The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird

Book by Barcott Bruce

Chapter 1

I f you feel a need to escape the law, elude creditors, hide assets, or shed the skin of your humdrum life, you could do worse than run away to Belize. Belize is a tiny nation tucked between Guatemala, Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea. It’s firmly attached to Central America but considers itself a Caribbean island, like a chicken that thinks it’s a duck. For more than a hundred years Belize was known as British Honduras, one of the most remote outposts of the British Empire, which explains why it’s the only Latin American nation to embrace English as its official language.

It’s difficult to overstate the smallness of the place. Imagine a country the size of Massachusetts with the population of Corpus Christi, Texas. Give it an army of seven hundred soldiers and a seat in the United Nations and you start to get an idea of Belize. Centuries ago more than one million Maya populated this part of Central America. Today fewer than three hundred thousand Belizeans spread themselves among the country’s river towns and tin-shack villages. Two-thirds of the country is covered by jungle.

Belize goes unnoticed by the rest of the world, and over the years the country has parlayed its obscurity into an attractive asset. For those shipwrecked on the shoals of life, Belize offers a new beginning. The country teems with adventurous refugees who’ve set up shop in the middle of the Central American jungle. British innkeepers, Mennonite farmers, Chinese shopkeepers, Lebanese entrepreneurs, American missionaries, Canadian aid workers, and Dutch scientists live peacefully alongside the nation’s longer- established residents, the Garifuna artists, Maya cacao growers, Mestizo plantation managers, and Creole politicians who make up the majority of the country’s population. Belize draws the eccentric, the madcap, and the downright mad. In this colorful human menagerie it takes some doing to stand out, but there is one woman who manages to delight, enrage, captivate, frustrate, and inspire her fellow Belizeans more than anyone else. She’s the proprietor of the Belize Zoo. Her name is Sharon Matola.

Sharon shares her office with a three-legged jaguar named Angel. When the screen door bangs, Angel limps up a cleated ramp that connects the jaguar habitat to the office, a plywood shack on stilts. When she sees Sharon, Angel rolls over and stretches like a dog wanting its belly scratched. Sharon will toss Angel a piece of chicken through the wire fence that separates them. The jaguar catches the meat in her jaws with a clop. Visitors to Sharon’s office often ask to pet Angel, which Sharon discourages. “Never pet a jaguar,” she once told me, “unless you’re willing to feed her your hand.”

Sharon speaks fluent Russian and once worked as a lion tamer for a traveling Mexican circus. She sings to wild jaguars to soothe them. As a young woman she married a dentist and lived in a tidy house in Iowa City. When she grew restless she started hopping freight trains to Florida. She once smuggled a spider monkey across the Mexican border by swimming the Rio Grande with the animal balanced on her head. She’s an expert in mycology, the study of fungi, and is considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on both the scarlet macaw and the Baird’s tapir, a three-toed ungulate with a ridiculous floppy snout. Most of that knowledge she picked up while walking through the Central American jungle carrying little more than a machete.

Sharon is more at home in the jungle than most of us are in our mother’s kitchen. An American by birth, she’s spent the past quarter century in the raw tropical landscape of Central America. In the fall of 1982 she left the United States to work as an assistant on a nature documentary being filmed in Belize. At the end of the shoot, the director left her in possession of a jaguar, two macaws, a ten-foot boa constrictor, and seventeen other animals. “Once you domesticate wild animals, they can’t care for themselves in the wild,” Sharon told me. “If you turn them out they’ll starve.” So she painted a sign that said belize zoo and stuck it beside the lonely road that runs from Belize City to the Guatemalan border. People came.

Today the zoo exhibits 125 individual animals and hosts more than seventy thousand visitors every year—more than one-quarter of Belize’s entire population. It is the country’s most visited tourist attraction and one of the region’s most prestigious scientific research stations. Belizean children idolize Sharon Matola. She invites them to the zoo and holds a tarantula in her palm, wraps a boa around her leg, and speaks to April the tapir as her friend. In the eyes of children she lives a magical life, padding through her own zoo like Willy Wonka strolling the chocolate factory floor. Sharon often buzzes through the countryside on a Kawasaki 650 motorcycle, and when children see her coming they jump and wave and shout her name: Zoo Lady!

