Belonging on an Island: Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in Hawai‘i 9780300235463

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Belonging on an Island

Belonging on an Island Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in Hawaiʻi Daniel Lewis

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College. Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Lewis. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). ¯ ʻo¯, July 1975 (Pencil sketch by H. Douglas Pratt; courtesy of Rob Frontis: Kauaʻi ʻO Shallenberger) Set in Bulmer type by IDS infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952011 ISBN 978-0-300-22964-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my daughter Iris Palila Lewis Me ke aloha ku¯mau ke¯ia no Palila, no kuʻu wahi manu hiwahiwa e hiʻipoli mau ai.

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Contents

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s ix Introduction 1

one Sitting Ducks: Extinction, Humans, and Birds in the pre-European Contact Era 9

two Counting Extinction: Observing and Surveying the ¯ ʻo¯ and Hawaiian Forest Bird Habitat 52 Kauaʻi ʻO

three Overcoming Extinction: Collectors, Stewardship, and the Palila 128

four Becoming Endemic: The White-eye, the Territorial Government, the Hui Manu, and Introduced Species 178 Epilogue 244

l i s t o f a b b r e v i a t i o n s 249 n o t e s 253 i n d e x 291

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Acknowledgments

i h a v e m a n y d e b t s , b o t h o l d and new, for the ko¯kua I’ve received with this book. A number of scientists, journalists, lawyers, archivists, activists, conservation administrators, librarians, historians, and family, friends, and associates of key personalities discussed in the book graciously talked to me, often at great length, about the birds, people, and topics covered in these pages. They provided me with archival material, images, and film footage, occasionally put me up in their homes, and helped me shape the book in very substantial ways. My special thanks to the following: In Hawaiʻi: at the Bishop Museum, mahalo for assistance from Leah Pualahaʻole Caldeira, Neal Evenhuis, and Molly Hagemann. Lynn Davis at UH Ma¯noa provided me with great materials and useful discussions about Henry Henshaw. Among the conservation community, Sam Gon, Henry Little, Kelvin Taketa, and Marjorie Ziegler provided useful perspectives on both historical and current matters, as well as many personal details. Others in the islands were of great help, including the late Joan Aidem, Carter Atkinson, Paul Banko, Sheila Conant, Noah Gomes, Jack and Beverly Harter, Jack Jeffrey, Patty Lai, Puakea Nogelmeier, Rob Shallenberger, and Dexter Keaweʻehu Vredenburg. On the U.S. mainland and in Europe, many people generously talked with me about the project, and made numerous essentially useful suggestions and contributions: Peter Alagona, Seth Archer, Clare Aslan, Bruce Benson, David Bottjer, Kevin Brown, Bob Cabin, Luis Chiappe, Fred Gregory, Alison Harding, Oliver Houck, David Igler, Nancy Jacobs, Helen James, Wally Johnson, Cam Kepler, James Maley, Cindy Matsumoto, John McCormack, Storrs Olson, Alan Peterson, Stuart Pimm, Doug Pratt, Robert Prys-Jones, Mike Sherwood, Beverly Stearns, Paul Sweet, and Jennifer

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Acknowledgments

Thomas. Mike Scott has been especially helpful over the years, pointing me to a wide variety of contacts and helping me take the measure of early scientific efforts to quantify the Hawaiian avifauna in the 1960s and 1970s. David Tomb, Katie Bertsche, and Doug Pratt generously provided me with their exceptional artwork of birds from the Hawaiian Islands for use in the book. A small but essential number of people also provided me with direct research support. These included Laura Rips, who has an enduring interest in Hawaiʻi and spent archival time there on my behalf, and helped greatly with proofreading and bibliographic matters, as well as Brook Engebretson, Bonnie Hardman, Kate Lain, Clare Moran, Teresa Spezio, John Vining, and Anita Weaver. My outstanding Claremont Graduate University research assistant Jacqueline Swaidan has my special gratitude for her steady efforts in tracking down sources on my behalf, translating Latin texts, reading the manuscript in its later stages, and much else. The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich offered me a three-month writing fellowship—invaluable for liberating me from my daily curatorial duties, but also for learning from other members of my effusive and wildly talented international cohort of historians, policy makers, economists, and other environmental thinkers at the RCC. Special thanks to the fearless and innovative Christof Mauch, the RCC’s Director, and to Fellows John Barry, Val Berros, Rita Brara, Erika Bsumek, Hal Crimmel, Joana de Freitas, Sophia Kalantzakos, Ruth Morgan, Simone Müller, and Victor Seow, all of whom engaged with me regularly on my project. We were uniformly thrilled to spend the summer in Bavaria. Eben Kirksey’s visit to the Carson Center was an inspiration as well. David Zeidberg, the Huntington Library’s Director, has been my mentor for twenty years, and has been unfailingly supportive of my research and writing efforts and enthusiasms. He graciously released me from my curatorial and administrative duties for my fellowship at the Carson Center, for which I will be eternally grateful. Colleagues at other libraries included Carla Zecher of the Newberry Library, who helped with the translation of Oustalet’s description of the Palila into English; Leslie Overstreet of the Smithsonian’s Cullman Library; Daisy Cunynghame of the MCZ in London; and Dana Fisher of the MCZ at Harvard, as well as the aforementioned staff at

