Jan Steen's mystery red macaw (left); and Roelandt Savery's
mystery red macaw (right) (both public domain)
In two previous ShukerNature blog
articles, I surveyed a number of mysterious, seemingly-vanished or even
still-undiscovered types of macaw with very diverse histories but united
morphologically by their eyecatching plumage whose hues were all drawn from the
blue, indigo, and violet sections of the colour spectrum (please click here and
here
to access these two articles). However, as will now be revealed in Part 1 of
this major new 2-part ShukerNature article on missing macaws, also on file are
some equally intriguing, mystifying examples of lost mystery macaws whose
plumage exhibits vibrant hues drawn from the colour spectrum's red, orange, and
yellow sections, and which were all reputedly different from any of the
familiar macaw species known today. All of these species, moreover, were
reported from the West Indies archipelago (click here for
a very much briefer, introductory coverage of them on ShukerNature several
years ago), and many chroniclers claimed that macaws were once extremely common
there, yet today none of its islands (other than Trinidad, but see my comment
later here) are home to any macaws at all.
Although
I have since read many much more detailed accounts of them elsewhere, when
still only a child I first learned about the Caribbean's lost macaws from Purnell's
Encyclopedia of Animal Life. This was an extremely comprehensive,
authoritative six-volume wildlife encyclopaedia first published during the
1960s and edited by zoologists Drs Maurice Burton and Robert Burton – which
included the following very succinct summary of most of them:
The red macaw of Jamaica has
not been seen since 1765 and the green and yellow macaw of the same island
became extinct in the early 19th century. The Guadeloupe red macaw became
extinct a century before this [i.e. during the 1700s] and the Dominican green
and yellow macaw in the late 18th Century. The Martinique macaw has not been
heard of since 1640 and then there was one which has been called the mysterious
macaw. No specimen of this is known but a description of it was published in
1658 – and that is all we know of it except that it lived on 'one of the West
Indian islands'.
The
red macaw of Jamaica is A. gossei; the Jamaican green
and yellow macaw is A. erythrocephala; the Guadeloupe red macaw is A.
guadeloupensis; the Dominican green and yellow macaw is A.
atwoodi; and the Martinique macaw is A. martinicus.
As for the 'mysterious macaw', this is A. erythrura, and like the
Martinique macaw it was principally blue and yellow in colour.
Cuban red macaw on Cuban
postage stamps (public domain)
Two additional
erstwhile Caribbean macaws not noted above by the Burtons are the Cuban red
macaw A.
tricolor and the scientifically-undescribed Hispaniolan red macaw
(there is also the purple macaw of Guadeloupe Anodorhynchus purpurascens,
already documented by me on ShukerNature here). I shall be examining the Caribbean's green
and yellow mystery macaws as well as its blue and yellow mystery macaws in Part
2 of this article, so let us concentrate now upon its red and yellow examples.
Incidentally,
I wish to point out that the illustrations that I am presenting here and also
in Part 2 include several beautiful paintings depicting these birds' possible
appearance in life that were commissioned by Lord Walter Rothschild for his
magnificent tome Extinct Birds (1907).
In
addition, please note that I am omitting from these two Parts' discussion any
coverage or consideration referring to the islands of Trinidad and Tobago,
because only one mystery macaw has ever been documented from either of them.
This is Seaforth's macaw, described in 1822 from Trinidad by ornithologist J.A.
Latham (but by no-one else), and almost certainly referable to a colour variety
of the scarlet macaw Ara macao, a South American mainland species but
which is native there too. Indeed, unlike all other Caribbean islands, but no
doubt due to its very close proximity to South America, Trinidad is known to be
inhabited by mainland macaw species (no less than four, in fact, including the
above-noted scarlet macaw, plus the blue and yellow macaw A. ararauna,
the red-shouldered macaw Diopsittaca nobilis, and the red-bellied macaw Orthopsittaca
manilatus).
THE CUBAN RED MACAW
Depending upon which authority is
consulted, as many as 15 endemic macaw species may have once inhabited various
islands in the West Indies, but all of them are now extinct – always assuming,
of course, that they ever existed to begin with. Indeed, most of them are
nowadays commonly referred to in ornithological circles as hypothetical.
Nevertheless, there can be no doubt whatsoever that at least one striking,
predominantly red-plumed species of indigenous Caribbean macaw did indeed once exist.
