Letter from the field by Charles Munn,
Senior Conservation Zoologist

My ongoing work with macaws as flagship species for ecosystem conservation has continued to expand in Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil over the past few months, with especially exciting results in the Lower Urubamba River (way downstream from Peru's famous Machu Picchu), in the new and amazing Madidi National Park in Bolivia, and in the dry forests of the cusp between the extreme eastern Amazon and arid northeastern Brazil.

In the Lower Urubamba, we are working with a friendly and cooperative community of 400 lowland Amazonian Indians from the Machiguenga ethnic group. This community, which is called Timpia ("tim-PEE-a"), owns about 70,000 acres of prime foothill rain forest just western of Peru's famous Manu National Park (see Jan '94 National Geographic, "Spirits of the Rainforest" from Discovery Channel, or PBS-TV's latest Manu program from November 1997--available on video). Timpia unilaterally banned all hunting and capture of macaws and other parrots in 1995 to try to attract WCS to support conservation education and field work in their forests.

Thanks to WCS's excellent relationship with this community, the Indians showed us a spectacular macaw clay lick hidden along a stream in the middle of their community lands and encouraged us to start research and photo tourism there. The lick is a 200-foot-tall reddish clay bank set back 300 feet from a small, knee-deep stream that is unnavigable due to numerous small rocky rapids. After having seen perhaps 25 of the best macaw and parrot clay licks in southern Peru, I can say that the Timpia site may turn out to be the most photogenic macaw lick of them all. Most large macaw licks have only one or two species of large macaws, but this one has all three of the large lowland species found in the Western Amazon: Scarlet, Green-winged, and Blue-and-Gold. The only other large macaw clay lick that we know of that has all three species is the Tambopata lick further south in Peru. The Tambopata site, however, is extremely hard to photograph safely because the birds eat clay half way up a 120-foot-tall clay bank that itself regularly collapses dramatically into the rushing current of the 400-foot-wide Upper Tambopata River. You can't snap pictures safely from the top of the bank because it is undercut by river erosion and collapses at unpredictable intervals. Forget photos from the opposite shore--the river is too wide to get good shots. In Timpia, the lick bank is even taller, but there are some trees growing on terraces on either side of the lick--a perfect site for permanent photographic blinds. If our work in early 1998 shows that these terraces are firm, then it might be possible to erect guyed metal observation towers near the lick face to permit excellent photo opportunities for visiting scientists, photographers, film makers, and general macaw fanatics.

The dramatic foothill scenery in Timpia and adjacent areas is more striking than that in either Manu or Tambopata, which makes Timpia even more promising for tourism. And the community already owns a long, wide, grass landing strip that is a mere seven minutes by boat and 50 minutes on foot from this secluded macaw lick.

A WCS partner group in Peru, InkaNatura, has obtained support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to work with the community in building a simple 20-bed biological station to offer researchers and photographers from Peru and abroad a unique educational experience. The station will be 100% owned by the community itself. My work in Timpia is supported by the Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg Foundation and by the Disney Corporation.

In Bolivia's huge new Madidi National Park (the size of New Jersey),' I had the good fortune of leading a National Geographic expedition through the park for four weeks in October 1997. Our team found the park, which WCS played a major role in creating, to be even more amazing than expected. Several times between 1992 through 1996 I surveyed macaws and other wildlife in the lowland rain forest of the park, but this October trip was my first to the high and middle elevations. Madidi starts at more than 19,000 feet--in towering snow-capped peaks covered with massive glaciers.

Near the glaciers we saw Andean Condors, Viscachas (incredibly cute, long-eared, relatives of the chinchilla) and fresh signs of Puma. The park then descends rapidly through Andean grasslands, moist cloud forest, lower mountain forest, and parched, deciduous rainshadow valleys to lowland rain forest and seasonally flooded lowland savannahs, the latter at a mere 600 feet of elevation. In the cloud forests we found several large display grounds of the blazing scarlet Andean Cock of the Rock. Madidi is estimated to harbor 1,100 of the 9,600 species of birds in the world---about 100 or so more than the Manu Park, which reaches only about 13,000 feet of elevation and has no snowcapped peaks or glaciers and no lowland savannahs.