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the Bishop Museum. French historian Noël Garrigue spent time at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris on my behalf, locating the type specimen for the Palila and providing archival information on Ballieu and his collecting efforts. My wife, Pam, and my kids, Paxton Jay and Iris Palila, made repeated trips with me to my native home of Hawaiʻi, and to Germany, England, France, and other corners of the world during the research and writing of this book. It was a rough assignment, I know, but I think they’ll find it in their hearts to forgive me. My ʻohana in Hawaiʻi also provided inspiration: my sister Laura Motta, and her children, Rosa and Jordan. Jean Thomson Black, my editor at Yale, was a fount of useful intel about the publishing business, offering continuous good humor and encouragement, and working strategically on my behalf. And finally—two heartfelt thanks that echo further down history’s hallways: to Carlos Cortés, my extraordinary doctoral advisor at UC Riverside, who showed me what critical thinking and analysis are about, why writing matters, and what history could contain; and to Bruce Musgrave, my remarkable high school English teacher, whose saturated teachings about the English language challenged and inspired me. Carlos and Bruce will never meet, but they are brothers from different mothers.

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Belonging on an Island

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Introduction “The death of a species is a more remarkable event than the end of an imperial dynasty.” —James Orton, The American Naturalist, 1869

i s l a n d s a r e s p e c i a l , a n d b e c a u s e they are bounded by the ocean, their spaces are especially distinct. What belongs, and what, if anything, does not? Who gets to decide what living beings belong on an island, who determines why an organism can belong, and how is belonging actually manifested? Given the usually enormous hurdles involved in preserving or restoring endemic life in the islands, do we even have the ability to control the distributions of most species anyway, even if and when we ever agree on what they “should” be? These are the essential questions of the book, viewed through the lens of four species of birds in Hawaiʻi—one known only from the fossil record, one extinct endemic, one surviving endemic, and one introduced species. Most of the endemic species of birds in Hawaiʻi—those found exclusively in the islands—are endangered, some critically, as are many other animals and plants there. Before humans arrived, life forms had become almost freakishly abundant and diverse—“endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” as Darwin observed about evolution’s workings. Then humans arrived, and kept arriving, and their actions, both intentional and accidental, have reduced the biota to a fraction of its original extent. Humans have brought complications, and their presence creates and

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Introduction

entangles ecological, political, economic, cultural, and philosophical challenges to the survival of endangered species. Many people have claimed to be “of ” Hawaiʻi. For those of Polynesian descent, they are the true ancestors of the land. Surely, they have had the longest human tenure in the islands, and had dramatic effects upon the land between their arrival and Western contact eight hundred years later. But others have claimed the land as their rightful place. Japanese, Filipinos, Mormons, Chinese, Portuguese, and many others have claimed the islands as their own, in meaningful ways, based on the breadth, depth, and intensity of their experience, familial and cultural ties, and much else. Birds in Hawaiʻi—like its people—are not simply native or foreign. There is a spectrum, as we will see, that confounds the established scientific and cultural narrative about what “belongs,” and what does not. And the passage of time, even on a scale humans can readily make sense of, can reclassify something’s belongingness. People like villains—they understand stark distinctions, clearly defined roles, and epic struggles suitable for the big screen, or at least the easy narrative. In the realm of Hawaiian birds, the villains are usually constituted as invasive species, and feather gatherers and collectors who killed very rare birds on the edge of extinction, and actors that continue to destroy native habitat. But the lives of birds in Hawaiʻi, birds of all kinds, along with the lives of humans there, have been marked by irregular change, naturalization, accommodation, disappearance, and reappearance. Villains in the nineteenth century became heroes in the twentieth, and vice versa. Through examination of these things, I want to suggest several new ways of looking at—and thinking about—nativeness, and want to propose a new set of definitions for biocultural nativeness. It is a status that I argue is not conferred by origin or means of arrival, but is shaped and determined by time, charisma, scarcity, utility to others, evolutionary processes, and the changing relationship with other organisms in their ecosystems. The focus of my investigations is ostensibly birds, but I hope that some lessons related to humans might be extracted from it as well. I do not put forth a plan for conservation of Hawaiʻi’s birdlife; there are others much better qualified, and I’m a historian, not a conservation biologist. But in the course of

