Black Market Macaw Rises From the Dead

The rarest of birds is getting a new lease on life. The beautiful Spix's macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii), which was declared extinct in the wild in 2019, is being reintroduced to its natural habitat, the tropical dry forest in northeastern Brazil.

Last week eight of the gorgeous blue-gray birds were released into the wild. Another 12 will be released before year’s end, with more to come in the future. The birds are raised in captivity, mostly in Germany, then transported to Brazil and kept in an aviary as they await freedom.

Crucial to the repopulation project will be restoring and protecting the habitat. The caatinga is a dry landscape of thorny shrubs and small trees, a place that revives annually during its 3-month rainy season. The Spix’s macaws once nested in old caraibeira trees that grow along creeks, feeding on seeds and nuts. The habitat has been squeezed as humans harvest wood, slash-and-burn land for farming, and raise goats that eat the seedlings of plants on which the macaws rely.

At the next rainy season, the University of the São Francisco Valley’s Centre for Ecology and Environmental Monitoring will plant some 50,000 seedlings of 26 different species to restore a couple hundred hectares of the caatinga. In some areas fencing is going up to keep goats out of the thickets.

Poachers, which helped send the birds to extinction in the first place, will no doubt be a problem again. That’s a thorny problem: the Spix’s macaw is both beautiful and rare, therefore very valuable on the black market. 

Watch a nice overview of the project at youtube.com/watch?v=OVVhKwyyeiE, or read a very detailed account at the journal Science, here: https://tinyurl.com/bdd3tsa8.

Photo credit: Patrick Pleul / Picture Alliance / Getty Images