Parrots and Profits
by John Tidwell
"AAAWWK!"
Artie's small black eyes glittered, and his cheeks began turning a deep red. Then a spectacular black crest rose slowly on his head, the way a human might lift suspicious brows. Sitting in her Rockville, Maryland, pet shop, Artie’s owner, Ruth Hanessian, spoke gently to the large black palm cockatoo and lovingly kissed his bare red cheek. The crest went down, and Artie began to 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.
Eighteen years ago, when he was a chick, poachers stole him from his nest in the remote jungles of Indonesia. He joined 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, in a private Singaporean quarantine facility, that Artie first saw Richard and Annamarie Stevenson, an American couple with a Florida-based wholesale wildlife business that had sunk about $200,000 into the cockatoos.
In the months after the birds arrived in Singapore, half of them had either died or been destroyed from an outbreak of what was suspected to be Newcastle disease, a lethal virus that can be devastating to domestic fowl and other birds. Even so, the Stevensons had to be smiling. No one had ever shipped this many palm cockatoos to the US before, and these birds were going to be the couple’s ticket to wealth and luxury.
There was a good reason black palm cockatoos (Probosciger aterrimus) at the time were practically unknown to most breeders in the US: 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 then-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 US had been named the world's largest importer of wild parrots by its own Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS). More than 800,000 birds were imported legally every year, and probably twice that number entered 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 doors, and lengths of PVC pipe. When Artie and the other 99 cockatoos arrived at Miami International airport one sultry afternoon in September 1983, the birds had been crowded into their small wooden crates for so long that many were sick and dying.
But for 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 onto their Ft. Lauderdale ranch. Richard Stevenson knew that the cantankerous Schubot had made millions in McDonald's franchises and wanted to amass the greatest private collection of exotic birds in the US 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 US 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 of Indonesia's byzantine export laws with the help of Don Bruning, the Bronx Zoo's expansive curator of birds, and were now preparing to seize the cockatoos as smuggled Indonesian “treasure.” While US laws on the importation of exotic birds were hazy, those on trafficking stolen wildlife, known as the Lacey Act, were not. Faced with the fact that the birds were also protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Stevensons’ defense crumbled. They forfeited all but two parrots to the USFWS in exchange for $45,000, a settlement Bruning still finds shocking.
"They were caught red-handed bringing in birds illegally," Bruning says, emotional after 17 years. "I mean they should be getting fined, not paid for doing it!"
The government now began distributing the cockatoos. Some went to the consortium of 11 zoos around the country that had been caring for the birds since their seizure— including two still on exhibit at the National Zoo’s Bird House—while eight 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 records. Ramon Noegel, one of the buyers, eventually sent his three birds on permanent loan to the Avicultural Research & Breeding Center (ARBC) of Loxahatchee, Florida—the machine-gun patrolled, avian Xanadu belonging to none other than Richard Schubot. Today the ARBC boasts some 120 palm cockatoos, the largest collection in the US
Artie, otherwise known as #62, was one of four cockatoos donated to SeaWorld. Five years later he was sold several times to different private breeders, finally ending up in Ruth Hanessian's pet shop, where he now sits in his cage, chomping macadamia nuts and flirting with anyone wearing black. Sadly, his saga is far from unique.
Flight of Fancy
Parrots, cockatoos, and lories comprise the Psittaciformes order, a group that includes about 330 species found mainly in tropical and subtropical forests of South America, Africa, and Australasia. No parrot species are native to Europe or North America (with the exception of Mexico), although the Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) ranged across the southeastern US until its extinction in 1914, and feral populations of released or escaped individuals are scattered widely, particularly in Florida.
Parrots’ exotic aura adds to their allure as pets—a demand that their wild populations often can’t support. Of the 58 at-risk species of parrot that aviculturists and smugglers lust after most, all but two are now protected under the Wild Bird Conservation Act, enacted by Congress in 1992 after intensive lobbying from conservation groups. According to John Webb, Assistant Chief of the Wildlife and Marine Resources Section at the US Department of Justice, the Wild Bird Act put teeth into the CITES agreement.
"The Wild Bird Act ended the [illegal] 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."
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 US, 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 could spell 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 in offshore waters searching for feathered gold. Don Bruning says that even a handful of such smugglers could have a catastrophic effect on rare parrot species.
"It’s significant because some of these island parrot populations only have a couple of hundred birds left in the wild," he explains. "If you remove ten or 20 chicks you are having a major impact on that population."
Island Star
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 unique to St. Lucia, and a member of the Appendix I club. The bird's tiny 40-mile range was steadily eaten away over the years by plantations, while its beautiful plumage made the jacquot a favorite target of smugglers. By 1971 fewer 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—spearheaded by native St. Lucian Gabriel Charles, who was tragically killed in a car accident in 1993—was faced with the task of saving a parrot that many St. Lucians thought of merely as dinner. With USFWS funding, Paul Butler, a dynamic English conservationist now with the RARE Center for Tropical Conservation in Arlington, Virginia, and the St. Lucian team helped devise a novel way of approaching the jacquot problem: They turned the parrot into a star, launching a major education 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 Herb Rafaele, an intrepid USFWS ecologist, 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 Forest & Lands Department got the green light to start listing large areas of St. Lucia's rainforest as national park. Rangers started building aviaries. Parrot hunting was forbidden until further notice. St. Lucians began turning in pet jacquots to the Forest & Lands Department in droves, so the birds could be freed. It was Rafaele's dream come true.