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arguing for a new understanding of nativeness, I want to map the origins of the bird conservation movement in the islands. I also want to tell the stories of people whose lives deserve a fuller reckoning, and credit, for work inventorying, understanding, and then working to save Hawaiian birds. It will be clear from this book that I am sympathetic to some introduced species found in the islands. This should not be interpreted to mean that I support the introduction of species from outside of Hawaiʻi. I am also by no means arguing that everything on an island is automatically granted native status; that is very far from a truth. The first chapter concerns a bird known only from the fossil record— Ptaiochen pau, or the Stumbling Moa-nalo. Rapidly eradicated by early Polynesians, this flightless duck is an exemplar of environmental difficulties caused by the sudden arrival of humans on an unpeopled archipelago. The ¯ ʻo¯, Moho braccatus—a member of a second chapter looks at the Kauaʻi ʻO small taxon of mostly yellow and black birds that all went extinct between the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth century. This was an era of observation—you have to know what’s where, and what’s what, before you begin work to save things. The third chapter focuses on the Palila, Loxioides bailleui—a critically endangered honeycreeper on the Big Island whose survival is entangled with law, politics, culture, and biology. And finally, the fourth chapter examines the Japanese White-eye, Zosterops japonicus, and the confounding nature of introduced species, some of which have been here long enough to have evolved into something unique to the islands. Extinction is a thread running through this story, but it is as much about arriving as it is about departing. And when you are working over territory about coming, going, and staying, what role does belonging play? We all belong, or want a sense of belonging—consciously or unconsciously, coherently or otherwise. It’s a key aspect of our being. The passage of time is like the decanting of the present from a shallow container into a deep pool, or an ocean. Belonging seems like something that needs to be earned through some kind of sustained tenancy. But just how sustained? This book has a strongly anthropocentric cast, for I’m not steeped enough in cultural anthropology to smudge the bright line often drawn between humans and animals. At the same time, indigenous Hawaiians

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had a much more reciprocal set of relationships with the land and its environment—so they did blur this boundary in a way that others do not. Animals can’t make value judgments about the callousness or indifference with which we consider them, but we readily make value judgments about them all the time. For instance, we levy charges of “invasive” and “alien” at animals found outside their “normal” range, when in fact there’s no conscious attempt on their part to do anything other than to maximize personal fitness and to survive. I would like to get twenty-first century humans to consider our hypocrisy about invasive species; with their sense of exceptionalism, humans are the most invasive of all biological entities, and that should leaven the conversation, although it almost never has. The story of birds and their place and presence in Hawaiʻi— sometimes deeply persistent and rooted in the land, sometimes ghostly and ephemeral, depending on the location, the era and the awareness, or lack thereof, of the observer—is made of confounding and competing parts, all brought together in the world’s most remote island archipelago by both chance and intention. Everything has come from somewhere else. It’s worth keeping in mind, because it colors the issue of belonging very much. Let me state clearly at the outset that I believe passionately in preventing species’ extinction—in their survival simply for the sake of their existence, as evidence and celebration of the astonishing processes of evolution that brought us birds. I believe in true biodiversity—proven to be a slippery concept, but one which involves variability among genes, ecosystems, and species. Biodiversity is certainly tightly tied to place, which skews things. As philosopher of science and conservation biologist Sahotra Sarkar has observed, “a place is geographically rooted and loses its sense of place exactly as it is generalized about: a place is a specific region on Earth’s surface filled with the particular results of its individual history.” So biodiversity in Hawaiʻi certainly has a different meaning than biodiversity in the Sahara Desert, the Antarctic, or the Brazilian rain forest. This makes belonging—and its cousin, nativeness—relative notions as well.1 The people of Hawaiʻi have irrevocably shaped the land since their arrival from other parts of the Pacific some thousand years ago. Their own evolution as the islands’ stewards and stakeholders, and their evolving

