In northeastern Brazil, there's a vast expanse of semi-arid shrub land and thorn forest called the Kachinga.

This unique ecoregion is home to thousands of animal and plant species.

Many of them are found nowhere else on earth.

One such species, endemic to the Kachinga, is the Spix's Macaw, Cyanopsida Spixii.

It used to live in the gallery forests on the margins of seasonal creeks.

This species, referred to by some as the little blue macaw, is stunningly beautiful.

It has a pale blue-gray head and its body and tail

display feathers in hues ranging from azure to cerulean. The elegant tail is long and tapered. Spix's

macaws depend on large, mature caribybera trees, also known as yellow trumpet trees in English.

The birds make their nests in naturally occurring holes in the trunks of trumpet trees.

Several hundred years of deforestation that began with European colonization has wiped out most of the Spix's macaws habitat. The oldest, largest

trumpet trees are mostly gone. As wild populations plummeted over the last century, wealthy collectors

around the world coveted these birds more and more. These people convinced themselves they just had to possess

their own rare and beautiful Spix's macaw. You know, when I hear wealthy collector, I can't help

but imagine a Bond villain, or some dude wearing a top hat, twirling his thin black mustache and wringing his hands with perverse pleasure over some recently accomplished misdeed.

Like buying a macaw, for example.

Because buying a Spix's macaw is definitely a misdeed.

It became illegal to trap and export these birds from Brazil starting in

1967. But sadly, that didn't stop poachers or the illegal trade of these birds. The rarer the

macaws became in the wild, the higher the price one could fetch on the black market.

You might be familiar with the plight of the Spix's macaw. It's one of the world's most

critically endangered bird species, after all. And back in 2011, there was that animated

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