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.’20
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,