Al Wabra originally belonged to Al Thani’s father who collected rare antelope and gazelle from the Horn of Africa – purely for pleasure and sport, with no conservation plans or scientific interest. His son continued to collect these small antelope and other rare species of mountain ibex and goat – but with the aim to breed and maintain captive populations. But the emblematic species of his preservation remained the ‘blue birds’: the Spix Macaw, the Lear’s Macaw and the Hyacinth Macaw.
The Hyacinth is the largest and most spectacular of the blue macaws. I had already been privileged to see them wild in the Pantanal region of Brazil, but I remember spending an afternoon at Al Wabra feeding a small flock of six birds, which had all been reared on site, one of whom nearly took my finger off when I tried to get too friendly! All these blue macaws have excited the interest and greed of professional collectors to the point where they are either endangered or already extinct in the case of the wild Spix. It is small wonder that such an avid collector as Prince Saud would have been interested in these rarest of birds. Since the earliest times people have placed a great value on blue and gone to great lengths to manufacture the colour which is so rare in nature – there are no blue mammals and just a few blue birds – that, as a consequence, philologists claim it to be the last colour to enter the human vocabulary.
While I was in Al Wabra, the researchers there were very close to compiling the complete genome of the Spix Macaw which would consequently be of immense help in understanding certain aspects of their breeding, thus going one step fur- ther to ensuring its survival for future generations. I remember seeing four Spix’s Macaw eggs in their incubators; two had been laid six days before and two the night before. The team would not know if they would be fertile for several more days. These miraculous invisible genetic worlds held the future of these rarest of birds.
Over the past six years, new gene-editing technology has given us previously unimaginable control over genetics. We are entering the era of de-extinction when some scientists believe we shall once again see Woolly Mammoths walk the Arctic tundra grazing the permafrost, Passenger Pigeons will return to the skies and the Dodo will be resurrected from the dead. Will this be the ultimate form of conservation, or will it just be another fantasy fuelled by the computer-generated dinosaurs we have all but accepted as a reality of our own Jurassic Park world?
The first remains of the mysterious Archaeopteryx were discovered in 1861, two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The fossil remains unearthed from the limestone deposits quarried for centuries near Langenaltheim, Germany were finally identified as those of a genus of early protobird, the missing link between feathered dinosaurs and modern birds. It is thought to be one of the oldest-known birds and has since become a key piece of evidence for the origin of birds and a confirmation of evolution.
I remember walking in the early morning half-light deep in the dense rainforest to watch the rare Trinidadian Piping Guan, locally known as the ‘Pawi’, as it ran and jumped along the moss and epiphyte-heavy branches. With its low-set body, it seemed more like a large lizard or a primitive mammal than a bird. At one time abundant, it has declined in numbers and been extirpated from much of its natural range and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has rated the bird as critically endangered.
An enthusiastic birdwatcher who has lived for years in Trinidad, Peter Doig, his watercolours like Unidentified Bird are as mysterious and as elusive as those first prehistoric fossil remains, as fleeting as the island’s ‘Pawi’, just out of reach, ghost-like, half perceived and half imagined – like all the rare and endangered birds of my youth. Like Archaeopteryx, his is also the Urvogel, ‘first bird’; it is the idea of a bird, a floating, soaring signifier, there but not there, the Rara Avis, both part of the literal landscape but also a feeder at the forest edge of our imagination – unobserved, yet deeply felt; on the brink, yet resolutely alive.
Words by Jerry Stafford
Artworks by Peter Doig
Thanks to Michael Werner Gallery, London