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perceptions of the sacred nature of the islands, have also become part of the alchemical mix of longing, belonging, loss, and hope that make up island life. For the native Hawaiians especially, there is a sense of inclusiveness into the landscape for all living things, and many nonliving things beside— objects imbued with mana, or spirit. Indigenous myths about birds, carried forward through an oral tradition—for precontact Hawaiians had no written language—played a key role in understanding birds’ place in nature. Hawaiians have always been close to the land and, in fact, cannot be separated from the natural landscape as something other than it. As Hawaiian scholar Noelani Arista has noted, “Hawaiian philosophy related people, their behavior, and social relations to creatures and spirits from the wai (water), kai (sea), and ʻa¯ina (land).” She has observed that “these conceptualizations are not simply about an affinity for the ‘natural environment’ but are shaped by genealogical relation and can be located in chants, prayers, stories, song, proverbs and as expressed in everyday speech.”2 A lot of birds evolved in isolation in Hawaiʻi, have visited here, or have arrived here briefly or for longer periods. At least 317 living species have been documented in the islands between 1778 and 2009, a count that includes native land birds and waterbirds, breeding seabirds, a variety of migratory species, and, in the interest of completeness, vagrants and nonnative species with established breeding populations in the islands. Some are long extinct; others are vanishingly rare; and still others can’t be avoided, visible at every turn on almost every island. This count also doesn’t include the dozens of birds discovered in the fossil record—the focus of the first chapter. I believe that humans didn’t really care about extinction until the twentieth century, despite giving lip service to it when the spectre of their own possible extinguishing came into both an individual and a collective consciousness. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, people’s newfound anxieties about the extinction of species reflected their own dawning awareness of their collective mortality. Darwin had already badly shaken people’s concepts of heavenly immortality after untethering humans from a unique place in the hierarchy of life. H. G. Wells noted in 1894, “It is part of the excessive egotism of the human animal that the bare idea of its

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extinction seems incredible to it.” This incredulity has also applied to other species—we’ve had a hard time believing it’s even possible. For centuries, people believed that the very idea of extinction was ungodlike. Why would a supreme being create a species, only to allow it to blink out of existence? Humming through this story is that of a people whose identities have also been threatened—that of native Hawaiians, the descendants of the original settlers. Their language, culture, and traditions have been at risk as their populations have become diluted and interspersed among non-Hawaiians.3 For individuals—and all populations are made up of individuals— being born means dying. Every living being eventually succumbs. It’s a sorry state of affairs, isn’t it? As songwriter Warren Zevon noted in just three words, “Life’ll kill ya.” We mostly care about other individuals, humans and otherwise. But we also need to care about populations: larger groups—biologists call them clades, taxa, tribes, and other things—but suffice it to say here that species matter. Halting extinction is confounding, difficult, and sometimes entirely impossible. In the inner chambers of their hearts, most people care about it only in a distracted, fretting way. It’s an abstraction, lacking in daily impact. But extinction is generative as well as regenerative; that is, in the bustling, interrelated ways of nature, when something goes away there is usually something ready to take advantage of its absence, and something usually will. As numerous writers have demonstrated, studying—and protecting— endangered species is at least as much about the places in question as it is about the species under scrutiny. For starters, no animal lives untethered to a wider world. It needs food, shelter, and a cohort with which to breed, interact, and survive. But it’s much more than that. Places are affected by law, public policy, politics, and the conflicting wishes of humans who want to use the land for different purposes. When a remote archipelago like Hawaiʻi is the place in question, a host of other issues arise. The language of species occupying new territories and changing them has become highly militarized—no doubt because people consider the task at hand to be a war: humans against organisms that, with no sentience or intention of their own, have arrived somewhere new. The term most commonly used in the

