A Grassroots Effort to Re-Bird the Empty Forests of Aratanha, Brazil

A century ago, trees were cleared atop Brazil's Aratanha Mountains to make way for plantations. When the farms closed down, forest reclaimed the mountains. And now, concerted efforts by biologists are bringing birds back to Aratanha as well.

From the Winter 2026 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

On an early crisp morning in northeastern Brazil, a white Toyota Hilux pickup truck barreled through a dense tropical forest like a robber’s getaway car. Sitting next to the driver, I clutched two precious pieces of cargo in fabric bags that swung with every twist and turn up the never-ending rocky road. Each bag held a tiny bird, and I could only hope they weren’t half as anxious as I was.

Two Cornell University undergraduates from the class of 2026, Lorena Patrício and Brian Hofstetter, gamely held on tight behind me, also gripping birds in bags. I wondered aloud how our charges might be stomaching the joyride.

“They probably think they got swallowed,” said Hofstetter.

Otherwise, we barely broke our silent concentration during the 30-minute ascent, the last stretch of a two-hour trip. We had one job: to hold the bags in front of us without touching anything.

The birds were Ceara Gnateaters—small, chubby, orange-brown, insect-eating birds. Classified as endangered by the Brazilian government, they are at risk of disappearing along with the northeastern Atlantic Forests, their only home.

The bird’s name comes from the Brazilian state of Ceará, where it was described by naturalists in the early 20th century. The 350-mile ocean coast of Ceará is a tourist hotspot for sun lovers—about 140 miles south of the Equator with famed beaches, mangroves, and sand dunes. Its landscape of sunbathing and nightclubs blasting forró music was a world away from our truck’s destination at the inland peak of the Aratanha Mountains.

The roller-coaster road eventually gave way to a smooth parkway and manicured lawn. On our right, a placid, manmade lake shimmered in the morning sun; on the left, a three-story wooden mansion stood guard over the Fazenda Espírito Santo, or Holy Spirit Farm.

The farm’s name is coincidentally apt, since it’s surrounded in ghostly silence by an “empty forest.” The term was coined by Wildlife Conservation Society ecologist Kent H. Redford in 1992 to describe Neotropical forests that appear intact, but are devoid of large mammals and birds due to human impact.

The gnateaters in our bags were here to help fill the void in Aratanha, as part of a major rewilding project that began in 2022 with the reintroduction of a once-critically endangered parakeet. About 20 miles and 2,500 feet in elevation away from the state capital of Fortaleza and its 2.5 million sun-drenched residents, Aratanha today is a mountain forest refuge roughly the size of Manhattan. In the 19th century there was no forest here, just colonial coffee and sugarcane plantations. When those farms failed, the forest reclaimed the land. The forest wildlife, though, never returned in full force—probably because Aratanha is really difficult to get to.

“The access to Aratanha is horrible and probably on purpose,” says biologist Fábio Nunes, 47, of the local nonprofit conservation group Aquasis, which has been leading the rewilding effort. “There are about only six property owners here today, and they don’t want people from the city to find this place. So it has everything to be isolated. For us, it’s like a laboratory.”

After three years driving up and down Aratanha to begin restocking this forest with birdlife, Nunes feels the work is paying off and the silence is finally beginning to be broken in this tropical soundscape. And this is only the beginning, Nunes says. Early successes have encouraged Aquasis to make more plans to bring back more bird species in Aratanha, and, eventually, even other types of fauna.

“It’s a green paradise, albeit an empty one,” Nunes says. “Just imagine how many animals could be here.”

“Tooth-Suckers” and “dirty-Faces”

In a forest trail away from the mansion, the gnateaters were prepared for release at Aratanha. They had been caught in mist nets three hours before by the Aquasis team in a much bigger forest 40 miles away in the Baturité Mountains, a place with a similar past and very different present.

The gnateaters seemed as discreet as any other plain brown bird, until I noticed the male’s striking white stripe of plumage running along the side of its head. Nunes says those stripes get bristled, looking like exaggerated eyeliner, when the bird is defending its territory.

