In the rainy season, which lasts for about 3 months, everything appears lush and green. The natural home of the Spix’s macaw is in the caatinga, a tropical dry forest in northeastern Brazil that covers 10% of the country. “I hope it works, because we really have no other alternatives.” Yet for the Spix’s it has to be tried, he says.
“There’s very few reintroduction programs around the world that have done something like that, none with parrots or macaws.”įew reintroductions of birds have been successful, and none was as ambitious as this one, says George Amato, a conservation biologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Fish and Wildlife Service and a technical adviser to the project. “The Spix’s project is unique in that they are reintroducing a species back into the wild that is currently extinct, has been extinct in the wild for over 2 decades,” says Thomas White, a wildlife biologist at the U.S. Poached to extinction for their mystique and beauty, Spix’s macaws will re-enter the wild from this aviary in Brazil. But the biggest challenge still lies ahead. The project, long hampered by infighting and overshadowed by controversy, had to overcome significant scientific hurdles to even come this far. If everything goes according to plan, these birds will be the vanguard of a new population of Spix’s macaws in their natural habitat. Twelve more are supposed to follow at the end of the year and still more in the years to come. On 11 June, more than a quarter-century after the female flew into oblivion, they plan to release eight Spix’s macaws from captivity into the wild. Now, conservationists are attempting to undo that fate.
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“The world of Spix’s macaw is full of very, very great uncertainties and a lot of people who say a lot of things that they don’t necessarily really mean.” The wild male vanished a few years later, and the Spix’s fate seemed sealed-another species lost. It is almost unheard of for parrots to hit power cables, he says, and in reality she might have been taken by poachers. “If that’s really true, then that is just incredibly bad luck,” Collar says. Years later, a local man said he had found the bird dead below a power line.
Two weeks later, she mysteriously disappeared. She grew stronger by the day, flying farther and farther, and after little more than 2 months had paired with the male. The female was released close to where the male lived and seemed to quickly adapt to her new life, eating wild food and avoiding an attack by a falcon. At the time, fewer than three dozen birds were known to be held in collections and zoos around the world, and a decision was made to release a single female in hopes the birds would pair and produce offspring. By the mid-1990s only a single individual remained alive in the wild, close to this dusty, small town in northeastern Brazil.įrom DNA in molted feathers, researchers in the United Kingdom confirmed that the last wild bird was a male. “For well over a century we just had this very, very weak information that there was this kind of mythical, rather beautiful blue bird,” says Nigel Collar, a conservationist at BirdLife International. The bird had scarcely been spotted since scientists first described it in the early 19th century, and it had taken on an aura of mystery, making it irresistible to parrot lovers-and to poachers.
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Download PDFĬuraçá, Brazil-In 1995, conservationists and scientists embarked on a desperate attempt to save the world’s rarest bird, a blue-gray parrot called the Spix’s macaw. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 376, Issue 6598.
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