SEEING SCARLET, by Barbara Kingsolver

Written with Steven Hopp

Picture a scarlet macaw: a fierce, full meter of royal red feathers head to tail, a soldier’s rainbow-colored epaulets, a skeptic’s eye staring from a naked white face, a beak that takes no prisoners.

Now examine the background of your mental image; probably it’s a zoo or a pet shop, metal bars and people chanting about Polly and crackers, maybe even pirates, and not a trace of the truth of this bird’s natural life. How does it perch or forage or speak among its kind without the demeaning mannerisms of captivity? How does it look in flight against a blue sky? Few birds that inhabit the cultural imagination of Americans are so familiar and yet so poorly known.

As biologists who have increasingly turned our attention toward the preservation of biodiversity, we are both interested in and wary of animals as symbols. If we could name the passion that kept pushing us through Costa Rica in our rented jeep, on roads unfit for tourism or good sense, it would have been, maybe, macaw expiation. Some sort of penance for a lifetime of seeing this magnificent animal robbed of its grace. We wanted to get to know this bird on its own terms.

As we climbed into the Talamanca Highlands on a pitted, serpentine highway, the forest veiled the view ahead but always promised something around the next bend. We were two days south of San Jose, in a land where birds lived up to the extravagance of their names: purple-throated mountain gems, long-tailed silky flycatchers, scintillant hummingbirds. At dawn we’d witnessed the red-green fireworks of a resplendent quetzal as he burst form his nest cavity, trailing his tail-feather streamers. But no trace of scarlet yet, save for the scarlet-thighed dacnis (Yes, just his thighs—not his feet or lower legs). Having navigated through an eerie morning mist in an elfin cloud forest, we found ourselves at noon among apple orchards on slopes so steep as to make the trees seem flung there instead of planted. All of it was wondrous, but we’d not yet seen a footprint of the beast we’d come here tracking.

Then a bend in the road revealed a tiny adobe school, its bare-dirt yard buzzing with activity. The Escuela del Sol Feliz took us by surprise in such a remote place, though in Costa Rica, where children matter more than an army, the sturdiest shoes are made in small sizes, and every tiny hamlet has at least a one-room school. This one had turned its charges outdoors for the day in their white-and-navy uniforms, so the schoolyard seemed to wave with neat nautical flags. The children, holding tins of paint and standing on crates and boxes, were busy painting a mural on the school’s stucco face: humpbacked but mostly four-legged cows loafing beneath round green trees festooned with round red apples, fantastic jungles dangling with monkeys and sloths. In the center, oversize and unmistakable, was a scarlet macaw. The children’s portrait of their environment was a study in homeland, combining important features of both real and imaginary landscapes; while their macaw surely had more dignity than Long John Silver’s, he was still a fantasy. All of these children had picked apples and driven their family cows across the road, and some may have seen the monkeys they depicted on their mural, but not one, probably, had ever laid eyes on a macaw.

Ara macao was once everywhere in Costa Rica—in the lowlands at least, on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts—but in recent decades it has been pushed into a handful of isolated refuges as distant as legend from the School of the Happy Sun. Its celebrity in the school’s mural cheered us because it seemed a kind of testimonial to its importance in the country’s iconography, and to the sporadic but growing efforts to teach children here to take their natural heritage to heart. We’d come in search of both things: the scarlet macaw, and some manifestation of hope for its persistence in the wild.

Our destination was Corcovado National Park, on the Osa Peninsula, where roughly a thousand scarlet macaws constitute the most viable Central American population of this globally endangered bird. The Osa is one of two large Costa Rican peninsulas extending into the Pacific; both are biologically rich, with huge protected areas and sparse human settlements. Corcovado, about one-tenth the size of Long Island, is the richest preserve in a country known for biodiversity: Its bird count is nearly 400 species; its 140 mammals include all 6 species of cats and all 4 monkeys found in Central America. It boasts nearly twice as many tree species as the United States and Canada combined. The park was established by executive decree in 1975, but its boundaries weren’t finalized until many years later, after its hundreds of unofficial residents could be relocated. Hardest to find were the gold prospectors—who had a talent for vanishing into the forest—and the remnant feral livestock, though the latter disappeared gradually with the help of jaguars.

For us, Corcovado would be the end of a road that was growing less navigable by the minute as we ventured farther out onto the peninsula. Our overnight destination was Bosque del Cabo, a private nature lodge at the peninsula’s southern tip. Our guidebook promised that we’d cross seven small rivers on the way, but we didn’t realize we’d have to do it without the benefit of bridges. At the bank of the first one we plunged right in with our jeep, fingers crossed, cheered on by a farmer in rubber boots who was leading his mule through the water ahead of us.

