For ‘extinct’ Spix’s macaw, successful comeback is overshadowed by uncertainty

RIO DE JANEIRO — On May 24 this year, Ugo Vercillo woke up to a piece of amazing news: two parrot fledglings, born in the wild in Curaçá municipality, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, had taken flight for the first time.

These weren’t just any parrots; they were Spix’s macaws (Cyanopsitta spixii), one of the world’s most threatened species, with its few living individuals all confined to captive facilities around the world. Or at least they were, prior to 2022. Now, 11 of these stunning blue birds are flying free again in the semiarid Caatinga biome of northern Bahia, and hatching a new generation of wild macaws, a testament to an intensive conservation effort that some consider — at least as far as parrots are concerned — the most successful ever attempted.

Vercillo, the technical director of Blue Sky Caatinga, a conservation organization focused on restoring Caatinga ecosystems and closely involved in the Spix’s macaw reintroduction, says the young birds that left the nest in May weren’t the first wild hatchlings born from the program. That first batch, a duo born in 2023, died before being able to fly. So when Vercillo and other conservationists discovered a new clutch of eggs earlier this year, they were determined to act.

“We had to intervene,” Vercillo tells Mongabay. “There were three chicks. We took one of the chicks because it was already weaker, which is natural because they usually lay three eggs, and out of the three eggs, only one survives. So we took the smallest one to take care of it in captivity to save it.

“But the two that stayed are strong and flying,” he goes on. “This morning I woke up to a photo of the chicks already on top of a catingueira tree, playing with their mother and being fed by her.”

The story of how the Spix’s macaw went from being extinct in the wild to once again flying the skies of the Caatinga is a stormy one. And even the successful reintroduction hasn’t quieted the squalls; the same week that Vercillo received news about the chicks flying, the administrative bond that held the project together was broken, threatening the future of this promising program.

A pair of young Spix’s macaws, lower branch, with a parent. The pair were the first wild-born Spix’s macaws to fly in Brazil’s semiarid Caatinga biome in decades. Their first recorded flight, in May 2024, coincided with an announcement by Brazil’s conservation agency that it would no longer cooperate with the ACTP, the Germany-based breeding center supplying the birds for release. Image courtesy of Blue Sky Caatinga.

A stormy tale

For all their power as a national conservation symbol for the most biodiverse country on Earth, wild Spix’s macaws coexisted very briefly with conservation efforts to save them. Though Indigenous inhabitants of the Caatinga had probably long known about them, the species was only described by science in 1832 from a specimen collected in 1819 by German biologist Johann Baptist Ritter von Spix. But no one was really sure about where the species occurred until its rediscovery in the late 1980s, and by then only three known individuals survived in the wild, in the municipality of Curaçá, some 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) north of Rio de Janeiro.

By 1990, that number had declined to a single male, who found companionship with a female of another species of parrot, the blue-winged macaw (Primolius maracana). That same year, conservationists warned the Spix’s macaw was “effectively extinct in the wild.” The last wild bird died in 2000, but the species’ extinct status was only formalized in 2019 by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. In the eyes of contemporary science, Spix’s macaws have always been on the brink of disappearing.

Conservation efforts have been in place since the 1990s to try to save the species, but these were hindered by a lack of resources and basic behavioral and ecological knowledge about the parrots. Driving the extinction were the threats of habitat degradation, as farms and livestock pasture expanded across the Caatinga, and the illegal pet trade, which picked up speed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet it was captive birds that eventually fueled the species’ revival. The biggest captive flock of Spix’s macaws today is held in Germany, by the Association for the Conservation of Threatened Parrots (ACTP). In 2020, as part of an agreement with the Brazilian government, the ACTP sent 52 birds back to their home country for the reintroduction program. What would follow was, by all accounts, a surprising success — one that would be thrown into uncertainty over a series of controversies between the Brazilian conservation agency and the German institution working alongside it.

Spix’s macaws at an enclosure in Brazil’s Curaçá municipality, where they’re prepared for life in the wild prior to release. Image courtesy of Cromwell Purchase/ACTP.

‘The most successful parrot reintroduction’

Cromwell Purchase is the scientific and field projects coordinator at the ACTP, having previously served as research director at Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation in Qatar. The latter facility once held most of the Spix’s macaws left on Earth. But according to Purchase, in 2014, following its founder’s death, “the best option — and in fact only option — that secured the release project [in Curaçá] was to send all the birds to the ACTP in Germany.”

The ACTP’s main partner in Brazil was the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), the federal agency responsible for managing protected areas and biodiversity. In 2019, the same year the species was declared extinct by the IUCN, ICMBio forged a technical cooperation agreement, or TCA, with the ACTP regarding the Spix’s macaw reintroduction. This agreement formalized the responsibilities of each part, and would be valid for five years, until June 2024, after which it would need to be renewed. Under it, ICMBio would be responsible, among other things, for technical support in monitoring the birds and bureaucratic support for the project, while the ACTP would build and manage the facilities to breed, train and release the birds within the species’ historical range. In 2020, ACTP transferred 52 macaws to this breeding facility from Germany; in 2022, decades after they disappeared from the wild, 20 Spix’s macaws were finally released back into the Caatinga.

“The project has been amazingly successful, beyond anything we could have dreamed of,” Purchase says. “We had a wishlist and all [the items] have been ticked.”

That’s also the assessment of Thomas White, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and a co-author with Purchase, Vercillo and others of a study published this January in the journal Diversity describing the results of the first year of reintroduction.

