, that the magnitude of his error became apparent. The blue parrot he had collected in the caatinga, and so carefully transported all the way back to Munich, was utterly unique, unlike anything else ever catalogued: Spix had found a new species. It later emerged that not only was it a species new to science, it was a representative of a whole ‘new’ genus.

Spix’s mistake was noticed first by another Bavarian naturalist, his assistant Johann Wagler. Wagler, a Professor of Zoology at the University of Munich, realised that the bird collected by Spix was smaller than the birds previously described as Hyacinth Macaws and was a different colour too. It had a greyish head, black bare skin on its face, instead of the yellow patches seen in the Hyacinth, and it had a smaller and more delicate bill than the bigger Hyacinth Macaw and its relatives.

In his Monograph of Parrots published in 1832, Wagler paid tribute to the bird’s collector in the naming of a ‘new’ species after him; Sittace Spixii, he called it – a name basically meaning ‘Spix’s Parrot’. Wagler, like Spix, completed his bird book just in time. That same year, Wagler was involved in a shooting accident. He peppered his arm with small shot while out collecting birds. He contracted blood poisoning, amputation was fatally delayed and he died in the summer, aged thirty-two.

Following Wagler’s realisation that a species new to science had been found, the French naturalist Prince Charles Bonaparte proposed in the 1850s that it be placed in a new genus called Cyanopsittaca. Bonaparte, the son of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Lucien, was a passionate ornithologist who had a special interest in parrots. Since this bird was unlike the other blue macaws in several important respects, Bonaparte believed that a whole new genus of parrots was warranted. He took the Greek word for blue, Kyanos, and the Latin for parrot, Psittacus, to denote a new genus literally meaning ‘blue parrot’.

In the 1860s in a monograph of parrots compiled by the German ornithologist Otto Finsch there is an everyday German name that translated means ‘Spix’s Blue Macaw’. Finsch wrote that the small blue macaw was easy to distinguish from the Hyacinth Macaw because of its smaller size and more bare skin on its face and around its eyes. He concluded that it was ‘An exceedingly rare species and found in few museums. Discovered by Spix on the river São Francisco at Juàzeiro’. Significantly, he wrote that, ‘Other travellers do not mention it at all.’

Three decades later, the Italian zoologist Count Tommaso Salvadori compiled the Catalogue of the Parrots in the Collection of the British Museum. Salvadori completed his two-year task in 1891. He retained Spix’s bird in a genus called Cyanopsittacus. The fact that no other birds quite like it had been discovered meant that it remained in the genus on its own, thereby signalling that it was quite unique with characteristics seen in no other bird.

The second half of its scientific name was spixii. From now on, the bird collected in 1819 by the river São Francisco would be known in its scientific Latin form as Cyanopsittacus – or more commonly today Cyanopsitta spixii, and in English as Spix’s Macaw.

The fact that the species was now officially recorded was, however, to prove a mixed blessing. It intrigued not only scientists, but also conservationists and collectors, the former seeking to save the species, the latter to own and possess the most sought-after of all birds. But the blue caatinga parrots were to prove an elusive quarry for all concerned.

Astonishingly, Spix’s Macaw effectively disappeared from the eyes of naturalists and travellers, and was not observed in the wild for eighty-four years after Spix had first encountered one. The fact that Spix’s Macaw was a rare bird was not lost on the early cataloguers and naturalists. Indeed, no European recorded one alive in the wild again until the start of the twentieth century when Othmar Reiser saw Spix’s Macaws during an expedition of the Austrian Academy of Sciences to north-eastern Brazil in June 1903.

He wrote, ‘As I knew that Spix had discovered this rare and beautiful parrot in the area of the river São Francisco near Juàzeiro, I made sure to keep an eye out for it in the area described. Unfortunately without success. Any enquiries made to the local people were also negative.’ Finally, at the lake at Parnaguá in the state of Piauí, more than 400 kilometres to the west of Juàzeiro, Reiser and his companions were rewarded with two sightings of the elusive blue bird. They reported one sighting of three birds and another of a pair. ‘They arrive apparently from a long distance and the thirsty birds at first perch, calling, on the tops of the trees on the beach to survey the surrounding area as a precaution. After flapping their wings for a few times they fly down to the ground with ease and drink slowly and long from pools or the water at the bank.’2

Reiser tried to approach but found the birds nervous and not tolerant of people. His attempts to shoot the macaws in order to obtain a specimen failed. ‘So it was that the parrot species most desired by us was the only one to be observed, but not collected’, he wrote. The only other encounter with Spix’s Macaw noted during this expedition was a captive bird shown to the party in the town of Remanso. Reiser tried to buy it, but lamented that it was not for sale.

But other Spix’s Macaws were for sale. Despite the lack of scientific observations by naturalists working in the field, the blue parrots were certainly leaving Brazil for a life in captivity overseas.

In 1878, the Zoological Society of London at Regent’s Park had obtained a live bird for its collection from Paris. It died and so the zoo set out to get hold of a replacement. In November 1894, a second bird was procured for the Society by Walter Rothschild: that one lasted until 1900. A third was held at the London Zoo from June 1901 but expired after just a year. These individuals were among a steady trickle that by the late nineteenth century were being exported to meet a growing demand for live rare parrots. In common with other rare species, when these birds died they were often included in museum collections. Following the demise of the first Zoological Society specimen, its skin was preserved and placed in the collection held by the British (now Natural History) Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire. The second London bird’s skin is now kept in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And it wasn’t only the large zoological institutions like London that were interested in owning them. In late Victorian England, as in other parts of the world, aviculture was growing in popularity, and private bird collectors certainly knew of the Spix’s Macaw as a rare and desirable addition to a parrot fancier’s aviaries.