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

In the December 1897 issue of Avicultural Magazine, a journal for serious bird keepers, the Honourable and Reverend F. G. Dutton from Bibury in Gloucestershire wrote, ‘Have any of our members kept a Spix? I have seen only two – one that our zoo acquired some years ago from the Jardin d’Acclimatation [in Paris], and one bought by Mr Rothschild … They were both ill tempered: but as the first had a broken wing, it had probably been caught old. I was greatly tempted by the offer of one from Mr Cross the other day, but there are so many calls on a parson’s purse, that he cannot always treat himself to expensive parrots. I ought to have been keeper at the parrot-house in the zoo.’ Although he does not mention a price, it is clear that even in the late nineteenth century Spix’s Macaws were the preserve of the more discerning and wealthier bird collectors.

After Dutton had published his request for details on any Spix’s Macaws kept in Britain at that time, a Mr Henry Fulljames of Elmbourne Road in Balham, London, came forward. The Reverend soon paid Fulljames a visit at his house to view his parrot collection. Dutton wrote, ‘Lastly, the most interesting bird was the Spix’s Macaw … It was very tame and gentle, but not, as regards plumage, in the best of condition. I never can see a bird in rough plumage without longing to get it right. And so it has been arranged between Mr Fulljames and myself that I should have the Spix at Bibury, and try what a little outdoor life might do for it.’ Although Dutton had hatched an apparently foolproof plan to have a Spix’s Macaw for free, at least temporarily, Henry Fulljames’s housekeeper put an end to the scheme. She was very reluctant to lose sight of the Spix’s and the bird stayed where it was.

The Reverend persevered, however, and by September 1900 he had acquired a Spix’s Macaw of his own. ‘My Spix, which is really more a conure than a macaw, will not look at sop of any sort,’ he wrote, ‘except sponge cake given from one’s fingers, only drinks plain water and lives mainly on sunflower seed. It has hemp, millet, canary and peanuts but I do not think it eats much of any of them. It barks the branches of the tree where it is loose, and may eat the bark. It would very likely be all the better if it would eat bread and milk, as it might then produce some flight feathers, which it never yet has had.’ He later wrote that his Spix’s Macaw, which lived in his study, was learning to talk.

The Reverend Dutton was not the only one to wonder if Spix’s Macaw might not be closer to the conures than the other macaws. Conures are slender parrots with long tails. They are confined to the Americas and are mainly included in two genera: Aratinga and Pyrrhura. Several writers repeated Dutton’s conjecture, but given the many macaw-like characteristics of Cyanopsitta it is safer to assume that it is a macaw.

By the early twentieth century, Spix’s Macaws were well known among bird keepers, at least from books. In Butler’s 1909 Foreign Birds for Cage and Aviary, the author refers to the earlier published claims that Spix’s Macaws are bad-tempered birds. ‘As all bird keepers know well,’ Butler wrote, ‘it is impossible to be certain of the character of any species from the study of one or two examples only. Even in the case of birds which are generally ill tempered and malicious, amiable individuals may occasionally be met with. Moreover circumstances may alter cases, and a Parrot chained by the leg to a stand may be excused for being more morose than one in a roomy cage.’ Butler, in common with previous commentators, remarked that Spix’s Macaws were extremely rare.

Another famous aviculturist in the early part of the twentieth century was the Marquis of Tavistock. In his book on Parrots and Parrot-like Birds in Aviculture published in the 1920s, he remarked that, ‘This rather attractive little blue macaw was formerly extremely rare, but a few have been brought over during recent years. It is not noisy, is easily tamed and sometimes makes a fair talker. There seems to be little information as to its ability to stand cold or as to its behaviour in mixed company, but it is probably neither delicate nor spiteful … In the living bird the feathers of the head and neck stand out in a curious fashion, giving a peculiar and distinctive appearance.’

