Читать книгу Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird - Tony Juniper - Страница 11

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 Much of his writing remains unpublished and apparently languishes unedited in the archives of the Vatican.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.¹⁹

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.’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.