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scientific literature is that of biological invasion. Just what is the definition of a “biological invasion”? Daniel Simberloff describes it as occurring when “individuals of a species not native to a region arrive with human assistance, intentional or not, and establish an ongoing population.” Policy makers, however, have been much more vague in their efforts to define these terms. President Bill Clinton’s Executive Order 13112 of 1999 defines an invasive species as one that is “alien”; that is, “not native to that ecosystem.” Under “Definitions,” “native” is defined as “a species that, other than as a result of an introduction, historically occurred or currently occurs in that ecosystem.” That only muddies the waters, because what does “historically” mean here? A better term would have been “prehistorically,” before humans and their record-keeping ways arrived. The Order does a bit better in its definition of “invasive species,” which it terms as “an alien species whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” But again, what does “harm” mean here? When an endemic species is actually assisted in some ways by an introduced species— such as pollination of native plants by introduced birds—does this effect negate any harm done? And does the harm have to be broadly harmful? This will become a key issue in Chapter Four, when we see the Hui Manu introducing species after species of bird to aid in insect control. Biogeographers, poets, and astronauts have all made the observation that the Earth is an island. But islands on the Earth are different. While nature usually defies containment, islands are by their very nature containers. Discontinuous, scattered, and numerous, they are also prone to disappearance in the way that continents are not, at least over deeper geologic time. They subside, rise, subside. Here today, gone to Maui. I was born in Hawaiʻi, three weeks before statehood, and lived there until leaving the islands to go to college on the mainland. A love of nature was crosshatched onto my DNA not through conscious study, but by wild bits that were somehow part of a push towards the center of another world, down at Pukihae Stream next to our house, swimming in cool, dark water, trying to catch tadpoles or fish, and throwing rocks, Sisyphus-like, into the crashing waves at the base of the stream with my brother. Starting up in the hills above rainy Hilo and ending at the ocean immediately below the

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three-sided island on which our house sat, the end of Pukihae ran under an old concrete bridge and into a large, cool pond that flowed from there over boulders and into the ocean. Time, presence, belonging, and absence are like that river: poured from a source and distilled down over a rocky course until it joins a larger world, where past, present, and future live: a dark and stormy ocean.

o ne

Sitting Ducks Extinction, Humans, and Birds in the pre-European Contact Era

“The current status of Hawaii’s birds can not be fully understood without the perspective of the fossil record.” —Frances C. James

c o u n t l e s s w o r d s h a v e b e e n written about the role of humans in extinction events in the past several hundred years, but preindustrialized societies have received considerably less attention, and have played a huge role in the demise of plants and animals. You think extinction is bad today in Hawaiʻi? At least for birds, it was much worse in the centuries between colonization of the islands by humans around 1000 CE and the arrival of Captain Cook in 1778. Judging by the fossil record, at least half of all bird species went extinct during this time. A much smaller percentage has gone extinct following the arrival of Europeans—about 20 percent of the original assemblage of species in the islands. Bird species in Hawaiʻi went extinct before Westerners arrived at considerably more than twice the rate they did after Cook made his first landfall in the harbor of Waimea on Kauaʻi. As one biologist has noted, a “catastrophic wave of extinction” accompanied humans’ arrival in the islands. The effects of these actions on the current avifauna of Hawaiʻi are indelible. Famously put another way by William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”1 9

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What this all has meant is that we’ve probably lost something like 70 percent of the bird species in the Hawaiian archipelago since the Polynesians hauled their canoes up onto land a thousand years ago, and the bulk of these extinctions preceded the white man and his own consuming ways. It’s easy enough to lie with numbers, and this lower percentage of extinction of a larger whole after Western contact might simply be a reflection of the fact that there were fewer birds to go extinct after Cook’s arrival. It’s been argued recently that modern extinction rates (as in the past several hundred years) are relatively low precisely because ancient extinction rates were high. It is sobering that through loss of habitat from the clearing of land, the introduction of rats and domesticated animals, the killing and eating of large flightless birds, and other actions, the native Hawaiians were culpable in the majority of extinctions of birds in Hawaiʻi.2 But it was not just a problem in Hawaiʻi. More generally, it’s been an island problem: one recent estimate calculated that human colonization across forty-one Pacific islands caused the global extinction of nearly 1,000 species of birds—and around 90 percent of bird extinctions worldwide have taken place on islands. It’s also a great complicating factor that species on islands can be both highly robust and extremely delicate, depending on the pressures to which they are subjected. Almost all species have survived for countless centuries. But their struggles to continue on islands can easily tip into extinction because humans are able to change the equation enormously for plants and animals: densities, threats from off-island introductions, habitat, and virtually everything else that allows species to live, or that makes them die out.3 Extinction is nothing new, though, and there are a variety of statistical and descriptive ways to slice the extinction pie. It’s been estimated that more than 99 percent of all species to ever live have gone extinct. Species have disappeared since species first existed—since the dawn of life on our planet, when living beings began to differentiate themselves from members of their own kind, or speciate, and actually become species of their own. Evolution into a distinctly new and different form is usually born out of necessity— based on selective pressures related to diet, weather, sexual selection, and genetic drift, as well as on beneficial random mutations. Where resources seesawed between abundance and scarcity, or when they limited a species’