The Cornell undergrads set up a table and gently pulled the birds out of their cloth bags to weigh them, attach ID bands to their thin legs, and extract DNA by plucking a small feather with a blood-rich base.

Then the birds were released, and they wasted no time disappearing into the foliage. Their squeaky calls—the gnateaters make a sound like someone sucking teeth, hence their Brazilian name chupa-dente do nordeste, or “tooth-sucker of the northeast”—soon died away, and the forest went quiet again.

For a moment, we were quiet, too. I’m sure we all shared the same thought, hoping the critters would survive to build a new home in Aratanha. But the silence was short-lived. A flock of 20 recently introduced Gray-breasted Parakeets showed up in the canopy to check out the scientists. Their chorus of raspy calls filled the air with some very welcome noise.

The Gray-breasted Parakeet also has a funny Brazilian name, known as cara-suja, or “dirty-face,” because of the dark brownish red feathers that give its face a smudged appearance, as if it had indulged in a bucket of wine. The parakeets were the first species reintroduced here by Aquasis in 2022, and it’s been a tremendous success, with the local population of reintroduced birds doubling in under five years from natural reproduction.

With the dirty-faces and tooth-suckers now inhabiting Aratanha’s empty forest, one might say the place has officially earned its haunted reputation. However, as I spotted the parakeets’ distinctive beaks resembling cheeky smiles, I felt a different vibe. Aratanha and its new creatures are actually a sign of hope.

Aquasis plans to reintroduce six more bird species considered endangered by the state government, including the Gould’s Toucanet and Band-tailed Manakin—both of which, along with Gray-breasted Parakeets, play important roles in forest regeneration as seed dispersers.

“They’re gonna eat all the fruits that are now rotting on the ground,” says Nunes, adding that the fruits’ seeds will come out the other ends of the birds. “It will be an enormous benefit to the forest.”

In the big Aratanha laboratory, Nunes says there is still room for bringing back many other wildlife species in the future. Eventually Aquasis plans to reintroduce mammals such as the agouti, a medium-sized rodent, which will further help the Aratanha forest become healthier.

“Unlike many frugivores, the agouti buries seeds for later consumption,” says Nunes, “and many of these forgotten seeds eventually germinate.”

Nunes also dreams of bringing back the puma, which has no recent records in the area, as well as the critically endangered frog Adelophryne maranguapensis, which may already have vanished from the area.

“Aquasis’ work is so inspiring and unique,” says David Bonter, codirector of the Center for Engagement in Science and Nature at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which supported Patrício and Hofstetter’s fieldwork with Aquasis through the Experiential Learning Award program. “It’s a big experiment going into Aratanha, building on the success of the parakeets. I was impressed by how much good work they were doing with on-the-ground conservation.”

A Tale of Two Mountains

The Aratanha and Baturité Mountains share a unique habitat—green islands of high-elevation rainforests that float above the surrounding lower-elevation brown shrublands. It’s a landscape tens of thousands of years in the making. In prehistoric times when the Amazon and the Atlantic forests were expanding, they met each other in Ceará. When the climate became drier and the forests retracted, the highlands retained enough humidity to remain as forest fragments. Meanwhile, the surrounding lowlands became caatinga, a semiarid biome that covers almost 90% of Ceará state.

“The forests met up there and, so to speak, they kissed,” says Weber de Girão Silva, an Aquasis biologist and noted expert on Ceará’s biodiversity. “And the result of that love, it’s a very special refuge.”

“It’s the only place on Earth where certain species of the Atlantic Forest and the Amazon meet,” he continues, citing examples such as the Red-necked Tanager of the Atlantic and the Gould’s Toucanet of the Amazon.

