The Bright Blue Beauty
Anything can be extinct
in the wild, including your soul
beneath a rare wing
while you are blinded
by gilt for sale.
The bright blue beauty,
that makes a being an object
of desire always brings disaster:
Spix’s macaw, trapped
and caged, is sold in the depths
of the black market.
Numbered rectangular papers
are exchanged for a life,
which is also your life.
Meanwhile, a hungry plague
is approaching, a heatwave
is prowling. A blue piece
of your human heart
is vanishing. Meanwhile,
with each extinct colour,
your soul is bleeding
its light into the dark abyss
of extinction—you, too, are fading.
Spix’s Macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii)
Thousands of wildfires are devouring the forests all over the world at the moment, and I am writing about a fabulous being for my August Extinction Column to end this heatwave season in the Northern Hemisphere with a bright hope of the Spix’s Macaw returning from extinction, with a wish that we might still live on the same earth with those blue creatures under the same pure blue sky, uncarbonised and smokeless.
Officially classified as Extinct in the Wild (EW) by the IUCN, which is one step away from total extinction, the Spix’s Macaw of Brazil vanished from the wilderness at the beginning of the Catastrocene (2000-today) due to the relentless animal trade, deforestation, and habitat loss.
A few years ago, a reintroduction project released a small group of captive-bred macaws into their native Caatinga habitat, and these birds adapted, paired up, even hatched the first wild-born chicks in decades. However, a sudden outbreak of Psittacine circovirus, a lethal and incurable parrot plague, struck the birds and put their existence at severe risk both in the wild and in captivity.
Today, this leaves us holding onto a fragile hope for these beings to fly freely in the wild, away from human markets and their numbered papers believed to buy anything and everything. After all, ‘money’ comes from the Latin ‘monere’, meaning ‘advise, warn, admonish’, which makes me think of the blue’s slow disappearance from the forests as an urgent warning.
I believe this bright blue bird manifests as the emblem of what happens when human beings, merely a part of a million-year-old ecosystem, desire something for its beauty until there is too little, or nothing, left of it. And until there is no colour left in our souls, our humanity is also withering.
Thanks for reading.
Özge Lena
Resources:
IUCN Red List of Threatened Species Spix's Macaw
Lethal virus strikes wild population of Spix's Macaw in Brazil