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ability to reproduce successfully, evolutionary processes blossomed. In Hawaiʻi, the beaks of honeycreepers changed. The toes of seabirds evolved, and some birds lost the need to fly. The various changes in environment— the coming and going of food sources, cyclical climate change, volcanism, and other aspects of environments affected by wind, weather, water, temperature, and other factors—meant that some survived without changing; others evolved to survive new circumstances; and others blinked out. But the natural pace of extinction is pretty glacial, at least compared to now—“now” being, say, the past thousand years. Science writer Natalie Angier famously called this “Nature’s chronic winnowing,” but it’s not been all that chronic, because species don’t actually go extinct very easily on their own. The background extinction rate—the rate at which species go extinct without the effect of humans—is about a thousand times slower than the current rate of extinction, here in the Anthropocene. As ecologist Stuart Pimm explained it to me, when humans and their messy ways aren’t figured into the equation, “generally, a species goes extinct every million years. In a group of 150 bird species, you’d go 10,000 years before you saw a natural extinction.” But now, the very concept of a background extinction rate is moot: humans are the new background. Plants and animals around the world are going extinct at a blistering pace. If—speaking chronologically— life on Earth is like a hand, with the wrist being the earliest living things, humans are the sliver of a fingernail. But nails are sharp, and in the tiny slice of time that is more or less the present, humans’ role has meant that almost nothing that now goes extinct does so without human causation.4 Much has been written about the long postcontact list of woes, which include a variety of blots on the paradise that was Hawaiʻi. These included humans’ sexually transmitted diseases, mosquitoes and their payloads of avian malaria and pox, and a barrage of introduced plants and animals that modified the land and its biota. This chapter, however, is about the extinction of a bird which disappeared due to the actions of a region’s original settlers but before any of the more leveling and destructive impacts of Western incursions. The exemplar I use here is the Small-Billed Moa-nalo, better known as the Stumbling Moa-nalo—Ptaiochen pau, known only from the fossil

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record in Hawaiʻi, and a bird whose extinction seems resolutely tied to humans. But the fact that birds disappeared at nearly three times the rate before Western contact than after it also conceals many other things about careful and sophisticated native stewardship of the land. What kinds of care did the Hawaiians exercise over the land, and over its bird life, before they were affected by Western incursions in the form of diseases, introduced species such as mosquitoes and mongooses, and a wide variety of birds from elsewhere? Throughout this book I will reinforce a key truth that is often resisted in the discussions about endangered species in Hawaiʻi: on islands, everything has come from somewhere else. Everything. The people, the plants, the insects, and, most certainly, the birds. Even the lava, the rooting force of the islands, has come from somewhere alien: far below the earth’s surface, rising up through a hole in the Earth’s crust to make a place on the Pacific Plate, the vast tectonic mass comprising the floor of the entire Pacific Ocean. Even the name is from somewhere else; “lava” is an Italian word, not a Hawaiian one. Estimating anything close to a precise number of bird species that existed in Hawaiʻi before humans arrived in the islands is extraordinarily challenging. The fossil record is inevitably filled with large gaps. The islands’ relative inability to store fossils across a wide geography contributes to this shortfall in the fossil record. Igneous rock—cooled magma from deep underground—doesn’t provide good storage, because its extreme heat destroys any bones that could otherwise mineralize and be preserved.5 Hawaiʻi before humans would have seemed like a magical place to anyone transported from a later time. There were no introduced species of any kind, at least not as we understand them today—nothing other than those introduced by wave or wind. In particular, there were no members of that pernicious, earnest, and sometimes-visionary species, Homo sapiens. No boats would be hauled up on beaches. No agricultural efforts to clear the land for crops would have been visible. For hundreds of thousands of years, no sounds of human voices, no pounding of rock against wood, no laughter, nor noises of sorrow—only the wind, the hissing of cooling lava, rainfall, and, later, insects calling, and birdsong—a cacophony of song and

