Lagoon of the Hoatzins

When I travel to another destination, either domestically or abroad, I usually have in the back of my mind a laundry list of animals that I hope to see.  Some are more fanciful and hopeful than others, with varying degrees of plausibility.  Sometimes, if I'm lucky, I'll find myself in the right place at the right time, and will happen to see that animal.  Sometimes, I'm even lucky enough to snap a photo, maybe blurry from the speed of the interaction, maybe too distant, but something to remember it by.

So imagine my surprise when, last year, on a visit to the Peruvian Amazon, I took a short walk from our lodge to the edge of a nearby little lagoon on my first day.  I walked past a few beached canoes, along the edge of the rickety dock, and overlooked the water.  I glanced across and there, not a few yards away, I found myself staring directly into the eyes of one of the most remarkable birds in the world - the bird, perhaps, that I had been the most hopefully of catching a glimpse of in South America.

The hoatzin is a visually striking bird, about the size of a smallish turkey.  Adults have a wild mohawk of a crest, making them look like a cross between a cockatoo and a peafowl.  If you think that the adults look weird, though, you should see the chicks, which are equipped with little claws on their wings that allow them to clamber through the branches, and even dive into the water to swim away if threatened.  These bizarre adaptations reminded many biologists of the bird-dinosaur Archeopteryx, and caused the hoatzin to be seen as an ancestral link between birds and reptiles.

How to Display a Hoatzin, by Katherine McLeod

Hoatzins have traditionally fared poorly in zoos, mostly likely a result of their specialized leaf diet.  I only know of one facility which has kept the birds for any length of time, and even bred them - the Bronx Zoo kept hoatzin in their Aquatic Bird House, though those birds are now all gone.  I knew that I'd likely never see one in a zoo, so my one chance was to spot one in the Amazon.  And, sure enough, barely 24 hours into my South American trip, I was face to face with one.

Soon, however, it wasn't just one.  Then I spotted another.  Then another.  The more I looked around, the more I saw that the trees around me were heavy with hoatzins.  The birds are poor flyers and tend to perch low over the water, which, with their large size, made them highly visible.  They historically have not been hunted on account of the foul taste of their meat - apart from biologists and birdwatchers, no one ever has expressed that much interest in them - so they were remarkably placid.  As it turns out, hoatzins are actually remarkably common, in the right habitat.  I took to walking down to the little lagoon whenever I found myself with free time.  Sometimes, I could see a dozen of them without turning my head, with some of them almost close enough to touch.  Unlike other birds or mammals I'd seen in the wild in fleeting glimpses, these I could sit down and appreciate and watch.

It's hard to say how much of my enthusiasm for the hoatzins came from never having seen one before. It was an evolutionary and taxonomically unique species - the only member of its own order - but part of me suspects that if they were common in zoos, I'd have just given a more passing glance.  I saw lots of other birds on that trip, many of them species I'd seen in zoos before.  None fascinated me like the hoatzin.  Ironically, of all of them, it was the hoatzin that I could most easily envision as a zoo bird.  Seeing three or four perched on a limb overhanging the coffee-colored water, just a few yards away, sitting still and easily photographed, I could easily imagine that we were all underneath the dome of a rainforest aviary.  If their diet hadn't historically been such a challenge, I could easily imagine them being one of the most popular of exhibit birds, a staple of South American exhibits and walk-through aviaries around the world.  

Perhaps with the new technologies and feed formulations and horticultural practices we have now, it would be possible to build on the success of the Bronx, maybe even establish a zoo population.  They aren't endangered, sure, but their biological uniqueness might make them worthwhile as a subject of study and appreciation in zoos.  But then again, perhaps not.  There are such limited resources in zoos, so many species that we could be supporting.  It would be difficult to justify adding another animal to the ark, especially when it's one that has been faring well in the wild and has traditionally been a poor doer in zoos.

And so on my last morning in the Amazon, I made sure to stroll back down to the water's edge to say goodbye.  I saw different birds every time I went down, but only the hoatzins were always there, always visible.  I hated to say goodbye to them - unlike the macaws and aracaris and tanagers and all of the other more colorful, flighty birds, I did not when - or if - I'd ever meet a hoatzin again.