Tidwell Article/Parrots 1
PARROTS & PROFITS by John Tidwell Sept 8, 2000
"AAAWWK!" Artie's small black eyes glittered and his cheeks began to turn a deep red. Then a spectacular black crest rose slowly on his head, the same way a human might lift suspicious brows. Sitting in her Rockville pet shop his owner, Ruth Hanessian, spoke gently to the large black palm cockatoo (Probosci geraterrimus) and lovingly kissed his bare red cheek. The crest went down and Artie began to thoughtfully crack a Brazil nut.
Artie is a bird with a past, and his story is typical of the odyssey many wild-caught parrots still experience. 18 years ago he was stolen by poachers as a chick from his nest in the remote jungles of Indonesia, becoming part of an illegal shipment of more than 200 palm cockatoos secreted out of Indonesia and laundered with new 'legal' papers, first in Malaysia and then in Singapore for export to the U.S. It was here that Artie first saw Richard and Annamarie Stevenson, an American couple with a shady Florida-based wholesale wildlife business. In the months since the birds arrived half of them had either died or been destroyed from a suspected outbreak of Newcastle's Disease, a lethal virus that can also infect humans. Even so, no one had ever tried to ship this many palm cockatoos to the U.S. before, and the Stevensons had sunk about $200,000 into this group. As they stood watching them, the couple had to smile. This was going to be their ticket to wealth and luxury.
There was a good reason black palm cockatoos were practically unknown to most breeders in the U.S. : they were not allowed out of their native Australia and New Guinea. The only legal way anyone could export them from Indonesia was with the permission of president Suharto himself, which the Stevensons didn't have. But this was the early 1980s, the very height of the international illegal bird trade, when laws governing the importation of wildlife into North America were vague. In fact, the U.S. was named the world's largest importer of wild parrots by its own Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS), with more than 800,000 birds coming in legally every year and probably twice that number on the black market. Parrots were the primary focus of the trade, their beauty, intelligence and rarity often making them as coveted as a Ming Vase or a Stradivarius. Trade stretched globally from Australia to Africa, with dealers making as much as $600,000 per year just selling parrots. Birds were smuggled through international airports and across dusty border checkpoints in suitcases, tire wells, rolled up newspapers, hollowed-out car Tidwell Article/Parrots 2
doors and lengths of PVC plumbing pipe. When Artie and the other 99 cockatoos arrived at Miami International airport one sultry afternoon in September 1983, the birds had been crowed into their small wooden crates for so long that some were sick and dying.
But to the Stevensons business was great. Only the year before they had brought in 27 other palm cockatoos, with the approval of the USFWS. The birds were barely a day out of USDA- licensed quarantine, when collector Richard Schubot strode unexpectedly into their Ft. Lauderdale ranch. Richard Stevenson knew the cantankerous Schubot had made millions in McDonald's franchises and wanted to amass the greatest private collection of exotic birds in the U.S. And what Schubot wanted, he got, one way or another. "He says 'how much do you want for them?'" Stevenson recalls, his nasal Cape Cod accent making him sound like a Boston cabbie. "And I says $5,000 each. And he says 'Fine, will you take a check?' Then he says 'here is a shopping list of birds I'm looking for, and can you get a hundred of these Black Palms?'"
This time the Stevensons weren't waiting on Schubot. Earlier that summer they had placed ads for the cockatoos in several major newspapers, never imagining that a sale of close to $600,000 in birds so rare no U.S. zoo had ever bred them would attract suspicion. It did. Months before, the USFWS and the Department of Justice had managed to obtain a copy Indonesia's Byzantine export laws with the help of Dr. Don Bruning, the Bronx Zoo's expansive Curator of Birds, and was now preparing to seize the cockatoos as smuggled Indonesian 'treasure'. While U.S. laws on the importation of exotic birds were murky, those on trafficking stolen wildlife, known as the Lacey Act, were not. Combined with proof that the birds were protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Stevensons defense crumbled and they forfeited the parrots to the USFWS in exchange for $45,000 and two cockatoos, a settlement Bruning still finds shocking. "They were caught red-handed bringing in birds illegally." Bruning says, still emotional after 17 years, "I mean they should be getting fined, not paid for doing it!"