“This will be worth it,” Steven insisted when we reached the slightly more treacherous-looking second river. There was no bridge in sight, and no evidence that one had ever existed, although a sign advised Puente en mal estando—“Bridge in a bad state.” Yes indeed. The code of Costa Rican signs is a language of magnificently polite understatements; earlier in the trip we had been informed by a notice posted on a trail leading up a live volcano, “Esteemed hiker, a person can sometimes be killed here by flying rocks.”

Over the river safe and sounds, with the Golfo Dulce a steady blue horizon on our left, we rattled on southward through small fincas under the gaze of zebu cattle, with their worldly wattles and huge, downcast ears. Between farms the road was shaded by unmanicured woodlots, oil-palm groves, and the startling monoculture of orchard-row forests planted for pulp. The dark little feathered forms of seedeaters and grassquits lined the top wires of the fences like intermittent commas in a run-on sentence. To give our jostled bones and jeep a break, we stopped often; any bird was a good enough excuse. A dark funnel cloud swirling above a field turned out to be a vast swarm of turkey- and black vultures. With our binoculars we scanned the vortex down to its primogenitor: a dead cow, offering itself up for direct recycling back into the food chain. Most of the peninsula’s airborne scavengers, it seemed, had just arrived for dinner. Angling for position near the carcass, two king vultures flapped their regal black and white wings and rainbow-colored heads at each other. “Wow, amazing, gorgeous!” we muttered reverently, gawking through our binoculars, setting new highs in vulture admiration.

At dusk, with seven rivers behind us, we pulled into the mile-long driveway of Bosque del Cabo under a darkening canopy of rain forest. Although the road tunneled between steep, muddy shoulders, but we could smell the ocean beyond. Our headlight beam caught a crab in the road, dead center. We slid to a stop and scrambled out for a closer look at this palm-sized thing. A kid with a box of Crayolas couldn’t have done better: bright purple shell, red-orange legs, marigold-colored spots at the base of the eye stalks. We dubbed this beauty “resplendent scarlet-thighed crab” and nudged it out of the road, only to encounter more just like it almost immediately. Suddenly we were seriously outnumbered. Barbara surrendered all dignity and walked ahead of the jeep at a crouch, waving her arms, but as crabherd she was fighting a losing battle against a mile-deep swarm. These land crabs migrate mysteriously in huge throngs between ocean and forest, and on this moonlit night they caught us in a pulsing sea of red that refused to part. They danced across the slick double track of their flattened fellows, left by other drivers ahead of us. In our many trips together we’ve rarely traveled a longer, slower crunchier mile than that one.

We slept that night in a thatched palapa, lulled by the deep heartbeat of the Pacific surf against the cliff below us. At first light we woke to the booming exchanges of howler monkeys roaring out their ritual “Here I am!” to position their groups for a morning of undisturbed foraging. We sat on our little porch watching a coatimundi poking his long snout into the pineapple patch. A group of chestnut-mandibled toucans sallied into a palm, bouncing among the fronds; no macaws, through we were in their range now. We walked out to meet this astonishing place, prepared for anything-except the troop of spider monkeys that hurled sticks from the boughs and leaped down at us, hanging from their prehensile tails in a Yankee-go-home bungee-jumping display. Retreating toward our lodge, we heard a parrotfish squawk in the treetops that we recognized from pet shops. Was it a macaw?

“Si, guacamayos,” we were assured by a gardener we found shaking his head over the raided pineapple patch. Yes, he’d been seeing macaws lately, he said, usually in pairs, “Practicando a casare”—“practicing to be married.” This was April, the beginning of the nesting season. Following their species’ courtship rituals, the macaw pairs would settle into tree cavities, always more than a hundred feet off the ground, to lay and hatch their two-egg clutches. The young stay with the parents for up to two years, during which time the adults do no more nesting until after these young have dispersed. This combination of specialized habitat and slow reproduction makes macaws especially vulnerable to an assembly of threats. The ravages of aerial pesticide spraying have lately diminished, as banana companies have left the country or switched to oil-palm production, but deforestation remains a phenomenal peril. Of the macaws’ original Costa Rican habitat, only 20 percent still stands, all of it now protected. In addition to the Osa population, some 330 birds survive in the Carara Biological Reserve to the north, and others survive in scattered pockets from southern Mexico into Amazonian Brazil.

Dire habitat loss has become the norm for tropical species, but macaws and parrots are further doomed by their own charm. Such beauty doesn’t come cheap: A poacher who captures a young scarlet macaw can sell it into the pet trade for up to $400 U.S. (The fine for being caught is about $325.) Since 1990, when the nearby town of Golfito was allowed to reduce taxes on goods passing through its port, employment from the import trade has grown, and poaching has noticeably declined. Farther north, however, in the economically undeveloped Carara region, the activity is still ubiquitous. Many conservationists feel their best hope is to develop introduce alternative sources of income for the poachers while educating their children about the poaching’s long-term trade-offs—which could include the extinction of a national emblem before they’re old enough to be adept at climbing hundred-foot trees. During our trip we spoke with several educators whose programs are aimed specifically at developing a family conscience about stealing baby parrots and macaws from their nest holes. Reordering children’s attitudes toward threatened species may eventually influence their families, so the thinking goes, even within a culture that has traditionally allowed these birds to be harvested with no more moral qualms than a hungry coatimundi brings to a pineapple patch.