The Aratanha and Baturité mountain ranges were both heavily impacted by past agricultural activity. But Aratanha, being five times smaller than Baturité, suffered much more. In the middle of the 19th century, farmers harvested native trees for shipbuilding and covered the slopes with coffee, sugarcane, cotton, banana, and maniçoba, a latex-producing tree. By the early years of the 20th century, the soil was depleted and the farms were gone, driven off by a series of plagues and droughts, lack of government support, and a labor exodus.

While today Aratanha is quiet, Baturité is buzzing with activity. Since the 1990s coffee farming has made a comeback here, but in a much more sustainable way, with coffee plants grown under the shade of the original Atlantic Forest. Farmers now produce small batches of high-quality beans, an effort that has also fueled ecotourism through the region’s Green Coffee Trail.

Baturité’s paved roads get congested on the weekends with traffic to a number of charming hotels and restaurants that cater to the Fortaleza elite escaping the heat of the capital 60 miles away. Although the Baturité mountains still support a wealth of fauna and flora, with local surveys documenting 259 species of birds, biologists fear for the future of this forest that is under intense pressure from development. The signs are everywhere.

Driving around Baturité, Nunes pointed out patches of land illegally burned to grow corn for cattle. Down the mountains, we could see the thorny shrubs of the caatinga threatening to come up. For Nunes, the increasing number of rattlesnakes found in the forest proves the land is drying out. Some communities already depend on water truck deliveries.

“We haven’t given up on Baturité, but we need strategies,” said Nunes. “It still has birds, and Aratanha does not.”

Nunes said that the now pristine Aratanha could serve as a backup refuge for many wildlife species that could become threatened in Baturité: “Aratanha is the only humid highland forest in the region that is not being degraded.”

Chupa-Dente Meets a Frog

Baturité boasts about 3,000 Ceara Gnateaters, according to a 2024 survey by Aquasis. This past June, 28 of those chupa-dentes were translocated to Aratanha. And for 40 days, the Cornell undergrads monitored the new arrivals in Aratanha.

Before the gnateaters were released into their new home, Patrício and Hofstetter mounted mini VHF radio transmitters on the backs of five of the birds, thanks to funding from the Association of Field Ornithologists and the American Ornithological Society. They also installed eight autonomous audio recording units in Baturité and six in Aratanha, in order to acoustically survey the forest soundscapes. The devices were donated by the Cornell Lab’s Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics.

“The recorders in Baturité serve as a control,” says Patrício. The recorders in Aratanha will provide audio data on the soundscape before and after the gnateater reintroductions. The hope, she says, is that they will hear chupa-dente songs during the breeding season from November to February in Aratanha that are similar to the levels of gnateater singing in Baturité.

Patrício, 23, a Brazilian from São Paulo state, and Hofstetter, 22, an Arizona native who speaks flawless Portuguese, blended in working side-by-side with the dedicated Aquasis field team, which included a group of six Cearenses, or Brazilians born and raised in Ceará. Jonas Cruz, a 29-year-old field technician, used his expertise in chupa-dente behavior to catch the birds in mist nets, while environmental educator Érica Demondes—who has a master’s degree in bioacoustics—helped with setting up and operating the audio recorders.

In January, Patrício plans to go back to Brazil over her winter break at Cornell to help Aquasis with hopefully finding gnateater nests during the breeding season.

“There is not much out there about translocations of insectivores, so we’re learning,” says Patrício.

Indeed, the first chupa-dente liberated in Aratanha suffered a grisly fate. On the third day in its new home, the bird’s VHF transmitter signal appeared to be completely still. Patrício and Hofstetter tracked its signal to the underground shelter of a big northeastern pepper frog, which emerged briefly from its burrow in the forest floor to show off a thin metallic wire protruding from its mouth.

“I really wanted my radio tag back,” Hofstetter says.

After a painstaking hunt and a lot of digging, the device was retrieved (along with the deceased bird) from the frog’s stomach.

“The things that I’ve done before were more pure science-based, and here it is very applied, which I very much enjoy,” says Hofstetter. “It’s been so meaningful to be here.”