While birds occasionally turned up in collections, attempts to find Spix’s Macaws in the wild were repeatedly frustrated. In 1927, Ernst Kaempfer had been in the field with his wife collecting birds in eastern Brazil for two years. Although the Kaempfers had managed to ship some 3,500 bird specimens back to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Spix’s Macaw still eluded them.

Following a search on the north shore of the river São Francisco near to Juàzeiro, Kaempfer wrote that

The region is one of the ugliest we have seen on the whole trip. No forest or anything alike; the vegetation is a low underbrush and open camp where grass only grows. The river is very large here forming on both shores large strips of swamp; the latter ones without any particular bird life besides small Ardeidae [heron family] and common rails. Owing to the character of the country the collection we could make was small only. All questions about Cyanopsitta Spixii that Spix discovered here a hundred years ago were fruitless, nobody knew anything about such a parrot.

The only Spix’s Macaw that Kaempfer was able to track down was a captive one that he saw at Juàzeiro railway station, another bird taken locally from the wild and about to embark by train on the first leg of a journey to lead a life in distant and obscure captivity.

In the early twentieth century, the only certainty surrounding Spix’s Macaw was its scarcity. As Carl Hellmayr, an Austrian naturalist studying the birds of South America with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, put it in 1929: it is ‘one of the great rarities among South American parrots’. Indeed, during the entire first half of the century, the only other possible record of the species in the wild, apart from Reiser’s in 1903, was a vague mention from Piauí before 1938.3 This report, from the extreme south of the dry and remote state, was in an area of deciduous woodlands that comprises a transition zone between the arid caatinga and the more lush savannas of central Brazil.

The species was not heard from again in the wild until the 1970s. Various collectors and zoos however owned Spix’s Macaws. Living birds were exported from Brazil to a wide variety of final destinations. Several went to the United States, where one was for example kept in the Chicago Zoo from 1928 for nearly twenty years. Others finished up in the UK, where several private collectors and zoos, such as Paignton in Devon and Mossley Hill in Liverpool, kept them. In all, there were up to seven in the UK in the 1930s. At least one was kept in Ulster during the late 1960s; a recording of this bird’s call is in the British Library of Wildlife Sounds. Spix’s Macaws were also kept in The Netherlands at Rotterdam Zoo and in Germany. One spent some time at the Vienna Zoo during the 1920s, while at least a pair had been imported to Portugal from Paraguay.

Spix’s Macaws were also supplied to collectors in Brazil itself and at least one was successful in breeding them. During the 1950s a parrot collector called Alvaro Carvalhães obtained one from a local merchant and managed to borrow another from a friend. They fortunately formed a breeding pair – by no means a foregone conclusion with fickle parrots – and after several breeding attempts young were reared. Carvalhães built up a breeding stock of four pairs that between them produced twenty hatchlings. One of these later finished up in the Naples Zoo. The rest remained in Brazil where they were split up with another breeder, Carvalhães’s friend and neighbour, Ulisses Moreira. The birds began to die one by one as time passed, but the final blow that finished off Moreira’s macaws was a batch of sunflower seeds contaminated with agricultural pesticides. This killed most of the parrots in the collection, including his Spix’s Macaws.

Although there was evidently a continuing flow of wild-caught Spix’s Macaws during the 1970s to meet international demand in bird-collecting circles, the openness with which collectors declared the ownership of such rare creatures sharply declined in the late 1960s. At that point, the trade in such birds was attracting the attention of agencies and governments who were increasingly concerned about the impact of trapping and trade on rare species.

Brazil banned the export of its native wildlife in 19674 and the Spix’s Macaw became further prohibited in international trade under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 1975.5 With effect from 1 July that year, all international commercial trade in Spix’s Macaws between countries that had ratified the Convention was illegal, except in cases where the birds were involved in official captive-breeding programmes, or were being transferred for approved educational or scientific purposes.

This new legal protection didn’t stop the trade, however; it simply forced it underground. To the extent that the trafficking was increasingly secret, the volume of commerce and the final destinations for birds being captured was unknown to anyone but a few dealers, trappers and rare parrot collectors. Despite the increasingly clandestine exploitation of wild Spix’s Macaws and a near-total absence of details about its impact, it was becoming ever more clear that the species must be in danger of extinction in the wild. The blue parrot first collected by Spix would come to symbolise a bitter irony: people’s obsessive fascination with parrots was paradoxically wiping them out.

3 Parrot Fashion

Parrots are surprisingly like people and can bring out both the best and worst in humans. From love and loyalty to greed and jealousy, the human qualities of parrots can provoke the most basic of our human responses in their keepers. Perhaps that is why for centuries parrots have been our closest and most cherished avian companions.

There are hundreds of kinds of parrot. The smallest are the tiny pygmy parrots of New Guinea that weigh in at just 10 grams – about the size of a wren or kinglet. These minuscule parrots creep like delicate animated jewellery along the trunks and branches of trees in the dense, dark rainforests of New Guinea. The heaviest parrot, the rotund nocturnal Kakapo (Strigops habroptilis) of New Zealand, grows up to 300 times larger. These great flightless parrots, camouflaged so they resemble a huge ball of moss, can weigh up to 3 kilos.6

Some parrots are stocky with short tails, others elegant with long flowing plumes. The smaller slender ones with long tails are often known as parakeets (the budgerigar, Melopsittacus undulata, is one), while it is the stouter birds that most people would generally recognise as ‘parrots’. The mainly white ones with prominent crests are called cockatoos and the large gaudy South American ones with long tails macaws. Despite this remarkable diversity, all of them are instantly recognisable, even to lay people, as members of the same biological family. The unique hooked bill, and feet, with two toes facing forwards and two backwards, identify them straight away.

Where the parrots came from is a baffling biological question. Many different ancestries have been suggested, including distant relationships with birds as diverse as pigeons, hawks and toucans. Even with modern genetic techniques it has not been possible to unravel the ancestral relationships between parrots and other modern birds. What is known, however, is that parrot-like birds have been around for a very long time.

The oldest parrot is known from a fossil found by a Mr S. Vincent in 1978 at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex, England. The tiny fragile clues that these diminutive birds ever existed were painstakingly investigated by scientists who identified the species as ‘new’: they named the creature Pulchrapollia gracilis. ‘Pulchrapollia’ translates literally as ‘beautiful Polly’, and ‘gracilis’ means slender.

This ancient parrot was small and delicate – not much larger than a modern-day budgie. Its remains were found in Early Eocene London Clay deposits dated at about 55.4 million years old. More remarkable than even this great antiquity is the suggestion that parrots might have been around even earlier. A fossil bird found in the Lance Formation in Wyoming in the USA might be a parrot too. If it is, it would demonstrate the presence of such birds in the Late Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago, thereby confirming that parrots coexisted with the animals they are ultimately descended from: the dinosaurs. Awesome antiquity indeed.7 To place this ancestry in perspective, the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens) are believed to have appeared only about 200,000 years ago.

Across the aeons of biological time since the first parrots appeared, the group has evolved into one of the world’s largest bird families. Of the 350 or so species of parrot known today, some are widespread, others confined to tiny areas. In either case, most species are found in the warm tropical latitudes. Some do, however, brave freezing temperatures in high mountains in the tropics, for example the high Andes, or extend into cooler temperate areas, such as New Zealand and southern South America. The Austral Conure (Enicognathus ferrugineus) for example toughs out a living in the raw cool climate of Tierra del Fuego, while the Antipodes Parakeet (Cyanoramphus unicolor) occupies the windswept outpost of Antipodes Island and neighbouring rugged islets in the Pacific well to the south of New Zealand. The Andean Parakeet (Bolborhynchus orbygnesius) has been recorded on the high montane grasslands at over 6,000 metres in the high Andes.

The majority of the world’s parrot species are found today in South America, Australia and New Guinea. The single country with most species is Brazil: over seventy different kinds are known from there. In mainland Asia from Indochina to Pakistan and in Africa there are remarkably few. This uneven distribution appears to be linked to the break-up of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland.8 Whether people have as yet documented the existence of all the living parrots is an open question. Three species of parrot new to science have been found since the late 1980s.9 All are from South America and amazingly have waited until the Space Age to be noticed, let alone studied.