The government now began distributing cockatoos. Some went to the consortium of 11 zoos around the country that had been caring for the birds since their seizure, while 8 cockatoos were returned to Jakarta to smooth the feathers of the Indonesians. The remaining birds were auctioned, as the USFWS often did with confiscated animals, to breeders with solid cockatoo track record. Ramon Noegel, one of the buyers, eventually sent his three birds on permanent loan to the Avicultural Research & Breeding Center of Loxahatchee Florida, the machine-gun patrolled, avian Xanadu of Richard Schubot. Tidwell Article/Parrots 3
Today the ABRC boasts some 120 palm cockatoos, the largest collection in the U.S. Artie, otherwise known as #62 was one of four cockatoos the government donated to SeaWorld. Five years later he was sold several times to different private breeders, finally ending up in Ruth Hanessian's pet shop. Today he sits in his cage, chomping macadamia nuts and flirting with anyone wearing black. But is this the best fate for an endangered parrot? After intensive lobbying from conservation groups, Congress enacted the Wild Bird Conservation Act in 1992, putting an end to the laissez-faire days of the American parrot trade. According to John Webb, Assistant Chief of the Wildlife and Marine Resources Section at the U.S. Department of Justice, the Wild Bird Act put teeth into the CITES agreement and stopped further bird imports. "The Wild Bird Act ended the bird trade in the United States." he says, "I mean we have really gotten out of the market. And I think that's one of the big success stories of the laws that were enacted to protect exotic birds."
Of the 58 at-risk species of parrot that aviculturists and smugglers lust after the most, all but two are protected under these laws. In the years since the Wild Bird Act was passed, the illegal international trade in parrots has noticeably dwindled. According to the USFWS, many career wildlife smugglers have shifted their trade from rare birds to equally rare reptiles, leaving the forces of bird conservation without a monolithic enemy to focus on. As a result, the post-Wild Bird Act era is one of complexity and moral ambivalence, requiring whole new approaches and uneasy alliances between aviculturists and conservationists. Welcome to the murky world of parrot conservation. Today as in the 1980s, the two principal threats to parrots remain habitat destruction, by natural or human forces, and the unsustainable harvesting of wild birds. While the international trade in parrots has become smaller, it has also become more focused. According to Richard Marks, Regional Division head of the USFWS' Law Enforcement Branch, bird pirates now target the rarest of the rare. "The illegal trade focuses on the most endangered parrots because they bring the highest prices." he says, "Many times poachers will steal eggs rather than the birds. And once the eggs are hatched in Europe or the U.S. and breeding pairs are established no one can prove they were smuggled."
Today some 45 endangered parrots are listed on CITES' Appendix I section, the convention's highest order of protection. Species on this list are so depleted by habitat destruction and poaching that any commercial trade in them would spell almost certain extinction. Some of the most vulnerable populations of these parrots are isolated on the tiny islands of the Caribbean, where modern bird pirates, like the buccaneers of the 18th Century, lurk offshore waters in search of feathered gold. Don Bruning says the ecological threat to these parrots, from even a handful of such smugglers could be catastrophic. "Its significant because some of these island Tidwell Article/Parrots 4
parrot populations only have a couple of hundred birds left in the wild." he explains," If you remove 10 or 20 chicks you are having a major impact on that population."
The West Indian island of St. Lucia lies like an emerald between Martinique and St. Vincent, its verdant Piton mountains shrouded in mist. High in its sultry central rainforests lives the Jacquot (Amazona versicolor), a large green and blue parrot that is unique to St. Lucia. Its also a member of the Appendix I club. The bird's tiny 40-mile range was steadily eaten away over the years by plantations and its beautiful plumage made the Jacquot a favorite target of smugglers. By 1971 less than 100 were observed in the wild and it was feared that the species would vanish. In the late 1970s the USFWS started working with St. Lucia's Forest & Lands Department to try to save the few wild Jacquots that were left. The small team of conservationists were faced with the task of saving a parrot that the St. Lucians usually considered dinner. But this was no deterrent to Herb Rafaele, an intrepid USFWS ecologist. Working with the St. Lucian team, he helped devise a novel way of approaching the Jacquot Problem: They turned the parrot into a star. The team launched a major educational campaign to show the islanders what was important and special about the Jacquot. And it worked. "Every student was exposed to a media discussion about the parrot." says Rafaele proudly, "They had people in parrot suits, parrot puppets, caged parrots for people to see, ministers making sermons, local musicians singing songs, all about the parrot. Because it was their parrot. They could take pride in it."
