“Not just any parrot.” Rachel pressed both palms to her chest. “The world’s rarest parrot. Probably the world’s rarest bird.”
The crossed hands rose and fell with the lime-turquoise bosom.
“Oh, my.”
“Would you like water?” I asked.
Rachel fluttered agitated fingers.
“It’s a macaw, actually.” Slipping off her half-moons, she let them drop to the end of their chain.
“A macaw is a type of parrot?”
“Yes.” She lifted the feather from beside the scope and stroked it lovingly. “This is from the tail of a Spix’s macaw.”
“Do you have a stuffed specimen?” Ryan asked.
“Certainly not.” She slid from her stool. “Thanks to habitat destruction and the cage-bird trade, there aren’t any more. I’m lucky to have the reference slides for the feathers.”
“What is it you look at?” I asked.
“Oh, my. Well, let me see.” She thought a moment, going through her own KISS abridgment. “Feathers have shafts out of which grow barbs. The barbs have mini-barbs, called barbules, connected by structures called nodes. In addition to the overall morphology and color of the feather, I look at the shape, size, pigmentation, density, and distribution of those nodes.”
Rachel went to one of the shelves above the drawers and returned with a large brown volume. After checking the index, she opened and laid the book flat.
“That”—she tapped a photo with a pudgy finger—“is a Spix’s.”
The bird had a cobalt blue body and pale head. The legs were dark, the eye gray, the beak black and less hooked than I’d expected.
“How big were they?”
“Fifty-five, sixty centimeters. Not the largest, not the smallest of the macaws.”
“Where did they hang out?” Ryan.
“The arid interior of east-central Brazil. Northern Bahia province, mostly.”
“The species is no more? They are an ex-species?”
I caught Ryan’s Monty Python reference. Rachel did not.
“The last surviving wild Spix’s disappeared in October of 2000,” she said.
“That’s a known fact?” I asked.
She nodded. “That bird’s story is very poignant. Would you like to hear it?”
Ryan was getting that look.
My eyes crimped in warning.
Ryan’s lips pressed together.
“Very much,” I said.
“Recognizing the Spix’s macaw’s perilous status, in 1985 Birdlife International decided to census the species in its only known habitat.”
“In Brazil.”
“Yes. Depressingly, the total count came to five.”
“That’s not good,” I said.
“No. And the situation went downhill from there. By the end of the decade the number of sightings had fallen to zero. In 1990, Tony Juniper, one of the world’s top parrot experts, went to Brazil to determine whether the Spix’s truly was extinct in the wild. After six weeks of scouring Bahia by four-wheel drive, questioning every farmer, schoolboy, padre, and poacher he met, Juniper located a single male living in a cactus on a riverbank near the town of Curaca.”
“Where’s that?” Ryan asked, flipping through the macaws.
“About thirteen hundred miles north of Rio.” With a tight smile, Rachel retrieved and closed her book.
I did some quick math. “The Spix’s lived on by itself for ten years after the initial sighting?”
“That bird became an international cause celebre. For a decade, teams of scientists and an entire Brazilian village recorded its every move.”
“Poor guy.” Ryan.
“And they didn’t just watch,” Rachel said. “The situation turned into an ornithological soap opera. Believing the Spix’s genes were too precious to waste, conservationists decided the male needed a mate. But macaws bond for life and this little guy already had a spouse, a bright green Illiger’s macaw.”
“Birdie miscegenation.” Ryan.
“Sort of.” Rachel answered Ryan, then gave me a puzzled look. “Though the couple never cohabitated. The Spix’s lived on a facheiro cactus, the Illiger’s in a hollow tree trunk. They’d fly together during the day, then at sundown the male Spix’s would drop the female Illiger’s off at her tree and return to his cactus.”