An organization named Zoo Ave goes a step further, by rehabilitating birds recovered from poachers or from captivity and reintroducing them into the wild. So far the group has released nineteen birds into the forest on the eastern shore of Golfo Dulce, far enough from Corcovado that the populations should remain genetically distinct. Of these birds, eleven are known to have survived. Zoo Ave’s goal is to establish a population of a dozen or so breeding pairs in the area near Rainbow Lodge, adjacent to the newly protected Piedras Blancas National park. Given that the total number of breeding macaw pairs in Central America is probably less than a hundred, every new nest cavity lined and filled with two white eggs a cause for celebration. “El que quiera azul celeste, que le cueste,” the Costa Ricans say—“If you want the blue sky, the price is high.” The mix of hope and fatalism in this dicho speaks perfectly of the macaw’s fierce love of freedom and touching vulnerability. We stood on the cliff near our palapa above the ocean, scanning, hoping for a glimpse of scarlet that wasn’t there. Today we would complete our pilgrimage to Corcovado, where we would see them flying against the blue sky, or we would not. On a trip like this, you revise your hopes: If we saw even one free bird, we decided, that would be enough. We prepared to push on to the road’s end at Carate, gateway to the Corcovado forest, home to the country’s last great breeding population of scarlet macaws.

Carate, although it appears on the map, is not a town; it’s a building. Mayor Morales’s ramshackle pulperia serves the southwestern quadrant of the peninsula as the area’s singular hub of commerce: He’ll arrange delivery-truck passage back out to Puerto Jimenez, buy gold you’ve mined, watch your vehicle for a small fee while you hike, or simply offer a theoretical rest room among the trees out back. Indoors, suspended by wires from the ceiling, is a dazzling assortment of bottles, driftwood, birds’ nests, car parts, and other miscellany—the very definition of “flotsam and jetsam,” provided you can tell what floated in and what was jettisoned. Above the main counter dangles the crown jewel of the collection: a mammalian vertebra of a size generally seen only in museums. Under this Damocles bone we purchased a soda and plotted our strategy for finding macaws. Outside on benches under a tree, we learned from the pulperia regulars that Corcovado did not exactly offer the user-friendliness we were accustomed to in a national park. There are no roads in, no hiking trails, no wooden signboard maps declaring that “you are here.” How do we get in? we asked. You walk, and watch out for snakes, we were told. It’s a thick jungle; where’s the best walking? On the beach.

While we chatted, a pet spider monkey sidled up to Barbara on her bench. Steven focused the camera. Nearby, a barefoot girl nearby watched intently.

“Is he friendly?” Barbara asked in Spanish.

The girl grinned broadly. “Muerde.”—“He bites.”

Steven snapped the photo we now call “Interspecific Primate Grimace.”

The steep gray beach offered rugged access to the park. The surf pounded hard on our left as we hiked, and to our right the wall of jungle rose sharply up a rocky slope. A series of streams poured down the rocks from the jungle into the Pacific. At the forest’s edge the towering trees were branchless trunks for their lower hundred feet or so. We began to hear, from this sparse, lofty canopy, the sound of macaws—not the loud, familiar croak but a low, conversational grumbling among small foraging groups. We jockeyed for a view, catching glimpses of monkeylike movement as the birds clambered around pulling fruit from the clusters at the tips of branches. Macaws are seed predators, given to cracking the hearts of fruit seeds or nuts. High above the ground is where you’ll see them, only and always, if you don’t want a cage for a backdrop. Both the scarlet and the other Costa Rican macaw, the great green, require large tracts of mature trees for foraging, roosting, and nesting.

It’s hard to believe anything so large and red could hide so well in foliage, backlit by the tropical sky, but these birds did. We squinted, wondering if this was it—the view we’d been waiting for. Suddenly a pair launched like rockets into the air. With powerful, rapid wingbeats and tail feathers splayed like fingers they swooped into a neighboring tree and disappeared uncannily against the branches. We waited. Soon another pair, then groups of threes and fives, began trading places from tree to tree. Their white masks and scarlet shoulders flashed in the sun. A grand game of musical trees seemed to be in progress as we walked up the beach counting birds that dived between trees.

All afternoon we walked crook-necked and open-mouthed in awe. If these creatures are doomed, they don’t act that way. El que quiera azul celeste, que le cueste, but who could buy or possess such avian magnificence against the blue sky? We stopped counting at fifty. We’d have settled for just one—that was what we thought we had come for—but we stayed through the change of tide and nearly till sunset because of the way they perched and foraged and spoke among themselves, without a care for a human’s expectation. What held us there was the show of pure, defiant survival: this audacious thing with feathers, this hope.