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male Spix’s macaw, South American, mostly blue, last of his kind. Wants female for connubial bliss, nesting. Open to blind dates arranged by scientists and bird collectors.

Late one afternoon in Curaca, a sunbaked village in the northeast Brazilian backlands, a quiet vigil is under way. Three men sit on wooden stools in the back lot of a stucco and wattle farmhouse, their eyes fixed on the thin fringe of trees and bushes that lines a dried-up creek bed. The sun that punishes this flat land of cactus scrub has dimmed, and a breeze whispers of the coming dusk. The men scan the treetops, crown by crown. No binoculars are needed here. The men know well the habits of their anticipated visitor, the little blue, or Spix’s, macaw, a species that has become as rare in the wild as a species can be, reduced to a lone male.

In time they hear it, faint but unmistakable: Kraw kraw arrrk. “The macaw,” says biologist Marcos Da Re, the chief watchman here. He looks at his wristwatch. “Five sixteen,” he announces, noting the time. Suddenly, a matte blue streak flashes against a powder blue sky. The macaw flies straight toward the tops of the caraibeira trees, where he will rest for the night.

At his side is a smaller, more brightly colored female maracana, or Illiger’s macaw. The male, driven by loneliness or an instinctive need to establish social bonds, has become the constant companion of the maracana. They wheel and soar before disappearing among the leafy camouflage. The performance is brief but brings smiles to the faces of the human observers.

The world’s 16 macaw species are scattered from Mexico to Argentina. A seventeenth became extinct around the turn of the century, and today nine are considered endangered, though none so gravely as the Spix’s. Da Re is a field biologist who has joined a scientific effort to save the Spix’s from extinction, in part by locating a captive female as a potential mate for the lone wild male. If successful, the project will offer inspiration for similar projects around the globe.

The Spix’s macaw first came to scientific recognition in 1819, when famed Austrian naturalist Johann Baptist von Spix shot one while visiting Brazil. The bird was not seen again in the wild until 1903, and scientists have observed it only rarely since. In 1986, Swiss scientist Paul Roth spotted a family of three on Melancia Creek, some 800 kilometers (500 mi.) inland from the coastal city of Salvador, near where Spix shot his specimen. But the wild-animal trade and habitat destruction by settlers had found them, too, and by 1988 naturalists thought that, with the exception of a few captive birds, the Spix’s macaw was extinct.

Then, in 1990, after a local farmer turned up with Polaroid snapshots of a large blue “parrot,” a team of naturalists plunged into the backlands, coming upon a lone adult male Spix’s near Melancia Creek. Scientists believe this bird is the last of his kind in the wild, living in the scrub that surrounds Curaca.

Brazilians call this country the caatinga, a sun-scorched terrain of baked mud, dried-up riverbeds, cactus scrub and the occasional lofty caraibeira. The caatinga hardly seems a fitting landscape for a macaw. Movies and books of jungle tales have created an image of macaws - those raucous, outsize parrots - as creatures of dripping rain forest, flitting about in clouds of steam and tangles of liana. But in fact, this arid land provides habitat for three macaw species, including the Spix’s.

But for Curaca’s stubborn male, the Spix’s macaw would be a footnote of ornithology. To save the species, a group of scientists in the late 1980s started a long and tricky campaign. Back then, they had a rough idea of who held the dozen or so captive Spix’s, but locating and acquiring them posed a challenge. “We didn’t know who had what birds, where they kept them all, much less what sex they were,” says Iolita Bampi, one of the pioneers of the campaign and currently the chief of the wildlife department of the Brazilian environmental authority, I BAMA. “We were starting in the dark.”

In 1989, IBAMA turned the group of scientists into a formal entity, the Permanent Committee for the Recovery of the Spix’s Macaw, which called upon the aid of conservationists on three continents. Not knowing that any Spix’s survived in the wild, the new committee focused on breeding the handful of captive birds with the intention of creating a reservoir of macaws for release into the wild. After discovery of the wild male, the committee initiated a search for a mate and hired Marcos Da Re to conduct field research in the area where the wild macaw had turned up.

The committee’s search was not only difficult but highly delicate. In addition to involving macaw specialists, environmental authorities and diplomats it also reached out to the private world of animal collectors and breeders. These collectors run legitimate concerns in their own countries, but in the past they have been the final customers in the nether-world of animal trafficking, which international law-enforcement agencies reckon moves more money than any other illegal activity except narcotics.