After the gnateater reintroductions, Hofstetter and Patrício monitored the new arrivals via telemetry with a radio antenna borrowed from the Federal University of Pará, and they spent their nights in Aratanha at the Holy Spirit Farm owned by Fernando Cirino Gurgel, a local businessman who has been a key supporter of the project. The students stayed in a simple cabin in the back of the property with minimal furniture and walkout access to the Aratanha forest interior. Despite living in the middle of a jungle, the Cornell undergrads say they were unsettled by unseemly quiet.

“In two weeks, we saw only one mixed flock [of birds]. It’s disturbing,” says Hofstetter. The loudest sound the students heard in four weeks at the cabana was when the property owner Gurgel came to visit, by helicopter.

An Epic Parakeet Rebound

In some villages in Baturité, residents cherish the raucous sounds of Gray-breasted Parakeets that echo throughout the treetops. Just 15 years ago, many villagers didn’t even know that these birds existed. As recently as 2007, the Gray-breasted Parakeet was considered the most threatened parakeet species in the Americas, with a global population below 250 birds. At that low point, Aquasis biologists stepped in and pulled the species back from the very edge of extinction.

Founded by a group of state college students in 1994, Aquasis has established an impressive track record of conservation successes. The nonprofit group began as a research and preservation group focused on marine species, especially the West Indian manatee, and then expanded to conservation projects for endangered birds, including migratory shorebirds such as the Red Knot and the endemic Araripe Manakin (from Living Bird Spring 2018).

The Gray-breasted Parakeet Project, or Projeto Cara-suja, started in 2005 and gained strength in the following years with financial support from Grupo Boticário, a major Brazilian cosmetics company. Nunes joined the team in 2010, coming from another environmental nonprofit group in Ceará that established protected areas in the caatinga.

At Aquasis, Nunes grew Projeto Cara-suja from a two-man operation to a seven-employee team. The team learned quickly that the illegal pet trade was one of the main threats to Gray-breasted Parakeets, as well as a lack of natural nesting cavities.

To combat the poachers for the pet trade, Aquasis lobbied the state government to create the Cara-suja Wildlife Refuge in Baturité in 2018, which also became the local headquarters for an environmental police post. A years-long policing campaign apprehending poachers and seizing illegal birds helped shift the local mentality. Some days, 2,000 birds of different species were seized.

As for the lack of natural nest cavities, Aquasis launched an effort to install artificial nests in Baturité. The project became a legendary success, as the Gray-breasted Parakeet population in Ceará quadrupled to more than 1,200 parakeets in 15 years—“possibly the most successful parrot nest-box scheme to date,” according to a 2021 book by British ornithologist and parrot expert Rosemary Low. Cara-suja became Baturité’s poster child, inspiring keychains, T-shirts, and even billboard advertisements for a local jeans store. Birdwatchers from all over the world, especially from Europe and the United States, now come to Ceará to see Gray-breasted Parakeets.

Nunes, a father of two and a former high school biology teacher, says the journey has truly been a labor of love. In the first years, he enlisted family and friends to help hang the nest boxes. He once held a lonely vigil monitoring the nests in Baturité on New Year’s Eve, afraid that fireworks would scare away the new tenants.

In those early days, his longest-serving field assistant, Bruno Lindsey, monitored the parakeets using the only means of transport available to the fledgling project: public buses.

“Ten years ago, the cara-sujas were rare. I would go two months without seeing them,” says Lindsey, 32. “Taking buses certainly didn’t help.”

Things improved when Projeto Cara-suja secured funding through the U.S. government’s Tropical Forest Conservation Act, a law that diverted Brazil’s debt repayments to the United States into conservation efforts for the country’s forests. With funding support, the project bought a car, then a motorcycle, and hired two more staffers.

Monitoring the nest boxes has been essential in order to ensure the safety of parakeet nestlings. The first nest boxes got infested with bees and meat-eating wasps. When the project team was able to ramp up their monitoring efforts, their main job was to evict bees and wasps.