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call, especially in the cool of the early morning. No trappings of humans who would later arrive, either: no mosquitoes, no rats, no mongooses, no dogs or cats or chickens, no plumerias, no pineapples, no sugarcane, no coffee, no carnivores beyond several species of raptors. Some snails existed, having arrived probably by being attached to birds’ legs or to something that floated to shore. Vast forests extended down to the water’s edge, and birdlife thrived in almost every corner of every island.6 The land had been formed by molten rock and water. Over time, living things did arrive, via sheer circumstance—a storm, the spores of ferns borne on the wind, a raft of debris that allowed some organism to float a long distance. Bats arrived in several waves, with the most recent arriving just 800 years ago. Trees arrived “in the dark belly of some wandering bird,” as James Michener wrote. Biologists aren’t usually known for their evocative terms, but this kind of forced relocation is called “sweepstakes dispersal,” and in fact some animals won the lottery, while many others no doubt lost and died en route.7 Some birds migrated to and from Hawaiʻi. The Ko¯lea, or Pacific Golden-Plover, which played another critical role for the migrating Polynesians, was a frequent visitor in spring and fall as it came and went between Hawaiʻi and its breeding grounds in Alaska. The birds would have dropped seeds in their poop, and things attached to their wings and legs would have taken root after birds landed or died there. The contents of their intestines contained bacteria that would have evolved into other life forms and become endemic to the Hawaiian archipelago, and even to specific islands if these forms could not fly, float, or swim the often-turbulent channels between islands. Migratory birds, usually with superb long-distance flight abilities, have made the long trip to the Hawaiian archipelago for at least 120,000 years.8 The Stumbling Moa-nalo almost certainly had a Hawaiian name—but if so, it is lost to us. This large bird was not a sexy beast. That distinction certainly can be applied to other birds in this book, such as the spectacular ¯ ʻo¯, whose bright yellow feathers were so attractive that a Hawaiian war ʻO cape could use the feathers from as many as 400,000 of those long-suffering birds. No, the critter was a large, flightless, slow-moving, and decidedly

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pedestrian member of the duck family. But it was a game-changer for life in Hawaiʻi. It was an herbivore—a plant eater, and the moa-nalo family was the largest of any of the herbivores on the islands—and long before any humans arrived, it transformed the landscape. The common name given to the object of this chapter’s affections, the Stumbling Moa-nalo, is an implicit commentary on its vulnerabilities, and its moniker stands in for the vulnerability of all birds upon their first exposure to humans. A species that vanished before Captain Cook’s arrival in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, the Stumbling Moa-nalo has been most commonly discovered in lava tubes. These tubes are formed when pa¯hoehoe lava, which is smooth and ropy, flows away from its source—be it a vent, a cone, a caldera, or some other rip in the earth releasing magma—and if the terrain is steep enough it moves fast, like a warrior. Sometimes these flows are many yards thick. As the lava flows downhill, or makai—toward the ocean—the surface can cool and harden, leaving flowing lava beneath. As this molten lava flows, it eventually evacuates its underground passageway, leaving a hollow tubelike structure. The Moa-nalo would occasionally “stumble” through a skylight or hole in the tube, fall, and, with no route of escape (can’t fly out, can’t really stroll out) die, the remains to be found by humans centuries later. But while the bird’s common name speaks only to its circumstances of discovery as a fallen species (so to speak), its scientific name is an explicit nod to its extinction. The generic name Ptaiochen is a mash-up of the Greek word ptaio (“stumble”) and the word “che¯n,” or “goose.” (An alternate meaning for ptaio is “fall into misery,” which seems appropriate in this context.) The species name “pau,” however, is a Hawaiian word meaning “finished” or “done.” Evening rush hour in Hawaiