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

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Parrots are almost legendary for their longevity. There are many stories of parrots living in excess of 100 years and of birds that have become family heirlooms passed down between generations. Certainly there are birds that have been in families for many years, but the oldest documented birds have not lived beyond their sixties.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the time macaws reach their fifties they often have cataracts, arthritis and are approaching senility. Some other birds live for a long time, members of the albatross family for example,

(#litres_trial_promo) but the longevity of parrots is quite exceptional nonetheless.

Their human-like traits give parrots a unique personality and character. What other birds have so consistently managed to grab tabloid newspaper headlines? There have been stories of parrots that wolf-whistle at blondes, about a parrot that swore at wild birds when it got stuck up a tree in the garden, the parrot who told the firemen to rescue him before putting the fire out and the ship’s mascot that yelled ‘arse’ and ‘bollocks’ from a cupboard during an important speech by the Admiral and told the rating to ‘fuck off’ when asked to be quiet. There was another story about a parrot that telephoned the police when its owner was locked out.

Tens of millions of years of quite separate evolutionary advance lies between people and parrots. Yet the psychology of these birds and humans has uniquely converged. They are the most human-like of birds, which has made them irresistible to human curiosity. And the appeal seems to go both ways. Not only can parrots build long-term relationships with other parrots, but also with other long-lived sociable creatures – people.

Rosemary Low knows all about that. She has kept parrots for more than forty years. Starting with budgies when she was twelve, Low progressed from there to larger and more demanding species. She has a vast published literature to her name, including a seminal work on the care and breeding of parrots printed in three editions.

(#litres_trial_promo) She has looked after some of the world’s largest parrot collections and has an impressive track record of breeding the birds in captivity. In the early 1960s at sixteen, she acquired an African Grey via a friend’s father who was a bank manager in Nigeria. She says it was her first real parrot and gave her many insights into the challenges of keeping the birds in captivity.

Low believes that parrots’ ability to mimic human sounds and to interact emotionally with people has been their downfall.

This is why the African Grey is so popular, but it is a tragedy. They are among the most sensitive birds and there is probably no parrot species less suited to a life in captivity. They have so many behavioural problems when caged. You practically need a degree in psychology to understand grey parrots. They are very clever birds. Like cockatoos they soon learn to manipulate people. The owners can’t cope with them any more so they get passed on from one place to another. It would be like a child finding itself in a new home every eighteen months or so. If it was a person it would be enough for it to end up in a psychiatric hospital.

Captive-bred parrots make better companions but cost at least twice as much. Until very recently there was little interest in breeding the likes of the more common species of amazon parrots, cockatoos or macaws for the pet market because they were so cheap and readily available from the wild. And costs aside, captive breeding is not as straightforward as it sounds.

With the larger and more intelligent parrots in particular, one of the main issues in captive breeding is compatibility. As is the case with humans, it is not sufficient to put a male and female parrot together and expect them to produce and rear young. A pair of birds randomly selected by human keepers can sit together for years and do nothing but, if provided with a partner they like, will nest immediately. Although it can be worth leaving birds together for a period to see if they will finally accept one another, placing parrots with incompatible partners can also lead to stress and emotional damage – something else people can relate to.

The natural commitment to one partner can translate into close relationships with their human keepers and has given pet parrots a reputation for devotion, faithfulness and affection. But the fact that parrots choose who they will or will not bond with can also be a source of disappointment for parrot owners. Having bought a bird, the new keeper can sometimes find that it decides to bond with another member of the human family or a friend. And parrots can also demonstrate fierce jealousy in taking a dislike to individuals whom they regard as competitors for the affections of their ‘partners’. Such selective bonding and expression of choice leads Low to believe that parrots are capable of almost human emotions.

The combination of this human-like emotional sophistication, an instinct for loyalty, the ability to mimic speech – and even to communicate with words – added to their astonishing and vivid beauty, has paradoxically proved a curse to the parrots. The range and depth of their attractions have made some species immensely valuable financially.

A large part of the problem is that parrots are highly collectable. Reminiscent of stamps, antiquarian books and paintings, there are lots of different kinds and several subsets for individual collectors to specialise in. Once the human obsession for rarity is added to the list of attractions in demand, then a lethal combination emerges: not least because one effect of scarcity is to escalate demand. This pushes up prices, leading to more trapping and then more scarcity. This market vortex has sucked down some species to the very brink of extinction.

Although most rare parrots are protected from trade under international law, as well as in most cases national legislation in the countries were they are found, the clandestine traffic in rare birds flourishes. Parrots are today part of an illegal trade in wildlife that ranks second in value only to the multibillion-dollar clandestine drugs and arms markets.

Even though the rarest and most protected kinds must often be kept in secret for fear of detection by the authorities, for the collectors there is still the irresistible allure of possessing birds that other people in your circle do not. The parallels with stolen works of art are surely apposite. The ‘owners’ enjoy the bird’s beauty and uniqueness with the added kick of exclusive control of an object passionately sought and admired by others. The fact that other clandestine collectors know (or believe) that you have it adds further to the attraction. This is a shadowy world of rumour, double-dealing and half-truths.

For some of the leading parrot collectors the challenge of breeding is important. Many also rationalise a conservation motive into their passion for rare birds, and in this respect a minority are sincere. But in the end it is rarity that is the sharpest spur. As in Ancient Rome, parrots are potent symbols of civilisation, wealth and high living; they remain in demand as expensive accessories of rich and powerful men. In this close-knit world, birds like Spix’s Macaws are the epitome of quality and grace; they are in the realm of the true elite.

At this end of the market, large sums of money change hands. Many thousands of dollars are routinely paid for a single rare parrot. But even though the resale value of birds and their offspring can be considerable, for the majority of these specialists cash is not the primary motivation. Some collectors spend fortunes on their parrot-keeping facilities and there is no way they could regain their costs from the sale of birds. A small number are much more businesslike and breed rare parrots on a commercial basis.

And where there is valuable property and jealousy, there is theft. Rare parrots are frequently stolen from their owners. The rarest and most endangered parrots are most at risk. Puerto Rican Parrots (Amazona vittata) are one of the most endangered of all species. Some of these birds are kept in breeding aviaries run by the US Government at the Luquillo National Forest on their native island. In April 2001 bird thieves broke in and took several birds despite the careful attention of the biologists who had been working for decades to save them from extinction.

Until as recently as the late 1980s, the effect of trapping on many of the rare and collectable species in the wild was unknown. The driving force behind the demand for the birds was rarity in captivity. Parrots weren’t considered as real wild birds with natural habitats. So familiar a commodity had they become to the collectors that the idea of them disappearing from their native forests was not seriously considered. Even when the obvious rarity of some parrots was acknowledged and the impact of trapping logically seen as a threat, most enthusiasts denied they were connected to the plight of parrots in the wild. Collectors preferred to blame poor farmers clearing forests or developing-country governments rather than face the consequences of their own obsession.

But by the end of the twentieth century it was clear that many of the main target species taken for the elite collectors’ market were getting into serious trouble. They now comprised some of the rarest and most endangered birds in the world. Many of the worst-affected species occupied tiny ranges in the wild, often only a single small island.

When the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) came into force in 1975 (see page 34), thereby banning trade in some of the most threatened parrots, the smugglers tried every means possible to circumvent the treaty’s protective measures. Rare parrot laundering via countries with more open borders or less strict regulations, document falsification, disguising rare species as common ones and straightforward smuggling all occurred and still do.

Even in countries that had the will to enforce the Convention, the means used by the traders to evade detection grew ever more sophisticated. Parrots are packed inside sections of drainpipe, hidden inside vehicles’ spare tyres and put in plastic bottles to smuggle them past customs officials. Rare parrot eggs are taken on planes strapped against the body of smugglers to keep them warm, hatched in incubators, the babies hand-reared and the birds sold on for a fortune. Where detection of smuggling in some places has improved, the trade routes have shifted to exploit the next weakest point of entry.