The Jacquot became St. Lucia's national bird. The island's Forestry Department got the green light to start turning large areas of St. Lucia's rainforest into National Park. Rangers started building aviaries. Parrot hunting was forbidden until further notice. St. Lucians began turning in pet Jacquots to the Forestry Department in droves, so the birds could be freed. It was Herb's dream come true. "I remember checking into a hotel and hearing a parrot squawk outside." he says, "And the clerk turned to me and said 'That's Amazona versicolor, our national bird.' I mean, she knew the scientific name!" 15 years after the campaign began, the Jacquot population has soared to 500 in the wild and growing. Now St. Lucia gleams as an example of how conservation can work to everyone's advantage. "St. Lucia is a real bright spot," says Grajal, "The parrots seem to be in stable condition as a result of a strong conservation plan. That doesn't mean that the population isn't threatened, its still vulnerable."
A case in point: this July the St. Lucia Forestry Department got wind that a notorious Czech couple's yacht was anchored off the island. Word had it they had been smuggling parrots from the Caribbean to the Czech Republic for years. Eastern Europe had been a major player in smuggled Tidwell Article/Parrots 5
wildlife for decades because its communist regimes had little concern for conservation. Bruning says St. Lucian authorities raided the smuggler's boat and arrested them, but the eggs they'd stolen were gone. This put St. Lucia in a dilemma. They knew that a sizable number of Jacquots are still languishing somewhere in the Czech Republic, technically the sovereign property of St. Lucia. But Czech laws on such things are ambiguous and their judicial system still rife with Byzantine communist bureaucracy. "The question is how do they get their birds back?" says Bruning, "That's St. Lucia's challenge right now: how to approach the Czech Republic." But even though international smuggling like this continues to threaten highly endangered species, its a different story when you look at individual countries. According to Dr. Grajal a lot of parrot smuggling goes on inside South American or African countries where international laws can't reach.
"A typical example is the Red-tailed Amazon." Grajal continues, "Brazil is busy building a major tourist development right in the middle of this parrot's habitat. Many of them are caught to put in the lobbies of those tourist complexes as decoration." For CITES inspectors, monitoring what kind of bird-trading goes on in small villages or on jungle waterways is nearly impossible from outside of the country. It would also be resented in many countries, prompting accusations of imperialism or espionage. Often countries like Brazil or Nigeria already have strict laws about smuggling already in place. The problem is enforcement. "Unfortunately that is driven by internal politics and is often vulnerable to corruption." Says Scott Derrickson, a researcher at the National Zoo's Conservation Research Center in Front Royal, Virginia, "We have a lot of evidence that harvesting and internal trade of parrots is even greater than the export trade." Derrickson says the most effective way to get data on this kind of trade is to work with other country's own 'green' organizations. Local groups can move around the countryside easily and keep track of threats or problems. But not all countries conduct parrot conservation the same way, nor do they always follow the methods of the international conservation community.
In the dry, dusty savannas of Northeastern Brazil's Caatinga region, tall caraibeira trees rustle in the late afternoon sun. As the light wanes, a large, cobalt- blue parrot with a gray head settles on the higher branches of one tree. His yellow eyes scan the scrubby landscape, and he gives a distinctive call that resembles the laughter of a child. But there is no response. This bird is the last Spix's macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii) left in the wild. Down a ruddy, dirt road from the tree with The Bird, lies the small, impoverished village of Curaca, about 1,300 miles north of Rio de Janeiro. It is here that a bold, if somewhat Quixotic endeavor is being mounted to save the Spix's macaw from oblivion. Spix's macaw was a species in decline even when it was discovered in the early 19th Century by the German naturalist Johann Baptist von Spix. At that time only about Tidwell Article/Parrots 6
60 were observed nesting in the lofty caraibeiras or amid the spines of fachiero cacti. Spixes are the smallest of the three blue macaw types and scientists think three factors have contributed to erasing them from the landscape in the 500 years since settlers ventured into this area: local subsistence farmers who hunted them for food, introduced African "killer" bees brought in by Europeans, and last but certainly not least, the pet trade. Another reason might be because Spix's macaws are extremely predictable: The same tree-hole. The same bush. Day-in and day-out. Catching them must have been a breeze. By the mid-1980s the Spix's macaw was considered extinct in the wild by the scientific establishment, with about 11 known to be in captivity around the world. Heated debate in the conservation community over how to preserve this species often created symposia and a flutter of papers, but not much else.
