Birds in Trouble

A visit to the California Academy of Sciences, located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, speaks volumes about the disaster that has befallen birds with the spread of humanity. A maze of narrow corridors in the scientific collections leads an explorer to the Ornithological Collection. There you will find a cabinet with a sign: “Extinct Birds.”


A well-known scientist, Warwick Kerr, thought that by hybridizing African and Brazilian bees he might be able to create a strain that was both calm and yielded a rich lode of honey. But before Kerr could do the experiment, a Brazilian beekeeper visiting Kerr’s lab deliberately allowed some of the African bees to escape. That beekeeper’s motives are unknown, but besides possibly hastening the exit of Spix’s macaws, he has been responsible for the deaths of numerous human beings.

In a poignant twist, the last known wild male Spix’s macaw was discovered in 1990 paired with a female, but the female was not of his own species. The male Spix was trying to reproduce with was a female blue- winged macaw. The mismatched couple did mate, and she even laid eggs, but, as one might expect, the eggs were infertile.

More than seventy Spix’s macaws now live in captive breeding programs run by conservationists. To counter the risk of losing genetic variability due to inbreeding, individuals have been exchanged between various institutions in an effort to maintain their genetic diversity.