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During the second half of the 1980s, the scale of the disaster about to overtake the world’s most familiar and popular birds finally became clear. One man was devoting his working life to the matter: Dr Nigel Collar at the International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP), a network of bird conservation groups from around the world headquartered at Cambridge in England.

(#litres_trial_promo) He had been writing about endangered birds for years and was the world expert on the subject. Collar had accumulated a vast global network of museum curators, academics and ornithologists who helped him piece together a picture of what was happening to the world’s fast-disappearing birds.

The results of this sifting through old manuscripts, field reports and collections, was the compilation of so-called Red Data Books. Collar’s great tomes systematically set out the situation faced by individual endangered species so that action to save them could be properly directed and prioritised. Basing his research on the collections and journals of the early natural history explorers like Spix and Martius, the fieldwork of top ornithologists and bird records compiled by different societies and academic bodies, Collar coordinated research that in 1988 led to the publication of Birds to Watch. It showed that more than one thousand species of bird out of a total of about ten thousand were in danger of disappearing for good.

One family was doing worse than any others – the parrots. Some 71 out of the 350 known species were then listed as at risk of extinction. Collar found that the principal reasons for this catastrophic decline were collection of birds for the pet and collector markets and destruction of the birds’ forest homes.

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Collar’s findings demanded that there was a change in the one-sided relationship between people and parrots. Hundreds of years of trapping and deforestation had taken their toll: there wasn’t much time to spare. Some of the most beautiful parrots were already at the very brink of extinction; for them the endgame was now in play. Just a few last moves were left as a final prelude to more than 50 million years of evolutionary memory being wiped away for good.

The group of parrots nearest to the edge was the blue macaws. Once seen in the flesh it is obvious why this group of spectacular blue parrots above all others should attract special attention from the trappers, dealers and collectors. Outstanding among even the parrots for charisma, charm and visual impact, the blue macaws – Spix’s among them – have been doomed by their unique qualities to become one of humanity’s most prized possessions.

4 The Four Blues (#ulink_662c8700-066c-5bd3-8f1a-e073fc24206e)

Visitors to the Berlin Zoo in 1900 enjoyed a unique spectacle. The crowds filing past the cages didn’t know it, but they were the only people in history to have seen all four species of the spectacular blue macaw alive together. In addition to the rare Spix’s Macaw, captive Hyacinth, Glaucous and Lear’s Macaws were then held in the Berlin aviaries as well. All had been imported from South America. These highly coveted zoological treasures would never meet again.

Today, the three large and similar-looking blue macaws are included in the biological genus Anodorhynchus, the name coined by Spix. These macaws are larger than the Cyanopsitta macaw first collected by Spix. They also differ from Spix’s in having a proportionately larger bill and curious patches of bare yellow skin at the base of the beak and around the eyes. The function of the bright startling highlights is unknown but could be to aid recognition, some form of adornment that is important for bonding and breeding or a means to reduce their temperature when the birds get too hot.

The large, black, hooked bill of the Anodorhynchus macaws is uniquely adapted for eating the fruits of various palms. The largest nuts eaten by the largest species, the Hyacinth Macaw, are about the size of a golf ball. Even with a big hammer or heavy-duty bench vice, it is impossible for a person to break them open. The macaws are, however, experts. They rotate the nuts in their bill manipulating where necessary with tongue and foot to place the tough objects in exactly the correct positioning for peeling. Once they have removed the tough external skin, the birds make perfect transverse cuts with the heavy square chisel at the cutting edge of the lower half of the bill that enables them to split the nuts in two. Inside is the prize, a nutritious fatty kernel.

As the palm trees evolved tougher and tougher shells to prevent their seeds being eaten, so the big blue macaws advanced a larger bill to crack them. And so it went on: an ecological arms race that produced surely the most impressive of all bird bills. Remarkably, the huge and powerful bill of these macaws is rarely used in anger. Despite having the potential to remove fingers easily, the birds are the gentle giants of the parrot world.