One reason for this was a highly emotional rift between conservationists, who maintained that wildlife belonged ultimately in the wild, and aviculturists who saw the domestication of endangered birds as the last best hope for their survival. Both were convinced that their way was the only hope for endangered parrots. But beneath these ideological differences lay a deeper sense of betrayal: many aviculturists had been known to engage in and support parrot smuggling. In the late 1980s when bird breeders began to talk about parrot conservation and downplay aviculture's dirty little secrets, the hackles of conservationists would rise and they would point to the poster- boy of avian betrayal, Tony Silva. Tony Silva, the one-time advocate of parrot conservation and curator of birds at Spain's Loro Parque zoo, who was jailed in the U.S. for secret activities. "He was a conservationist to the public, but a bird smuggler to the netherworld" says Webb, "I think the number of rare macaws he smuggled was in the hundreds if not thousands from all over the world. Yet all the time he was claiming he was championing the plight of these birds. So there's always the possibility that there is this second side to the avicultural industry."
When Brazil's premier wildlife authority, the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Natural Renewable Resources (IBAMA) announced in 1989 that it had created a special group that would focus on restoring Spix's populations in the wild through captive breeding, conservationists were leery. Worse, the Permanent Committee for the Recovery of the Spix's Macaw did not add leading parrot conservation organizations like the World Parrot Trust to its list of members. Instead, IBAMA included zoos and private aviculturists who owned the Spix's macaws the Committee planned to breed. Unfortunately, the only aviculturists known to have these rarest of birds were very wealthy ones who had been quite active in the bird trade. In fact, Spix's were so rare that if someone owned one it was virtually an indictment of illegal smuggling. Birds were only rumored to exist in certain private collections run by Richard Schubot-types in fortified, often secret locations. But they had the birds, and in order to create a sustainable, Tidwell Article/Parrots 7
genetically diverse population of Spix's macaws IBAMA needed more than the 11 found in the world's zoos.
Faced with this dilemma, the government of Fernando Collor de Mello made a controversial, if pragmatic, decision in 1990, granting a general amnesty to all private owners of Spix's macaws if they joined IBAMA's breeding program. Over the next five years notorious collectors like the Philippine tycoon Antonio de Dios were coaxed to come forward, slowly raising the number of documented birds. Reaction from the conservation community was largely scathing, accusing the Permanent Committee of consorting with an enemy who was exploiting the situation to get amnesty. "All the people who have Spix's are crooks." growls Dr. Noel Snyder, a retired field biologist who has co-authored several key pieces of bird conservation legislation. "But instead of throwing those people in jail, IBAMA took the opposite approach by legalizing the birds! Their birds are coming from all over the world and may have diseases. Its just a mess, and I think if it comes out successfully they will be lucky." But not all conservationists are so harsh. Dr. Grajal points out that the Spix macaw is in a desperate situation, requiring desperate measures. It would also be nearly impossible for Brazil to prosecute such wealthy and powerful people.
"And even if they could catch them, is the Brazilian government going to go into these private collections in Singapore or Switzerland or the Canary Islands or Russia, and actually try to confiscate those parrots? No." he says ,"I agree they are consorting with the enemy, but the main objective here is to save the Spix's macaw. Not whether you're a saint or not." Ironically, that same year two ornithologists from the British-based conservation group Birdlife International made a startling discovery. After weeks of driving through the thorny scrubland of Brazil's Bahia state looking for wild Spix's macaws, Tony Juniper and Carlos Yamashita happened to be having a drink in a village bar when a local farmer heard their story and said "I know where you can find that bird". The rest is ornithological history. Interestingly, the last of the Spix's was found where once scores had flocked a century before.