Though we still know little of these birds’ place in nature, parrots have become uniquely familiar to humans and have been closely associated with people for centuries. The oldest document in the literature of the Indian subcontinent is the Rigveda, or Veda of the Stanzas, of about 1,400 BC. This ancient work, written in Sanskrit, remarks on the great fidelity of parrots and records how in the mythology of that time they were symbols of the moon.

The Ancient Greeks were also well aware of parrots. The historian and physician Ctesias travelled widely in the East in around 400 BC. As well as holding the great distinction of producing the first published account of unicorns, he also brought news to Europe of curious human-like birds kept by the natives in the lands he visited. Aristotle wrote some 100 years later about a parrot, but he may not have seen it himself because he described it, presumably on the strength of its hooked bill, as a kind of hawk.

During his conquests of the fourth century BC the Macedonian general Alexander the Great marched through Afghanistan to the Indus valley in modern-day Pakistan. There his men acquired parrots that were later brought home with their other spoils of war. Alexander was probably the first person to bring live parrots to Europe. They were medium-sized green parakeets marked with black on the face and with maroon patches on the wings. They had long tails and a shrill cry. They are today known as Alexandrine Parakeets (Psittacula eupatria).

After Alexander’s conquests, the expansion of trade between the Greek city states and the Orient ensured that Europeans would soon become more familiar with parrots. In the second century BC the earliest known picture of a parrot was produced in a mosaic at the ancient Greek city of Pergamum.

The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote in 50 BC about parrots he had seen in Syria. Since no parrot is native to that country today, they were most likely imported; probably from Africa. In AD 50 Pliny described parrots that he said were discovered by explorers sent to Egypt. Although these birds are not known to occur naturally in Egypt now, they might have been imported from the savannas beyond the desert, or it might have been that the desert was less extensive than it is today. Other accounts of the same birds gave their origin as India. Since there is only one parrot in the world that has a natural distribution that embraces both Africa and India it is very likely that these birds were Ring-necked Parakeets (Psittacula krameri). This species is one of the most widespread, adaptable and common parrots in the world today, and has a long history of living with people.

Ring-necked Parakeets were, for example, prized in Ancient Rome where they were kept as pets. So valuable did they become that they were often sold for more than the price of a human slave. Demand was intense, so a brisk trade built up with birds brought into Europe in large numbers. They were kept in ornate cages made from silver and decorated with ivory and tortoiseshell. Noblemen carried the birds through the streets of Rome as a colourful accessory. The statesman and philosopher Marcus Cato wrote, ‘Oh, wretched Rome! What times are these that women should feed dogs upon their laps and men should carry parrots on their hands.’ Some parrots, however, found a less fortunate fate in Rome. During the rule of Emperor Heliogabalus from 222 to 205 BC they became a table delicacy. Not only that but they were fed to his lions too, along with peacocks.

With the decline of Rome and its excesses, parrot keeping faded in Europe. A few Ring-necked Parakeets made it back with Crusaders and merchants during the Middle Ages and Marco Polo came across cockatoos in India, although they are not native to the Subcontinent and presumably had made their way there on the trade routes from further east. Today the most westerly distributed naturally occurring cockatoos are found in islands in the Moluccan Sea and in the Philippines. French sailors also found African Grey Parrots (Psittacus erithacus) in the Canary Islands. They had been imported there from West Africa. These parrots were found to be excellent talkers and by the middle of the fifteenth century a steady flow of birds to the islands had been established from Portuguese trading posts along the African coast.

Popular, colourful and in short supply, parrots once again became expensive status symbols. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – the great age of exploration – the fact that parrots were fashionable, in big demand and valuable meant that sailors travelling to new lands in tropical latitudes were on the look-out for them.