Fieldworkers studying Hyacinth Macaws have described the effect of their work on palm nuts as resembling that of a machine tool or laser rather than that of a bird’s bill. Once opened, the coconut-like flesh of the nut is crushed into a paste that the birds find absolutely irresistible. Hyacinth Macaws are clever when it comes to cracking such tough nuts. One German aviculturist noticed that when his macaws were given Acrocomia nuts brought home from a visit to South America the birds used small pieces of wood to help grip the fruits firmly in their beaks. His macaws would shave a small piece of wood 3–4 millimetres long from their perch, position it inside the upper half of their bill and use it as a wedge to keep the smooth nuts in place for easier opening.

These big blue macaws (the Hyancinth, Lears and Glaucous) can eat other food but their ecological niche is very much dependent on palms. Since they eat so many of the nuts, they need lots of palm trees to keep them going, so they live around types of palms that grow in communal clumps. They need palms that produce the right-sized nuts, and nuts that permit the extraction of the nutritious flesh. These exacting requirements are paramount in determining the distribution of these spectacular birds.

The largest of the 3 big blue macaws, Hyacinth Macaw, is the largest parrot in the world. The intelligence, huge size, striking coloration, dramatic appearance and pure charisma of these parrots make them exceptionally collectable. Their top-heavy appearance – a third of their muscle weight is concentrated in their large head to operate the massive beak – gives them a unique identity.

They have a comical expression, particularly when they’re flying – their features appear overemphasised. In some respects they resemble clowns and to the first-time observer it is as if nature has made some amusing mistake. They are very inquisitive, engaging and usually have quite a laid-back disposition. It is no wonder that ever since they were first seen they have been in demand. Rosemary Low sums up the Hyacinth’s appeal. ‘It is just such a charismatic creature, even if you don’t have the faintest interest in parrots you look at one and it just knocks you out. They are incredible birds, not just their colour but their behaviour, their character – it is extraordinary.’

Although there is undoubtedly more to it, colour plays a big part in the attraction. Blue land animals are rare. There aren’t any blue mammals and very few blue birds. Since earliest times people have placed a great value on blue and gone to great lengths to manufacture the colour. Plants from the genus Isatis (woad) yielded a blue dye called indigo that once held great ceremonial importance. Later on, this plant attained considerable commercial value. Until the advent of synthetic dyes, woad was cultivated in great plantations that were for a time a mainstay in some colonial economies. Indigo was, for example, the main export of El Salvador until coffee took over in the 1870s.

Among the parrots there are only a handful of species that are naturally mainly blue and very few that have completely blue or bluish plumage; the four blue macaws are the most spectacular. The least known of the trio of larger blue macaws is the Glaucous Macaw (Anodorhynchus glaucus).

THE GLAUCOUS MACAW

Europeans visiting South America made their first references to this bird during the late eighteenth century. Travellers to the southern part of the continent made their long journeys to the interior, as elsewhere in the vast New World, principally by river. It was in the middle reaches of the great rivers Paraguay, Paraná and Uruguay in southern South America that early chroniclers saw a large long-tailed blue parrot. Its general plumage was pale powdery blue but brighter, almost turquoise, above. It had a heavy greyish tinge on the underparts and head and in certain lights could appear nearly green. Sánchez Labrador, a Spanish priest dispatched by the Jesuits to work as a missionary with the Guaraní Indians in the region of what is today northern Argentina and southern Paraguay, was one of the first to write about a bird that was probably of this species.

Labrador worked there from 1734 until his return to Europe in 1767 following the expulsion of the Jesuits from the continent by the Spanish and Portuguese colonial authorities. He was a passionate naturalist who spent long hours documenting the wildlife in the many places he visited. Much of his writing remains unpublished and apparently languishes unedited in the archives of the Vatican. One manuscript on the fish and birds of Paraguay written in 1767 has, however, been printed. In it are some of the very few details from that era about the Glaucous Macaw.