In Brazil, the capture, sale or purchase of wild animals is prohibited. But demanding return of the collectors’ macaws surely would have been a complex and drawn-out process, says Natasha Schischakin, who heads the committee’s working group on captive breeding. What is more, many of the collectors possessed valuable expertise, such as the ability to reproduce Spix’s in captivity. So the committee and the Brazilian government agreed that all holders could participate in the recovery program but would have to give up management of the macaws to the committee so the birds could be treated as a single population. To encourage collector participation, the Brazilian government promised that aviculturists who helped out would be granted one-time amnesty from prosecution for any macaws held illegally.

Apparently moved by the macaw’s plight, five private breeders - one in the Philippines, one in Spain, one in Switzerland and two in Brazil - joined the project. One of them, Wolfgang Kiessling, an experienced breeder who owns a huge and profitable zoo, Loro Park, on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, even put up more than $100,000 for the recovery project. The cooperation of these breeders was fundamental to success. All are now full partners in the program. The Sao Paulo Zoo also held birds that had been previously confiscated, and these too joined the managed population.

Even after the politics had been sorted out, the biological challenges remained daunting. These included building up the captive Spix’s into a breeding stock for future release and figuring out how to reintroduce a captive female macaw to the wild male and to the species’ native habitat.

The committee located an eligible female Spix’s in Recife, Brazil, and began to prepare her for release. Caught in the wild as an adult, she had been living a caged life for nearly seven easy years. “If we had released her cold into the wild, she would certainly have died,” says Marcos Da Re.

So she went to boot camp, with Da Re as drill sergeant. He led her through an eight-month regimen of flying calisthenics and a Spartan, working-bird’s diet. He logged the time she took to crack a pinhao nut, clocked her flights and even counted her wing beats.

The prep course worked. In mid-March, she left the cage. The researchers put food out for her to keep her near the cage while she adjusted to the wild. Soon, she flew away into the caatinga, but within a matter of weeks she turned up again, flying with the male Spix’s and his maracana companion. The trio flew together for nearly six weeks, sometimes joined by other maracanas, as this was the time of year when macaws flock in small bands. Hope soared when, at night, the pair of Spix’s left the maracanas and roosted together.

Then, one day in June, the female Spix’s disappeared. The field biologists suspect that the maracanas split into two groups, with one Spix’s macaw joining each group. Until the researchers are sure of the female’s whereabouts, they are keeping a constant vigil for her, scouring a 2,000-square-kilometer (772-sq.-mi.) tract of terrain for a blue needle in an immense haystack. Meanwhile, the committee is attempting to boost Spix numbers in captivity. Seven birds hatched in 1995 brought the world total to 39. Release of birds into the wild could be crucial to recovery.

Da Re has discovered that protecting the endangered macaw means winning over the human community. So he has added helping the impoverished rural folk to his mission.

Years ago, Curaca was a prosperous village of sheep herders and leather workers whose pastoral bounty paved broad streets, built sturdy buildings, even supported a flourishing theater troupe. Since then, Brazilian palates have turned from mutton to beef, and hides of better quality are imported from Africa or Argentina. As long as they were relatively prosperous, residents of the caatinga did no harm to the naturally rare and delicate local flora. But economic woes brought ecological decline as herders, desperate to make up for shortfalls, ravaged the scant surviving trees for firewood, farms and fences, leaving behind a denuded landscape even more vulnerable to the cyclical dry spells. Now, like the macaw, Curaca barely holds on.

But Da Re has found friends here. “These people are my eyes, my scouts,” he says. He has become as involved in their plight as they have in the fate of the little blue macaw. The interest is not just sentimental. Over-grazing and forest cutting have run down not only the Spix’s habitat but the productivity of pastures and farms. So Da Re and his team went to work building fences, teaching rotational grazing practices and replanting the caatinga, measures that protect the herders’ fields and the macaw’s feeding grounds.

Funding the fences, as well as school construction and cultural and sports activities, has not been easy. But the efforts made in behalf of the village have won respect and allies for the macaw. The whole community has become caught up in the effort to save the bird. The plight of the ararinha azul has inspired poems, plays and songs and even a town pageant, where children paraded in blue-feathered costumes. The people of Curaca follow the saga of the airborne dating game the way most Brazilians follow the prime-time telenovelas, or soap operas.

The case of the Spix’s macaw, says Da Re, shows how even a poor community like Curaca, if given half a chance, can play a crucial part in conservation. And he expects the effort in Curaca to reverberate elsewhere. “Through the Spix’s macaw we are learning not only about the biology of this little-studied bird, but about the environmental history of the entire region,” Da Re says. “The macaw is also a flagship species, showing us the way to saving other endangered species.”

Mac Margolis is the Brazil correspondent for The Economist and is a contributor to Newsweek. Photographer Claus C. Meyer lives in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.

© 1996 National Wildlife Federation & 2004 Gale Group