The Permanent Committee moved quickly to protect and study The Bird, which was valuable not only for its genes, but also because it was the only one of its kind that knew how to survive in the wild. All the others had either been hand-raised or living in captivity for many years, and probably would not know how to find food or avoid predators. Committee researchers went to Curaca and began an intense effort to educate the villagers about why saving the Spix's macaw - their Spix's macaw - was so important. It worked, in part because the people of Curaca felt that The Bird had suffered as much as they had, and they take care of their own. "We've got all the Vaqueros around there protecting the macaw." says Dr. Benny Gallaway, president of the Tidwell Article/Parrots 8
American Federation of Aviculturists, which is helping to fund the project. "We have the commitment of the local population, from schoolchildren to grandmothers. You couldn't buy that kind of protection."
Even so, conservationists point-out Spix's macaw is the rarest and most valuable parrot in the world, and Curaca is well-known in the area. How well the villagers might one day fare against professional smugglers with machine-guns is a question Gallaway avoids. Indeed, the Committee has been mysterious on almost all information coming out of the project, which has frustrated both non-project scientists and international law enforcement officials. What is released reveals a highly experimental program. Shortly after its discovery, the lone Spix's was observed consorting with a fetchingly green female Illiger's macaw (Ara maracana), but their attempts at inter-species offspring failed. This was good news for the Permanent Committee because they had been preparing to release a wild-born female Spix's from a Brazilian zoo into the wild Spix's territory. In March 1995 Curaca's parrot couple became a trio, but after a month the female Spix's disappeared and was later found dead, apparently from hitting a powerline. After 7 years in a cage, the wild may have been too wild.
However this did not derail the program. Nearly a decade of persuading Spix's owners to donate their now legitimate birds has given the Permanent Committee a studbook of 61 Spix's macaws, including 5 donated last year from de Dios' private collection. The plan now is to sneak newly hatched Spix's babies into the wild bird's nest, where they could be raised to be as wily and resourceful as their parents. Despite charges from the Parrot Trust and others that the Spix's program is flawed and amateurish, Grajal sees it as one among a wide spectrum of new, innovative parrot conservation programs. While unorthodox, he says, they are expanding our knowledge of what works and what doesn't. "To say that we will save all parrots with a single "magic bullet" is dreaming." he says, "Today parrot conservation is a case by case situation largely determined by the internal politics of each country. This makes everything much more complicated. The future for parrots is far less black and white than it used to be."
As is his practice, the Last Spix's Macaw escorts his viridian mate to her nesting hole each evening, and then swoops off to his favorite cactus-top retreat. He has survived the hunters, the trappers, the scientists, the droughts and the 'killer' bees. He even kept the mate he chose. Because he was the only one they couldn't catch. Z John Tidwell is a freelance journalist who often writes for Zoogoer. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. Tidwell Article/Parrots 9
SIDEBAR OR BOX: MEXICAN PARROTS RETURNING TO THE WILD Mexico's Western Thick-Billed parrots (Rhynchopsitta pachyryncha) once filled the skies over what is now Arizona, New Mexico and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Hunting and habitat destruction made them extinct in the U.S. and highly endangered in Mexico. But the winds of change have turned for the Thick-Billed parrot. This past February the Wildlands Project, a non- profit U.S. conservation organization and a consortium of five Mexican environmental groups drew up an agreement to protect 6,000 acres of old growth forest in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains that had been scheduled to be logged within two years.
Part of the plan is to bring in wild flocks of Thick-Billed parrots in what may be the most successful parrot re-introduction project to date. "The area is the third largest nesting area for parrots in this region." says Allan McDonell, Executive Director of the Wildlands Project. "It will be a great area to get parrots healthy and repopulated." What is special about this re-introduction plan is the use of wild parrots from other areas of Mexico rather than birds from zoos or aviaries. McDonell says this will mean the birds will have the best chance of survival because they will already know how to find food and avoid predators.