I met Sharon in 2002 on a reporting trip to Belize. Ari Hershowitz put me on to her. Hershowitz is a scruffy, bearded guy I met years ago while writing a story about a gray whale nursery in Mexico. A multinational corporation wanted to build a salt factory in a calving lagoon. Hershowitz, an organizer for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), was one of the people who stopped it. Over the years we kept in touch. One day I called and found him in an expansive mood. He had a new project. An international energy company wanted to build a dam that would flood one of the last great sections of unbroken jungle in Central America. “It’s a small dam but the damage would be enormous,” he said. “This river valley is like a cradle of life. It’s filled with jaguars, tapirs, scarlet macaws. They’d all be wiped out by the dam.”

“Where’s the river?” I asked.

“Belize.”

I fumbled for an atlas. “Belize?” I said, flipping to the index. “What part of Belize?”

“Middle of the country, about ten miles from the Guatemalan border,” Hershowitz said. “Seriously, you should go check it out. It’s a two-hour flight from Houston.” He paused. “It’s a former British colony. Everybody speaks English.”

“Who’s fighting the dam?”

“We’re working with a coalition of groups down there, but there’s one woman who’s spearheading things. Her name’s Sharon Matola. She’s kind of the Doctor Doolittle of Belize.”

I reached for a pen. “Any other interesting characters?”

Hershowitz chuckled. “How much time you got?”
Later that week I made a few phone calls to Belize, which is an experience not unlike playing the slots. You dial and dial, and once in a while the call goes through. Everyone I talked to either loved or despised Sharon Matola. “She’s our Joan of Arc,” one woman told me. Another man practically spat when he mentioned “that woman.” A little online research revealed that the Belizean newspapers were equally divided. Some praised the Zoo Lady and her anti-dam crusade. Others blamed her for all of the nation’s ills. Banks wouldn’t lend Belize money because of Sharon Matola. Children went hungry because of Sharon Matola. The Belize Times, the Belizean government mouthpiece, called her a modern-day colonialist and a traitor to the nation. A government spokesman labeled her “an enemy of the people.”

It was that phrase—“an enemy of the people”—more than anything else, I think, that convinced me to fly to Belize and track down the Zoo Lady. Over the next six years I would come to appreciate Sharon Matola in all her complexity. She is a strange and enchanting woman. She can display more tenacity, courage, generosity, and love than seems possible for one person. She can be warm, goofy, and funny. She can also be impossibly stubborn and self-righteous. I didn’t know that at the beginning. All I knew was that if any government hated and feared a woman that much, I wanted to meet her.
According to the World Conservation Union (IUCN),* the most respected scientific organization tracking species extinction, one in every four mammal species and one in eight bird species face a high risk of extinction in the near future. Plants and animals are

*Although its full name is the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, the IUCN is commonly known as the World Conservation Union.

disappearing at a rate at least a hundred times the planet’s natural, or background, extinction rate. The problem has become known as the “sixth extinction crisis” because it follows previous waves of species disappearance in the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous periods. Those extinctions happened over geologic time. This one is happening in the blink of an eye.

At times the earth’s fate seems so dire and inexorable that I’m tempted to throw up my hands and say to hell with it. The forces driving the sixth extinction possess so much money and power that fighting them requires a willing suspension of disbelief. The odds are so long that if you look at them too hard you’ll lose your mind. Every once in a while, though, I meet a rare subspecies of human who offers hope. It’s almost never a politician or a scientist. It’s almost always a woman without credentials. They’re often self-taught researchers who become experts through years of hard experience and close observation. They’re the ones who scoop up a jar of brown water from a ditch and ask impertinent questions about what’s in it. Because they don’t know protocol they barge in and do what nobody else has the courage to do. They don’t ask...