FEATURE
Sick started to search for the macaw in 1964. By 1977 he had come to the conclusion that the only place where the Indigo Macaw, as he called it, could live was the Raso da Catarina. He wrote: “Our doubts, however, were very great. Could it be that this region was so completely overlooked by scientists, and that they could hide, for more than a century, a bird as large as a macaw? It was hardly believable.”
emphasis is on parrots! Watching them. I have seen parrots leave their roost sites in many locations. Usually they are gone in a whoosh of wings -- and that is that. But not the Lear’s. I know from the time on my photographs that we watched them for well over one hour. Some of them were perched in trees several hundred metres away but they kept returning to fly over us -- prolonging those precious moments that were the highlight of countless parrot watching trips in many parts of the tropics. Today, if you are in this remote area
with a guide, it is not so difficult to see Lear’s Macaw. I could not help thinking about how long, difficult and painful the experience was for Helmut Sick and Dante Teixeira, his colleague in Rio’s National Museum. Sick started to search for the macaw in 1964. By 1977 he had come to the conclusion that the only place where the Indigo Macaw, as he called it, could live was the Raso da Catarina. He wrote: “Our doubts, however, were very great. Could it be that this region was so completely overlooked by scientists, and that they could hide, for more than a century, a bird as large as a macaw? It was hardly believable.”
Then the Raso was “a white spot on the map of Brazil, no settlements, no roads, dried-up rivers”. It was supposed to be impenetrable. It was certainly inhospitable, owing to its tremendous heat and the lack of water. After eleven
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