This is because there are not only many
eyewitness reports of it on file but also at least 19 preserved skins and
taxiderm specimens in 15 major city museums around the world (including
Liverpool, London, Berlin, Dresden, Paris, Stockholm, Washington DC, New York,
Cambridge in Massachusetts, and Havana), plus subfossil remains. This species is,
or was, the Cuban red macaw Ara tricolor, which, as its common name
suggests, formerly inhabited the island of Cuba (plus the much smaller Isle of
Pines, aka the Isla de la Juventud, nearby).
Quite small for a macaw, measuring a mere
20 in long, when adult this species was predominantly red and yellow in colour,
but its wings were purplish-blue, and its tail was blue with pale blue upper
tail coverts (hence its binomial name, tricolor – 'three-coloured', i.e.
red, yellow, and blue). As in all macaws, the sexes were alike, but according
to American zoologist Austin Hobart Clark, writing in an Auk paper of
1905 concerning Greater Antillean macaws, its juveniles were mostly green,
rather than exhibiting the tricoloured plumage of the adults. No specimen or
description of its egg is known.
Cuban red macaw, by John Gerrard Keulemans, from Lord Walter Rothschild's book
Extinct Birds, 1907 (public domain)
Judging from a plethora of good native
eyewitness accounts, the Cuban macaw existed in small populations scattered
virtually throughout its island home, nesting in holes in palm trees and
feeding upon fruit and seeds plus flower buds and sprouts, but was most common
in the extensively forested area of Cuba's vast Zapata Swamp (Ciénaga de
Zapata). There is contention as to how tasty (or otherwise) its flesh was, but
it is certainly known that it was hunted by Cubans for its meat, and that its
young were captured alive by them to be sold and bred as pets.
Although the Cuban red macaw was still
said to be abundant in 1849, by the 1850s only one large flock still existed,
which frequently came to feed at a small group of trees at Zarabanda in the
Zapata Swamp, where quite a few of them were 'collected' (i.e. killed) by German-Cuban
ornithologist Dr Juan C.C. Gundlach. This activity on his part and also by
others, coupled with portions of its swampland habitat being lost to the creation
of plantations, proved disastrous for the species, and in 1864 the last pair of
Cuban red macaws known to have been killed in the wild were shot at San
Francisco de la Vega.
This is not near the Zapata Swamp on
mainland Cuba as frequently yet erroneously reported, but rather on the Isle of
Pines, as correctly identified in 2013 by James W. Wiley and Guy M. Kirwan in
their extensive Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club paper on
extinct Caribbean macaws. They also correctly stated that it was a pair of
macaws that was shot there, not a single one as is still so often mistakenly
claimed by other writers.
Cuban red macaw, by François-Nicolas Martinet, 1765 (public
domain)
Two single specimens were reputedly shot
as late as 1867 by members of Spanish writer-priest Antonio Perpiña's entourage
while travelling through central Cuba, and Gundlach believed that the species
existed in the Zapata Swamp until as late as the mid-1880s, but there is no
physical evidence to support his claim. Perhaps the best-known captive specimen
is one that lived at Paris's famous Jardin des Plantes, its body being donated
to Paris's National Museum of Natural History in 1842 after its death on 6
October of that year. However, once again contradicting frequent but incorrect
claims cited elsewhere, it was not the last captive specimen.
One that was exhibited at Amsterdam Zoo,
for instance, survived until 1858, and a specimen living in the Knowsley Park
aviaries of the 13th Earl of Derby died in March 1846. Both of these
latter specimens were again donated to museums following their deaths, with the
Knowsley Park individual being retained at Liverpool's World Museum.
Habitat destruction, hunting them for
their meat, and the capturing of young macaws to serve as pets have also been
cited as causes for the extinction of the other lost Caribbean macaws
documented here and in Part 2, and certainly they showed surprisingly little
fear of their hunters, thereby making their killing a tragically easy task. Yet
unlike the Cuban red macaw, there are no preserved skins or stuffed specimens of
any of these latter forms. As will now be seen, however, there are for at least
certain of them some noteworthy written accounts and intriguing illustrations testifying
to their erstwhile reality.
RED MACAWS OF HISPANIOLA
AND GUADELOUPE
Until the end of the 16th
Century, a scientifically-undescribed species of red macaw, one that was fairly
similar in appearance to that of Cuba, may also have existed on the
neighbouring island of Hispaniola, judging from a short description given in
1561 by Spanish historian and Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas within his
authoritative three-volume Historia de Las Indias (History of the West
Indies).
Differentiating by their respective size
three different species of Hispaniolan parrot (seemingly a macaw, an amazon
parrot, and a conure), he stated:
The largest…differ from those of the other islands in that they
have over the bill or the forehead white, not green or red; those of this
species that are in the island of Cuba have over the bill or the forehead red.