“The Spix’s macaw reintroduction has been the most carefully planned, the most carefully executed, and the most successful reintroduction of any parrot I have ever seen anywhere,” White tells Mongabay.

Spix’s macaws in a specially built enclosure at São Paulo Zoo in Brazil. The zoo currently holds 27 of the birds, with a maximum capacity of 44. But this on its own wouldn’t be enough to supply the rewilding target of 20 birds per year. Image courtesy of São Paulo Zoo.

And he’s seen a few. White was one of the minds behind the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Project, an initiative that successfully increased the number of wild Puerto Rican amazons (Amazona vittata) from 13 to around 250 (plus more than 450 in captivity). He also worked on the conservation of parrot species in the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Chile and Brazil, and was invited to advise on the reintroduction of the Spix’s macaw in 2012.

According to him, this project was special. Before setting the birds free, the team placed them in a training and release facility so they could properly develop their flying, social and feeding skills. The researchers selected macaws for release based on their genetic makeup and age (3-7 years), to maximize genetic diversity and avoid maladaptive behaviors that come from too many years spent in captivity. And even after all this careful preparation, the parrots weren’t cast into the wild alone.

“The Spix’s macaw reintroduction is the first parrot reintroduction that used the surrogate species concept, and what’s called the mixed species flock concept to maximize the probability of success,” White says.

What this means is that the researchers released the first batch of 20 Spix’s macaws along with blue-winged macaws — the same species that formed a couple with the last wild male Spix’s in the 1990s — so that the birds could form unified groups. Unlike their captive-reared cousins, the blue-winged macaws were taken from the wild for the specific purpose of teaching the Spix’s how to behave as free parrots. According to Vercillo, by observing the more experienced birds, the Spix’s would develop a better grasp for finding food and avoiding predators.

By all metrics, the Spix’s macaws were indeed good learners. By the end of the first year of the reintroduction, in June 2023, the reintroduced population showed a cumulative survival rate — accounting for the uncertain fate of some individuals — of 58.3%. That might not sound like much, but based on the other parrot reintroductions, the researchers were ready to consider anything above 30% a success.

The birds also showed good cohesion, with 17 of the 20 staying together as a group. But, perhaps most importantly, the released birds formed at least six heterosexual couples, and one pair successfully bred in their very first year in the wild, a sign that the project was on the right track.

“We were pretty sure we’d have good survival, good flock cohesion, and good interaction among the birds, but we were surprised that they started breeding so soon,” White says.

A Spix’s macaw at São Paulo Zoo in Brazil. The species’ return to its native habitat, from which it was declared extinct, has been bittersweet: the rewilding program has been a technical success, but bureaucratic wrangling threatens to stall future releases. Image courtesy of São Paulo Zoo.

Dark clouds on the horizon

But the future of the Spix’s macaw is still far from secured. Vercillo led a study published in 2023 in Bird Conservation International presenting a population viability analysis for the species — a mathematical model used to gauge the likelihood of a population going extinct under various scenarios over a given period.

“In this study, we estimated that in order for the population to remain stable and to avoid the risk of extinction in the next 100 years, it would need to grow to around 700 or 800 animals,” Vercillo tells Mongabay.

The plan, then, was simple: to keep reintroducing 20 Spix’s macaws into the Caatinga every year for the next 20 years, so that this somewhat safe threshold could eventually be reached. The goal would demand constant caring for and monitoring of the birds, and continual investment in its breeding and training facilities. The Diversity study reinforces this point, noting that “the importance of regular population supplementation and continued support of this nascent wild population cannot be overemphasized.”

So it came as a shock to many of those involved in the reintroduction program when ICMBio announced, in May 2024, that it would not renew the cooperation agreement with the ACTP. Since then, a conflict of narratives has broken out between the two sides, throwing into uncertainty the future of the reintroduction of one of the rarest, most threatened species of parrot on Earth.

In the second part of this story, Mongabay looks at the administrative turmoil that led to the end of the agreement, what it means for future Spix’s macaw reintroduction efforts, and the potential for what Purchase warns could be “the second extinction of the species in the wild.”

Spix’s macaws hang out in the tree canopy in rural Curaçá municipality, the site of the species’ return to the wild decades after having disappeared. Image courtesy of Cromwell Purchase/ACTP.

Citations:

Juniper, T., & Yamashita, C. (1990). The conservation of Spix’s macaw. Oryx, 24(4), 224-228. doi:10.1017/s0030605300034943

Purchase, C., Lugarini, C., Purchase, C., Ferreira, A., Vercillo, U. E., Stafford, M. L., & White, T. H. (2024). Reintroduction of the extinct-in-the-wild Spix’s macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii) in the Caatinga forest domain of Brazil. Diversity, 16(2), 80. doi:10.3390/d16020080

Vercillo, U., Oliveira-Santos, L. G., Novaes, M., Purchase, C., Purchase, C., Lugarini, C., … Franco, J. L. (2023). Spix’s macaw Cyanopsitta spixii (Wagler, 1832) population viability analysis. Bird Conservation International, 33. doi:10.1017/s0959270923000217

This article by Bernardo Araujo was first published by Mongabay.com on 15 July 2024. Lead Image: Spix’s macaws in a specially built enclosure at São Paulo Zoo in Brazil. The zoo currently holds 27 of the birds, with a maximum capacity of 44. But this on its own wouldn’t be enough to supply the rewilding target of 20 birds per year. Image courtesy of São Paulo Zoo.

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