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