Spix's Macaw - History

History

The species appears to have been seen and described ("larger than a Psittacus, the entire plumage is grey-blue") by the German naturalist Georg Marcgrave when he worked in Pernambuco in 1638.

Spix's Macaw is named for German naturalist Johann Baptist von Spix, who collected the first specimen in May, 1819 on the bank of the São Francisco River near Juazeiro in Brazil. Spix wrote: "The bird is gregarious and very rare."

The next reported sighting of the bird wasn't for 84 years, in 1903 by Othmar Reiser of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 400 kilometres (250 mi) west of Juazeiro at Lagoa de Parnaguá (lake at Parnagua) in the State of Piaui. (What we now know about its habitat and probable range casts doubt on this observation) Reiser had also seen one in captivity at a railway station in Remanso. These observations resulted in an early supposition of a vast potential range for the species in the dry interior of the northeast. .

A trickle of Spix's appeared in captivity starting in the late 1800s. The earliest known specimens were three held by the London Zoological Society between 1878 and 1902. The bird remained rare and highly coveted. The first captive breeding occurred in the 1950s in Brazil, in the aviaries of the late Alvaro Carvalhaes, an aviculturist from Santos. He hatched numerous chicks, some reports say as many as 24, one of which ended up at the Naples Zoo (Italy), where it remained alive until the late 1980s. Most of his birds died of poisoning in the 1970s. Some of these birds were the likely source of rumored Brazilian Spix owners in the 1960s and 1970's.

With the passage of the Brazil Wildlife Protection Act in 1967, Brazil forbid the export of its wildlife, and in 1975 became a party to the CITES treaty. These actions barely impacted the illicit bird trade, but Spix owners were forced underground (consequently complicating the later effort to initiate a captive recovery program).

The bird was not studied in the wild until the 1970s. As recently as 1980, R. Ridgely stated that "there is no available evidence indicating a recent decline in numbers." Beginning around 1980, at the very height of the illegal bird trade, traders and trappers removed dozens of Spix's from the wild, and by the early 80's, it was generally believed to be extinct in the wild.

Three Spix's were re-discovered in the Curaçá region in 1986. Two of the birds were captured for trade in 1987. A single male, paired with a female Blue-winged Macaw, was discovered at the site in 1990. A female Spix's Macaw released from captivity at the site in 1995 was killed by collision with a power line after seven weeks. The last wild male disappeared from the site in October 2000. The species probably became extinct in the wild late in 2000, when the last known wild bird was no longer seen. No sightings of this macaw have been made in the wild since 2000. While the IUCN Red List views its status as Critically Endangered and possibly extinct in the wild, ornithologist Nigel Collar of Birdlife International, the authority for the IUCN Redlist of birds now calls this bird extinct in the wild.