The Spix’s little blue macaw — extinct in the wild for 22 years — now flies free again in its natural home in Brazil
listed as Extinct in the Wild. Although they aren’t the most brilliantly colorful parrots, little blue macaws are highly desired as pets because people really like looking at blue birds.
As a result of these extreme changes in precipitation, the caatinga is very fragile and vulnerable to desertification, particularly from livestock grazing as well as land clearing. “Spix’s macaws specifically live in the creek systems of the caatinga, which are very few and far between”, Dr Purchase explained. “The problem with these creek systems is that as soon as you have erosion, that’s where all the water rushes through and takes away everything.”
In addition to habitat destruction and invasive bees, wild little blue macaws experienced a gradual but inexorable decline due to capture for the illegal wildlife and pet trade. For example, illegal trapping led to a rapid population decline so that, by 1986, the entire wild population consisted of just three birds. Trappers then returned to poach two more parrots so by 1990, only one bird, a lone ageing male, remained.
And yet .. not all hope was lost. Several tiny populations of these parrots still survived in captivity in Brazil, the Middle East and Europe, and were estimated at the time to number somewhere around 55 individuals. In the 1990s — even before this species went extinct in the wild — the Brazilian government had already launched an effort to encourage reproduction of these parrots and to negotiate for the species’ repatriation.