The priest used the local Guaraní Indian name for the bird, Guaa obi. Guaa is the onomatopoeic name for macaw and obi (or hovy) describes a colour between blue and green. He wrote about one of these macaws that he met in the village of La Concepción de Nuestra Señora:

When a missionary arrived from another mission, the macaw would go to his lodging. If it found that the door was shut, it would climb up … with the help of its bill and feet until it reached the latch. It then made a sound as if knocking and often opened the door before it could be opened from the inside. It would climb on the chair in which the missionary was sitting and utter ‘guaa’ three or four times, making alluring movements with its head until it was spoken to as if thanking him for the visit and attention. Then it would climb down and go into the courtyard very contented.

If it did anything untoward to other tame birds, the missionary would call it. It would approach submissively and listen attentively to his accusation, the punishment for which was supposed to be a beating. When it heard this it lay on its back and positioned its feet as if making the sign of the cross and the missionary pretended to beat it with a belt. It lay there quietly … then it turned over, stood up and climb up the robe to the hand of the missionary, who had pronounced the punishment, to be stroked and spoken to kindly before leaving very satisfied … There are very many of these birds in the woods of the eastern bank of the Uruguay River, but they occur rarely in the forests along the Paraguay River.

Other travellers to the region also came across the Glaucous Macaw but similarly recorded very few details about its natural history. Félix de Azara lived in South America from 1781 to 1801. His 1805 account of his travels mentions a blue-green macaw that he saw on the Paraná and Uruguay rivers in Argentina and northwards to just inside the south of modern Paraguay. He said that the Guaa-hovy was a common bird along the banks of these rivers. Apart from a few details on its distribution, no more was noted.

The French explorer, Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny, travelled in southern South America between 1827 and 1835. He found the species on the Uruguay River, probably on both the Uruguayan and Brazilian sections, also in Argentina on the Paraná River. As well as making passing references to this species in his travel journals he ate one, but found it very tough and the taste disagreeable. He noted that it was not a very common bird. More significant than details about the culinary potential of the Glaucous Macaw, however, was his observation of the vast swaths of yatay palms that grew on the rich soils that flanked the broad watercourses. These palms made a big impression on d’Orbigny. In his journal for 23 April 1827, he wrote:

There I saw for the first time, the palm tree known by the local people under the name ‘yatay’, which had given the locality the name of Yatayty … This palm does not grow to a great height, the trunk of it is thick and covered with old marks where the leaves had been attached, in which grew several figs which finish by smothering the tree. The leaves of this palm are elegantly curved and the green-blue of their fronds directed towards the sky, contrast pleasantly with the surrounding vegetation.

But d’Orbigny correctly saw the implications of colonial development for the fate of these beautiful palm forests:

In the past the yatay palm covered all the sands in these places, but the need to develop the land for cultivation, or the appeal of the pleasant foodstuff that the heart of the tree offers, had necessitated such exploitation that, since the time of the wars, it can no longer be found on foot in other than very small numbers, sad and last of what is left of the handsome forest, of which they formed part, and which before long must disappear entirely.

Later that year and in early 1828, d’Orbigny recorded more details about the fate of the splendid forests. On 4 January he noted:

I was leaving Tacuaral, so as to go to Yatayty, without doubt the most productive land in the entire province of Corrientes … All the inhabitants of other parts of the province come to settle in the middle of these woods, cutting down the palm trees and planting the lands … It is also to be feared that they will destroy the palm trees, which will no longer grow back in the inhabited regions, and will finally disappear completely.

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D’Orbigny also recorded some of the very few details collected at the time about the habits of the Glaucous Macaw. Of the River Paraná he wrote, ‘All along the cliff, one saw scattered pairs of macaws of a dull blue-green, from which the woods echoed repeatedly the incessant shrill cries. Each pair appeared either at the edge of huge holes they had dug out of the cliffs in order to lay down their brood, or perched on the hanging branches of trees which crowned the banks.’