A single later report of a macaw on
Hispaniola, on the authority of local resident M. Deshayes, was subsequently
documented in 1779 by the eminent French naturalist Count Georges-Louis de Buffon
within his multi-volume magnum opus Histoire Naturelle. In 1983, German
macaw enthusiast Dieter Hoppe dubbed the Hispaniolan red macaw Ara tricolor haitius
in his book Aras, thereby classifying it as a subspecies of the Cuban
macaw.
Possible appearance of the Hispaniolan red macaw, envisaged by
Brazilian bird artist Rafael Nascimento (© Rafael Nascimento)
A third alleged Caribbean species that
was apparently predominantly red-plumed, and which was formally named by Austin
Hobart Clark in 1905, was the Guadeloupe red macaw A. guadeloupensis,
also known as the lesser Antillean macaw. The first known mention of this
species by a European derived from the voyages of none other than Christopher
Columbus, who mentioned in his writings that when visiting Guadeloupe
in 1493, his landing party observed "red parrots as large as
chickens" there (or guacamayos, as referred to by the island's native
Caribs at that time). And according to Diego Álvarez Chanca, who joined
Columbus on his second voyage (1493-94), they took two such macaws from the
houses of Caribs encountered by them on Guadeloupe.
Furthermore,
during the 1650s, French missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre also referred to these
very distinctive red macaws of Guadeloupe, which he termed the arras and
documented as follows:
The Arras is a sort of Parrot
bigger than all the others. This is proved because those of Guadaloupe [sic]
are larger than all the other Parrots, both those from the Islands as well as
from the Mainland; while this Arras is larger than these by one third. It has
the head, the neck, the belly and the back of the colour of fire; its wings are
a mixture of yellow, azure, and crimson feathers; while the tail is entirely red
and a foot-and-a-half long.
A sepia line drawing of one such macaw in the company of
various other Guadeloupe fauna appears in Du Tertre's book Histoire Generale
des Antilles (1667).
Guadeloupe
red macaw, arrowed, in drawing from Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre's book Histoire
Generale des Antilles, 1667 (public domain)
In Die New Welt (1534), German humanist
and historian Johann Huttich stated that he had recorded on Guadeloupe a red
macaw "present in such numbers as grasshoppers are with us", thereby
indicating that it was very common back then. Nevertheless, this fiery-plumed
macaw had seemingly vanished before the end of the 1700s, and has
never been conclusively identified with any species alive today. Of great
interest, however, is that it readily recalls a mysterious, predominantly red macaw
featured prominently in one of the most famous depictions of another extinct bird,
the Mauritius dodo Raphus cucullatus.
The depiction in question is a beautiful oil painting by Flemish
artist Roelandt Savery (1576-1639), which was painted in Holland in 1626. It
was once owned by George Edwards (1694-1773), a very talented English bird
painter and author in his own right, and it is now housed at London's Natural
History Museum. This great work has become virtually the 'standard' notion of
what the dodo looked like in life (though in more recent times, the veracity of
its chubby form has been questioned), and has thus attracted great attention.
In
stark contrast, almost entirely ignored from an ornithological standpoint are
the two very striking, colourful parrots that Savery painted to the dodo's
immediate left and top-right in this same painting. Judging from their size and
form, they are evidently macaws, but they do not resemble any known species.
I'll be dealing with Savery's right-hand macaw in Part 2 of this article, as it
is of potential relevance to two different Caribbean mystery macaws that I'll
be documenting there. However, his left-hand macaw may well be equally
pertinent to one specific Caribbean mystery macaw discussed here in Part 1,
because other than its pale facial skin and some yellow-gold and blue wing
plumes, this latter Savery-depicted macaw is entirely red.
Dodo and two mystery macaws,
in Roelandt Savery's painting, 1626 (public domain)
If these two depicted macaws were meant to be real, it suggests
that they may be lost (and possibly even undescribed) species, or unusual
freak/hybrid individuals, but what happened to the specimens that they were
based upon? Or could they have been 'invented' by Savery purely as colourful
support for the more prosaic plumage of the dodo? Or perhaps they did exist but
Savery's depictions of them were based not upon physical specimens but instead
upon inaccurate verbal descriptions of known species?
What I
find so interesting about Savery's depicted left-hand macaw is that it greatly
recalls Du Tertre's description of the arras or Guadeloupe red macaw – so much
so, in fact, that I cannot help but wonder whether a specimen of this latter
macaw was brought back to Holland and became the model for Savery's red macaw.