In fact, Madidi Park is now acknowledged to be the most biologically diverse protected area in the world, thereby stealing the crown from Manu, which held the record for 23 years. The king is dead. Long live the king.

In the middle elevations, we recorded rauchous flocks of endangered Military Macaws, while in the lowlands we marvelled at the tameness and majesty of families of Red-and-Green Macaws, who repeatedly flew within 20 feet of us at eye level as we gazed out over the lowland forest from a forested plateau perched atop a 300-foot-tall macaw nesting cliff. The macaws at this last site are very tame thanks to five years of fierce, on-site protection by the WCS partner group "Eco Bolivia", which expertly organized the complex logistics for our trek. Eco Bolivia, which is composed mostly of lowland Indians of the Tacana ethnic group, is the leading on-the-ground conservation organization in Madidi, and enjoy support from the Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg Foundation and the Disney Corporation through WCS, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Macaw Landing Foundation, and the Ashoka Foundation, among others. In 1998 and beyond, WCS supporters will be hearing much more about Madidi, because even after numerous expeditions to high and low elevations of the park, we still are just barely scratching the surface in what is perhaps the world's most complex reserve.

For instance, on this last trip, I was amazed to discover that all information and local informants point to the possible existence in the low mountains of the very heart of the reserve of a "lost world" of 150,000 acres or more of tropical forest that may NEVER have been inhabitated by humans, and still is not. What might be living there? No one knows. Stay tuned.

Turning now to the greatest of all parrots, the mighty Hyacinth Macaw, in mid and late 1997, my work with these fabulous birds yielded exciting new discoveries and opportunities in the greatest of all tropical countries: Brazil. Working with our partner group "BioBrasil Foundation" (sic) and in collaboration with Focus Tours (formerly of Minnesota, now of Santa Fe, New Mexico), I had the pleasure of showing to 18 macaw fanatics hidden in a large blind a flock of 70 Hyacinth Macaws eating palm nuts in the wild at eye level in golden morning sun at a distance of 50 feet. This spectacle, which I couldn't believe until I saw it, was ingeniously orchestrated by BioBrasil's team of rustic macaw experts, who are former macaw trappers turned conservationists and ecotour technicians.

The 18 visitors were an organized ecotour from the Kaytee Avian Foundation (KAF), which is based at Kaytee Products in Chilton, Wisconsin. This latter company is the world's largest producer of scientifically-designed macaw and parrot diets, backyard bird feeding products, and small mammal diets. KAF is the major supporter of this conservation project for Hyacinth Macaws in Brazil, with additional support coming from the Macaw Landing Foundation, the World Parrot Trust, the International Aviculturists Society, and Natural Encounters, Inc, a leading designer of theme park and zoo spectacles involving free-flying birds of prey and macaws. As a result of the success of this project, which has stopped all trapping of Hyacinth Macaws in a large region of dry northeastern Brazil (the southern part of the state of Piaui), BioBrasil is now moving forward with plans to create the world's first Hyacinth Macaw Reserve through the purchase of a key plot of 5,000 acres at perhaps 25-35 dollars per acre. The Hyacinth Macaw Project will appear soon in a major European nature magazine, and macaw lovers everywhere are encouraged to support this project through WCS or any of the other groups mentioned and to visit the project soon--the climate is spectacular-- no biting bugs, no tropical diseases, plenty of ice cold beer and warm Brazilian sun----and tons of macaws. What more does a person need?

Finally, Focus Tours and WCS have teamed up to advise local ranch owners in Brazil's famous wildlife mecca--the Pantanal--on how to implement scientifically-designed photo ops for their numerous Hyacinth Macaws --which gather in flocks of 15-40 in two keys spots discovered by the famous Brazilian parrot biologist Carlos Yamashita and the accomplished tour leaders of Focus Tours. This project is just getting underway, and will be an excellent complement to the BioBrasil Hyacinth Macaw Project described above.

Any WCS members or macaw fans who wish to comment on these or other of my macaw projects are encouraged to contact me through WCS or the Macaw Landing Foundation, and I will respond as soon as possible when I return from field work.