When Columbus returned to Seville in 1493 from his first expedition to the Caribbean, the parrots he brought back were displayed at his ceremonial reception. He had obtained the birds from natives who had tamed them. A pair was presented to his royal patron, Queen Isabella of Castile. These parrots were probably the species of bird from the genus Amazona that remains native to Cuba and the Bahamas today, the Cuban Amazon or Cuban Parrot (Amazona leucocephala).

As the Conquistadors pressed their explorations throughout the islands and deeper into the mainlands of Central and South America, they found the practice of taming and keeping parrots was commonplace among the local populations. There is every reason to believe that the indigenous peoples of the tropics have kept parrots for thousands of years, and certainly for a lot longer than Europeans, a practice that many tribal societies continue to this day. Forest dwelling peoples with an intimate knowledge of their surroundings took the colourful birds to the heart of their culture where they became prized and revered possessions. Small-scale collecting by indigenous people for local trade was, however, very different from the approach of the Europeans. The foreigners had wholeheartedly embarked on their globalisation adventure and wanted volume supplies for the mass markets back home.

The parrots and the forest people were to have a lot in common. One was to face biological oblivion, the other cultural genocide. There is a story from 1509 in which the tame parrots belonging to local villages raised the alarm about an impending attack. Perched in the trees and on huts around a village, the birds screamed and shouted at the approach of Spanish soldiers, thereby enabling the local population to escape from their assailants into the forest. But the alliance of birds and ‘Stone Age’ humans was no match for muskets and axes. They did not resist the might of the colonial powers for long. The birds and the forests were soon victims of an unprecedented age of plunder.

In the 1500s the plumage of brightly coloured birds became fashionable for personal ornamentation. Taxes levied on the Indian populations recently subjugated by European armies were partly paid in macaw feathers. The long plumes of these birds were naturally collectable, desirable, exotic and beautiful. European consumers wanted them and would pay handsomely. Feathers were one thing, whole birds quite another. As the voyages of novelty-hungry explorers penetrated more and more remote localities, so the variety of parrots brought home increased. In 1501, Portuguese sailors brought the first macaws back to Europe from Brazil. The birds were known to the local people as ‘macauba’ and were probably Scarlet Macaws (Ara macao). Such birds were to become among the most desirable of all parrots to cage and own. Later on, a blue one would also enter the trade. That creature, the Spix’s Macaw, would become the most valuable of all.

In 1505 parrots were imported to England. They were an instant success and became fashionable accessories, at least for the better off. In addition to his six wives, Henry VIII kept one (an African Grey) at Hampton Court. A portrait of William Brooke, 10th Baron Cobham, with his family painted in the middle 1500s hangs at Longleat House in Wiltshire, England. It portrays a family dressed in typical Tudor clothes seated around a meal table. A parrot stands among the dishes of food. It looks like some species of amazon but is not any bird we know today.

Being vegetarian and able to thrive on a diet of seeds and fruits,10 parrots could endure the long sea voyages that would kill most insectivorous birds. The trade became more regular and grew increasingly lucrative as the birds’ popularity soared. The establishment of Portuguese and Dutch colonies in Asia would soon ensure a supply of birds from the East too.

Mass-produced metal cages meant that the birds became more widespread in captivity as the ever-expanding supply of wild parrots brought down prices. When zoological gardens were opened in European cities during the nineteenth century, the cheeky, colourful parrots were an instant hit with the public. London Zoo was the first scientific zoological garden in the modern world. It was founded in 1828 and opened its gates on the fringes of the green expanse of Regent’s Park as a means to fund the scientific work of the London Zoological Society. Parrots were a big draw; so a special building, the Parrot House, was opened.

The red-brick Parrot House at the Zoo today is an essential part of the gardens’ character and stands as a monument to the popularity of parrots during Britain’s imperial age. Many of the parrots that have passed through there are among the rarest, most beautiful and coveted creatures in the world. Spix’s Macaws were fleetingly among them, but in an age when the fragility of our world was undreamt of, little or no thought would have been spared for the precariousness of these birds’ existence.