Moreover,
in his book The Dodo and Kindred Birds (1953), Japanese dodo
expert Masauji Hachisuka included as the frontispiece a copy of Savery's
original painting specially prepared for him by another famous but much later
bird artist, John Gerrard Keulemans (1842-1912), and stated in the accompanying
caption that the two macaws depicted in it were indeed from the West Indies.
Dodo and two mystery macaws,
in Keulemans's copy of Savery's painting, in the frontispiece of Hachisuka's dodo book
(public domain)
Certainly,
transportation of Caribbean birds back to Europe in post-Columbus times
frequently occurred. Hence it is by no means impossible that one or more
Guadeloupe red macaws found their way to Europe at the time of Savery when this
species was still extant in its West Indies homeland.
Having
said that, while communicating in December 2010 with Jolyon Parrish, subsequently
the author of The Dodo and the Solitaire: A Natural History (2012), I
was informed by him that Savery sometimes altered the colours of his subjects
to suit his specific needs for the painting in question, and that I should therefore
be wary of placing too much emphasis upon the colours of the depicted dodo's
two macaw companions. Jolyon also stated that some ornithologists have sought
to identify Savery's depicted red specimen not as a Guadeloupe red macaw but
rather as the much more familiar, and extant, red and blue (aka green-winged)
macaw A. chloroptera from the South American mainland.
However,
I find such an identification to be both surprising and implausible, because
Savery's mostly blue-lacking and entirely green-lacking red macaw bears scant
resemblance to A. chloroptera, bearing in mind that the latter species
has vivid, instantly visible, and very sizeable portions of both blue and green
upon its wings.
Red and blue (aka
green-winged) macaw Ara chloroptera
(copyright-free)
In any
case, Savery's painting is not the only putative depiction of a Guadeloupe red
macaw on record. A second, but hitherto much more obscure example was kindly
brought to my attention in July 2013 by Brazil-based bird artist and
crypto-ornithological researcher Rafael Nascimento.
The
bird in question is a large red macaw, depicted sitting on a perch in the
top-left corner of an oil painting from c.1665 by Dutch artist Jan Steen,
entitled 'The Way You Hear It, Is The Way You Sing It'. As I soon realised when
viewing it, this bird closely resembles Savery's depicted red mystery macaw
(see the direct visual comparison of them that opens this present ShukerNature
article).
Both
of these birds have yellow and blue wing plumes (although the blue plumes are
scarcely discernable in Steen's bird), but otherwise their plumage is uniformly
red. Were these two depictions based upon two different specimens of the same
species, I wonder – and could that species have been the now-demised Guadeloupe
red macaw? Or perhaps Steen's depicted macaw was directly inspired by Savery's?
But who can now say with any degree of certainty, more than four centuries
later?
Mystery red macaw in Jan
Steen's oil painting, 'The Way You Hear It Is The Way You Sing It', c.1665 (public
domain)
Yet
for there now to be two classical works of art depicting what is clearly one
and the same variety of mystery red macaw, and one that corresponds closely with
a verbal description of an ostensibly real but long-lost Caribbean species,
certainly lends weight to the prospect that this latter macaw was indeed real,
and not merely hypothetical, as some ornithologists have suggested due to no
physical evidence for its former realty having been procured to date.
Also
worthy of mention here is a colour plate that appeared in François-Nicolas
Martinet's Histoire Naturelle (1765), which depicts a supposed
Guadeloupe red macaw. Thanks to its wings' very striking blue and yellow plumes,
which are much more prominent than those of the red mystery macaws depicted
respectively by Savery and Steen, however, this bird bears much more of a
resemblance to the scarlet macaw, and it may simply represent an imported
scarlet macaw specimen.
A
revised version of this plate that appeared in a contemporary work by Buffon
makes it look even more like a scarlet macaw. Nevertheless, in both versions it
lacks the blue tail feathers characteristic of the latter species but
apparently lacking in the Guadeloupe red macaw, so this artwork remains
something of an enigma.
Possible Guadeloupe red macaw
depiction from François-Nicolas Martinet's book, Histoire Naturelle, 1765 (left); version of Martinet's plate
depicting possible Guadeloupe red macaw, in contemporary tome by Buffon (right)
(both images in the public domain)
THE JAMAICAN RED MACAW
The final principally red Caribbean macaw
on record is A. gossei, the Jamaican red macaw (also known as the yellow-headed
macaw). It was one of several extinct West Indies parrots formally described
and named in 1905 by Lord Rothschild within a paper published by the Bulletin
of the British Ornithologists' Club. Rothschild named this particular macaw
in honour of the famous Victorian naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, who in his
book The Birds of Jamaica (1847) had documented an individual shot about
10 miles east of Lucea in c.1765 by a Mr Odell.