“We got so much honey we joked we would open a beekeeping business,” says Nunes.

In 2017, Nunes wrote his master’s thesis at Federal University of Ceará about the success of wooden nest boxes for fostering Gray-breasted Parakeet breeding. He found that the artificial boxes offered excellent protection for parakeet nests and resulted in high reproductive success, averaging more than seven eggs per clutch.

Today 250 boxes are spread around Baturité properties, where landowners have agreed to safeguard the parakeets from poachers and nest invaders. The touristy village of Guaramiranga is a hotspot for Gray-breasted Parakeet nest boxes, and also trendy restaurants. In June, the beginning of the Brazilian winter, cheese fondue and hot chocolate were being served in the quaint colonial main square of this village nicknamed the “Switzerland of Ceará.”

But I was out at Sítio Sucupira, a lavish property on the town’s outskirts, at sunset—the perfect time to see parakeets returning to their nighttime roosts. More than 20 cara-sujas perched around a tree where an artificial nest box was installed. Normally, seven sleep in the box, but the team has seen up to 30 parakeets cozying up inside. As we took photos, some parakeets poked their heads through the two holes of the box, as if to check us out.

“Cara-suja is part of my life. I have the greatest honor to have helped the project,” said the property owner, Pio Rodrigues Neto, 72, a construction mogul with a penchant for poetry. He donated 75 nest boxes, doubling the capacity of the project at the time. His property has the world’s largest concentration of cara-sujas in a single spot, thanks to the 10 nest boxes he had installed. In 2025, 59 parakeet chicks were hatched here.

As the cara-suja population boomed, the species achieved the rare feat of being downlisted from critically endangered to endangered on the IUCN Red List in 2017. Soon, it was time for Projeto Cara-suja to help the parakeets reconquer other territories, starting with a reintroduction into the empty Aratanha mountain range.

Birds Fly Again in Aratanha

Aratanha is the Indigenous name for “parrot’s beak,” although some say it refers instead to a local species of small freshwater shrimp. Either way, both had gone extinct in the area, until Nunes led the effort to bring Gray-breasted Parakeets back to Aratanha, with help from funding by Spain’s Loro Parque Fundación and Germany’s Zoological Society for the Conservation of Species and Populations.

An on-site acclimatization aviary was built in 2021 on the mountaintop Holy Spirit Farm. Then in 2022 the cara-suja reintroductions began. Over the next two years, 44 parakeets were reintroduced, each one set free after spending a few months in the aviary. The team’s biggest fear was that, once they opened the doors, the birds would fly away from Aratanha and never come back.

“It was very risky, a real tension,” says Nunes. “When the first cara-sujas left, they went to this tree, then to another one, and then they flew away and vanished completely. I thought it was over. I was speechless.”

An hour later, though, the parakeets came back to eat the supplemental food left by Aquasis biologists outside the aviary.

“It was pure happiness,” says Nunes.

Within a year, the reintroduced parakeets were already breeding, using the 15 nest boxes installed at Aratanha and finding their own food, without needing supplementation. Today, there are around 90 Gray-breasted Parakeets in this forest, helping regenerate the forest by dispersing the seeds of native trees like the embaúba and gameleira, as well as a native species of cactus.

“Embaúba is a pioneer tree vital for forest regeneration,” says Nunes. “And the fruit from the cactus feeds the chicks. You can see their crops full of its tiny seeds. We expect a big increase in this cactus now that it has found its natural disperser again.”

When I visited Aratanha in June, the aviary was empty, but the parakeets were still living nearby.

As for the chupa-dentes, Nunes found four gnateaters (two pairs) in November when he was at Aratanha doing other fieldwork. Aquasis is sending in a team of biologists in December 2025 for a formal resurvey to assess the status of the translocated birds.

Meanwhile, the forest in Aratanha awaits its next new residents, hopefully the Gould’s Toucanet and then the Band-tailed Manakin.

“In the end, it was never just about the cara-sujas,” says Nunes. “But they opened the way for many good things.”