Recovery of Spix Macaw threatened by climate change

(28 May 2024)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Curaça, Brazil – 11 March 2024
1. Various of Spix Macaws sitting on top of trees and screeching
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Cromwell Purchase, Biologist:
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“I came to Brazil to bring the spix macaw back into the wild. My whole working career has been involved with the spix macaw. Working in Qatar, and then in Germany, and now moved here in order to release the birds into the wild.”
3. Various of Cromwell and Candice Purchase walking on a dry riverbed
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Cromwell Purchase, Biologist:
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“A blue bird seemed to be something that everyone wanted to get their hands on. Very rare the color in the wild, so they were poached. The poaching really brought them to extinction in the end of the day. The poaching is bad, it created the extinction, but it wasn’t the only thing involved.”
5. Spix macaw on a tree
6. Last known wild spix macaw nest
7. Purchases and group on a dry riverbed
8. Aerial shot of Caatinga biome ++MUTE++
9. Various of Caatinga
10. SOUNDBITE (English) Cromwell Purchase, Biologist:
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“Climate change is something that is real and you feel it in the arid zones. When you are in a dry area, that only gets rainfall for a very short period of the year, and you have a draught in that period that you were supposed to get the rain you might now go an entire year before you going to get your next rain.”
11. Aerial shot of Caatinga biome ++MUTE++

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Curaça – 12 March 2024
12. Blue Sky employee walking on a reforestation area
13. Various of Blue Sky employee showing growing seedlings of recent reforestation planting
14. Employee showing a small seedling bag
15. SOUNDBITE (English) Cromwell Purchase, Biologist:
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“We’ve partnered with Blue Sky in order to try and plant as much as we can so they can actually survive those dry seasons that are getting longer and longer.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Curaça – 11 March 2024
16. Purchase walking outside the project’s conservation and breeding facilities
17. SOUNDBITE (English) Cromwell Purchase, Biologist:
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“It’s the first time we are releasing a bird that has no wild counterpart of the same species. And no counterpart that knows the wild. That is probably the hardest part and what makes the project so novel. What makes it so exciting is that actually we’re successful, we were able to get them into the wild and last year had them starting to breed.”
18. Outside wall of conservation facility with a spix macaw painting
19. Purchase outside the cages of a conservation facility
20. Spix macaw duo inside a facility
21. Various of a spix macaw chick
22. Various of spix macaws flying
STORYLINE:
All Spix’s macaws are majestically blue in the blazing sun of Brazil's Northeast, but each bird is distinct to Candice and Cromwell Purchase.

As the parrots soar squawking past their home, the couple can readily identify bird No. 17 by its smooth feathers and can tell No. 16 from No. 22, which has two beads attached to its radio collar.

This familiarity offers a glimpse of the South African couple’s commitment to saving one of the world's most critically endangered species.

The parrot — endemic to a small fraction of the Sao Francisco River basin and already rare in the 19th century — was declared extinct in the wild in 2000, when a lonely surviving male disappeared following decades of poaching and habitat destruction from livestock overgrazing.

The few remaining birds were scattered in private collections around the world.



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