" The desert Spix's " - A report in the September 2011 issue of Parrots Magazine
Ryan Watson has a very special job of looking after a rare collection of birds for a member of Qatar's royal family, Sheik Saoud bin Mohammed bin Ali al-Thani. He takes great care with Jewel, a four month old Spix's Macaw and is pleased with the way it is developing.
If Jewel continues to thrive, Watson will soon move her and a companion, a second young macaw shrieking at the far end of the pair's long enclosure, to a larger aviary, where they will flock with others of their kind.
Although the distance of the move will be short, it has far-reaching implications, and will foster fledgling hope that this rarest of parrots can be saved. Watson was hired to rescue the species from the edge of extinction and send it soaring back into the Brazilian jungle.
It's an audacious plan in an improbable location, in this oil and gas rich kingdom on the Arabian Peninsula. With no signs marking it in the flat arid landscape, a fenced private wildlife compound extends across 1.6 square miles, about 20 miles west of the capital, Doha.
The Al-Wabra Wildlife Preservation began as a private menagerie with a questionable past, but has been transformed into an intensive conservation operation owned by Saoud. A staff of 200, including four veterinarians and five biologists, maintain the compound.
Private menageries are common in the region, said Watson, a 33-year-old Australian who heads the blue macaw breeding programme. Since arriving at Al-Wabra preserve in 2005, Watson has overseen the hatching of 24 Spix's Macaws. Combined with birds bought from a commercial breeder in the Philippines, and a collector in Switzerland, the facility shelters 55 Spix's macaws, nearly 75 percent of the world's known population.
"The bottom line is, that the future of the species now rests in the hands of the sheik," said Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, or, perhaps more accurately, in the hands of Watson.
But the going is tough. "The birds don't do very well in captivity," Watson said. Many of the older birds can live for 30 years or longer and can suffer from weak kidneys, which is the result of dehydration when they were smuggled from Brazil to private collectors decades ago.
A more worrisome problem is the genetic bottleneck caused by extreme in-breeding. All but four of the surviving birds descended from a brother-sister pair kept by the Swiss breeder and as a result, only two percent of eggs laid by second-generation captive females, hatch. Tests allow breeders to select pairs with the greatest genetic diversity, but those couples don't always produce eggs.
And for unknown reasons, the hatchlings that do emerge skew heavily female. Because Spix's macaws form strong pair bonds, that means a gender balance will ultimately be required for the species to thrive.
Watson and his wife, Monalyssa, a macaw expert from Brazil, plan to move to a 6,000-acre farm bought by Saoud in northern Brazil. There, they will build a hatchery, a nursery and an aviary, and following a step-by-step plan, they hope to introduce captive-bred macaws into the wild. Initially, they will only let the birds out at night, drawing them back to the aviary with food and water. Slowly, it is hoped the birds will learn to eat wild food and avoid predation.
The Watsons will test the process with a more abundant Brazilian species, the Illiger's macaw. If captive birds of that species adapt well, within three years, young Spix's macaws will be flown home. "It's 50-50," said Watson, assessing the macaws' odds of survival. He has heard all the criticisms but says, "What's the point? Wild animals belong in the wild, otherwise, what we're doing is not conservation."
End of report