"I remember checking into a hotel and hearing a parrot squawk outside," says Rafaele. "And the clerk turned to me and said ‘That's Amazona versicolor, our national bird.' I mean, she knew the scientific name!" Fifteen years after the campaign began, the jacquot population has soared to 500 in the wild and growing, while ecotourism is drawing tourist dollars to the island’s protected habitat. Now St. Lucia gleams as an example of how conservation can work to everyone's advantage.
"St. Lucia is a real bright spot," says Alejandro Grajal, director of Latin American and Caribbean programs at the National Audubon Society. "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. It’s still vulnerable."
A case in point: This past July the St. Lucia Forest & Lands 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 European countries have been major players in smuggled wildlife for decades because their communist regimes had little concern for conservation. St. Lucian authorities raided the smuggler's boat and arrested them, but the eggs they had stolen were gone. They know that a sizable number of jacquots—technically the sovereign property of St. Lucia—are still languishing somewhere in the Czech Republic. Yet Czech laws on such things are ambiguous, and their judicial system still rife with communist-era bureaucracy, thus making recovery of smuggled wildlife time-consuming, and improbable.
Furthermore, a lot of parrot smuggling goes on within South American or African countries where international laws can't reach. "A typical example is the red-tailed Amazon [Amazona brasiliensis]," says Grajal. "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." Monitoring bird-trading in small villages or on jungle waterways is impossible for CITES inspectors, who have no jurisdiction over domestic trade. Countries like Brazil or Nigeria already have strict laws about smuggling in place, but the problem is enforcement.
"Unfortunately [enforcement] is driven by internal politics and is often vulnerable to corruption," says Scott Derrickson, a scientist at the National Zoo's Conservation and 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 countries’ own green organizations. Local groups can move around the countryside easily and keep track of threats and problems. But not all countries conduct parrot conservation the same way, nor do they always follow the methods of the mainstream international conservation community.
Spix's Last Stand
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 high 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 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.
The Spix's macaw was in decline even when the species was first described to science in the early 19th century by the German naturalist Johann Baptist von Spix. At that time, only about 60 individuals 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 contributed to erasing them from the landscape: local subsistence farmers hunted them for food; introduced African "killer" bees—brought in by Europeans to establish a honey crop—competed with the birds for nesting holes and probably attacked them on occasion; and last, but certainly not least, the pet trade. Moreover, Spix's macaw movements 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 created symposia and a flutter of papers, but not much else. A highly emotional rift had developed between many conservationists, who maintained that wildlife belonged ultimately in the wild, and aviculturists, who saw captive breeding of endangered birds as the last best hope for their survival. Both were convinced that their way was right for endangered parrots.
But beneath these ideological differences lay a deeper sense of betrayal: Certain aviculturists had been known to engage in and support parrot smuggling. In the late 1980s, when many 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—the one-time advocate of parrot conservation, and curator of birds at Spain's Loro Parque zoo, who had been jailed in the U.S. for smuggling birds.
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 private aviculturists who owned the Spix's macaws that the committee planned to breed. Unfortunately, the only aviculturists believed to have these rarest of birds were wealthy ones who had been quite active in the bird trade; Spix's were so rare that if someone owned one it was virtually an indictment of illegal smuggling. But these private collectors had the birds, and in order to create a sustainable, 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 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. It’s just a mess, and I think if it comes out successfully they will be lucky."
But not all conservationists are so harsh. Grajal points out that the Spix’s macaw is in a desperate situation, requiring desperate measures. “Even if they could catch [the smugglers], 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?" he asks. "No, 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 Britain-based conservation group Birdlife International made a startling discovery. After weeks driving through the thorny scrubland of Brazil's Bahia state looking for wild Spix's macaws, Tony Juniper and Carlos Yamashita stopped for a drink in a village bar. A local farmer heard their story and proclaimed, "I know where you can find that bird!" The rest is ornithological history, for the next day the farmer took both scientists to the outskirts of the dusty village of Curaca, where in no time at all they saw the now famous wild Spix's macaw. The bird, in fact, was found where scores of Spix’s macaws 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 lived 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.
"We've got all the vaqueros around there protecting the macaw," says Benny Gallaway, president of the American Federation of Aviculturists, an organization that 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 that the Spix's macaw is the rarest and thus most valuable parrot in the world—and Curaca is well known to smugglers 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 vague about almost all information coming out of the project, frustrating both non-project scientists and international law enforcement officials.
Shortly after its discovery, the lone Spix's was observed consorting with a fetching green female Illiger's macaw (Ara maracana), although the two birds have never produced offspring. This was good news for the Permanent Committee, which 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 odd couple became a trio, but after a month the female Spix's disappeared and was later found dead, apparently from hitting a power line. After seven years in a cage, the wild may have been too wild.
However this death 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 five returned 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 foster parent. 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—if mostly untested—parrot conservation programs that 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 Illiger’s as his companion. Because he was the only one they couldn't catch.
—John Tidwell is a freelance writer and independent television producer living in Silver Spring, Maryland.
ZooGoer 29(6) 2000. Copyright 2000 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