Gosse had obtained his information
concerning this specimen from an account sent to him by a Dr Robinson (not
Robertson, as often mistakenly given elsewhere) who had observed it as a
preserved taxiderm exhibit (but lacking its legs). Sadly, this unique specimen,
the only one known of the Jamaican red macaw, is now lost, but Robinson's
description of it is preserved in Gosse's book, so here it is:
Basal half of upper mandible black, apical half ash-coloured;
lower mandible black, tip only ash-coloured. Forehead, crown, and back of neck
bright yellow. Sides of face around eyes, anterior and lateral part of neck,
and back, a fine scarlet. Wing coverts and breast, deep sanguine red. Winglet
and primaries, an elegant light blue. The legs and feet were said to have been
black; the tail red and yellow intermixed.
Jamaican red macaw Ara
gossei, by Joseph Smit, from Rothschild's book Extinct Birds, 1907 (public domain)
Of great interest, moreover, is that in
2003, researchers C.T. Fisher and F.E. Warr, writing on the subject of avian-related
library and manuscript resources in a paper published by the Bulletin of the
British Ornithologists' Club, revealed that a hitherto-overlooked
full-colour painting of a mysterious Jamaican macaw largely fitting Robinson's
description as documented by Gosse had lately been discovered in a work
containing many wildlife paintings published in 1765 – namely, Lieutenant L.J.
Robins's The Natural History of Jamaica. The copy of this work in which
the painting had been spotted was owned by the Earl of Derby.
Other researchers have since speculated
that it was more likely to have been a Cuban red macaw that had been imported
into Jamaica. (Moreover, parrot expert Tony Pittman has mentioned to
me that A. gossei as a whole, not just this one specimen, might well
have been based entirely upon examples of A. tricolor imported or traded
from Cuba and therefore never existed as a valid species in its own right.)
Yet as can be seen here by comparing my
article's illustrations of the Cuban red macaw with the Robins-derived painting,
the Jamaican red macaw does not correspond precisely with the Cuban red macaw.
In particular, its golden-yellow underparts differ markedly from the much
darker underparts of the Cuban red macaw, as does its bright red back in comparison
with the Cuban's very dark back.
Possible Jamaican red macaw painting in Lieutenant L.J. Robins's
book The Natural History of Jamaica, 1765 (public domain)
Evidencing that mainland South American
macaws (or, at the very least, known macaw species from Trinidad) have indeed
been imported into Jamaica, within an Archives of Natural History paper
published in October 2010 ornithological researcher S.T. Turvey documented a
previously-unconsidered watercolour painting of a probable scarlet macaw A.
macao that had lived on Jamaica, where it had been depicted in 1765 by John
Lindsay.
However, whereas this latter specimen certainly
does resemble the scarlet macaw, it does not recall either the macaw in the Robins
painting or the macaw of Robinson's verbal description, indicating once again
that A. gossei was a distinct, valid Jamaican endemic. Indeed,
concluding their coverage of A. gossei within their authoritative tome Extinct
Birds (2012), Julian P. Hume and Michael Walters opined:
Thus there seems to be reasonable evidence that at least one
other endemic red macaw, along with Ara tricolor of Cuba, once occurred
in the West Indies. Whether it justified specific status is now impossible to
ascertain.
Scarlet macaw Ara macao,
showing its characteristic blue tail plumes (© Dr Karl Shuker)
Finally: in 1967, within the second
revised edition of his classic volume Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the
World, the esteemed American ornithologist James C. Greenway opined that
perhaps the scarlet macaw, the Cuban red macaw, and the mysterious red macaws
reported from Hispaniola, Guadeloupe, and Jamaica collectively constituted a species
complex, or superspecies as he called it. However, with no specimens of the
last three macaws to examine, this must remain just an opinion, albeit a most
intriguing one.
In Part 2 of this ShukerNature
article (click here to access it), I examine reports and illustrations of some lost Caribbean
macaws that reputedly sported green and yellow or blue and yellow plumage. I also survey the possible taxonomic status of a most interesting
macaw-like mystery parrot featured in a very famous painting by the celebrated
17th-Century Dutch architect and painter Bartholomeus
van Bassen – so don't miss
it!
Extinct Birds author Lord Walter Rothschild aboard his famous zebra-drawn
carriage (public domain)
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