Other reports of these birds, or reports of parrots that might have been Glaucous Macaws, during the middle part of the nineteenth century, were few and far between. After 1860 no new wild specimens were added to museums and only a very few were procured by European zoos. There were three in the Amsterdam Zoo during the 1860s, several in Hamburg and Antwerp Zoos during the 1870s and 1880s respectively, two in London between 1886 and 1912, one in Berlin from 1892 to the early twentieth century and one in Paris from 1895 to 1905. Another one was reportedly kept in the Buenos Aires Zoo until as late as 1936, but was said to be an old bird that was by then forty-five.

From the early twentieth century, even reports of captive Glaucous Macaws became less frequent, while reports of birds in the wild virtually come to an end. Indeed, after 1900 there were only two records that may have been of living wild birds, one from Uruguay in 1950 where a single bird was seen on a fence post, and another from Paraná in Brazil in the 1960s, where locals said they lived in the steep banks that flanked the Iguazu River. The locality where the macaw on the fence post was seen was later turned over to a eucalyptus plantation. They were not reported again on the Iguazu. By the late 1970s, the Glaucous Macaw seemed to be extinct.

Then in June 1991 a British newspaper made the remarkable claim that parrot breeder and collector Harry Sissen had a Glaucous Macaw among the birds he kept at his farm in Yorkshire, England. As it turned out, the claim was wrong. It was a similar-looking but quite different species, a Lear’s Macaw. But the report was one among persistent and continuing rumours that birds still existed in the wild and were still being supplied to bird collectors in the USA, Brazil and Europe. Another parrot enthusiast who was more concerned for the birds’ conservation was Tony Pittman. He believed the Glaucous Macaw could still exist and decided to go and look for it.

Pittman had been interested in parrots for years and his special enthusiasm was for the blue macaws. He and his associate Joe Cuddy planned to trace the routes of the explorers, naturalists and writers who visited South America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They used research assembled by endangered bird expert Nigel Collar to find all the manuscripts and early accounts of the Glaucous Macaw that they could lay their hands on.

The firm records formed a circle covering Corrientes and Misiones Provinces in north-east Argentina, Artigas Province in north-west Uruguay and portions of the southernmost states of Brazil. Collar was convinced that the species might yet survive, and Pittman and Cuddy were determined to look for themselves. In June 1992 they set off for Buenos Aires en route to search in the places where the birds had been reliably reported, in some cases more than 200 years before.

They assumed that the original habitat of the bird was gallery forests along the main rivers from which the birds would foray into palm groves to feed. They also had good reason to believe that the Glaucous Macaws once nested in the steep cliffs and banks along the main rivers. With these likely habitat preferences in mind, they looked in the most promising areas.

Pittman remarked that ‘driving through the countryside where the Glaucous Macaw was found in the eighteenth century is just like driving through parts of southern England. There is no way a bird that size could be around with no one noticing it. It’s very bare of trees and heavily ranched.’ In addition to large-scale cultivation and ranching in the areas where the yatay palms once grew, large sections of the river valleys had been modified or flooded by huge engineering works, such as the Salto Grande hydroelectric complex on the river Uruguay. The men spoke to the locals but could find no one who knew of it. Not only that, but they encountered genuine astonishment from people at the idea that such a bird could possibly still exist.

Disappointed, Pittman and Cuddy returned with no evidence that the bird survived. But in 1997, following new information, they went back and this time they did find someone who knew of the blue macaw they looked for. While in the vicinity of the little town of Pilar that lies on the Paraguayan bank of the river Paraguay, Pittman was introduced to Ceferino Santa Cruz, a 95-year-old cotton farmer who lived in a little village.

The old man spoke only the local Guaraní Indian language, so Paraguayan friends had to translate his words into Spanish. He told them that he had been born there in 1902. His father had moved to the place in 1875 following the devastating War of Triple Alliance with Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. This bitter conflict ruined Paraguay, killing 90 per cent of the country’s adult male population. Ceferino’s father was among the survivors. Although the old man had never himself seen the blue macaw, his father had told him about them. His father had said that the parrots fed on fresh green palm fruits. This interview, across generations through the Indian tradition of storytelling, provided perhaps the only direct link that remained with the Glaucous Macaw. No one else in the world seemed to know anything about it.

