FEATURE Photograph Steve Brookes


The species was described by Bonaparte in 1856, from a prepared specimen in the Paris Museum, whose origin was known only as Brazil, and another specimen from Antwerp Zoo, Belgium, of unknown origin.


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 there 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


BIRD SCENE 09 25 21


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48