The inescapable conclusion was that the Glaucous Macaw was extinct, and probably had been for some years. The most likely reason for its disappearance was degradation and disappearance of its habitat, especially the loss of the yatay palms on which it probably fed. One analysis found that yatays are the only colonial palm species occurring where these birds once lived with a nut of the right size and type. Ornithologists examining the bird’s likely diet concluded that, ‘There has been no palm regeneration in the range of this extinct macaw, and the remnant palm groves are more than 200 years old.’

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The reason for the palm’s disappearance was the introduction of European agriculture. The colonists soon learned that the places where the yatay palms grew indicated the richest soils, and naturally that was where the farmers first settled. The region was accessible by river and a substantial population grew up in early colonial times. The city of Corrientes that lies in the heart of the bird’s historical range was founded in 1588, the year the Spanish Armada sailed on England, so the impact of an advanced European society had, by the time of Pittman’s visit, already lasted more than 400 years.

Even in areas where the birds’ favourite palms might have survived the onslaught of ploughing, their eventual loss was assured by extensive cattle-grazing. Ranching was already an economic mainstay by the end of the eighteenth century, and meant that the effective regeneration of sufficient palms for the macaws to survive did not occur; their staple food plants were nibbled away by the cattle before they had a chance to grow or produce fruit, and eventually died out. Indeed, several species of palm in the genus Butia (to which the yatay belongs) are themselves listed as threatened with extinction. The trapping of birds for captivity certainly hastened the macaw on its way, but to what extent this pressure was complicit in its disappearance cannot be known.

It seems that the last living Glaucous Macaw reliably identified by a scientist was the one kept in the Paris Zoo (Jardin d’Acclimatation) for ten years from 1895. Whatever the reasons for its rapid slide into oblivion, the Glaucous Macaw – a large and conspicuous blue parrot – had become extinct and no one had noticed until decades after the event. Indeed, one leading parrot expert blithely described the species as ‘rare’ even in the late 1970s, by when it had not been seen for certain in the wild for more than a century. Certainly no one in the Berlin Zoo in 1900 would have realised that they were gazing upon a doomed species.

THE LEAR’S MACAW

In the 1970s, ornithologists believed that a similar fate awaited the gorgeous blue Lear’s Macaw (Anodorhynchus leari). This parrot was known to Victorian naturalists as a similar-sized species to the Glaucous Macaw (although a little larger at 71 centimetres) and the two were obviously close evolutionary relatives. The Lear’s was, however, darker, deeper blue and more glossy; in some respects it was more like the Hyacinth Macaw, from which it was distinguished not only by size but by a curious facial expression created by the oval bare yellow skin patches around the eyes that made the birds look a bit sleepy.

The English name ‘Lear’s Macaw’ came from the title conferred on the species by French biologist Prince Charles Bonaparte – the nephew of Napoleon – who in 1856 wrote the first scientific description of the species. The Englishman Edward Lear, much better known for his nonsense verse, had illustrated the macaw in his book Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots. The first instalment of this work appeared in 1830. Lear was then a promising young artist who had begun work on painting parrots at a time when their popularity was soaring. Despite the care Lear devoted to his work, in common with others he mistakenly believed that his painting of the blue macaw was of a Hyacinth. Although he had the ‘wrong’ species, he did produce an excellent painting and the name stuck and remains with us today, alongside the bird’s other common English name: Indigo Macaw.

But during the nineteenth century, Lear’s Macaw was even less well documented than its enigmatic cousin the Glaucous. A very few specimens were added to museum collections following the death of birds in zoos, but their natural origin was quite obscure. Although odd ones turned up in the USA and Europe in consignments of Hyacinth Macaws from Brazil, they were also rare in captivity. Scarcity and mystery added to their collectability; the rarity and obscurity made demand for them greater, not less.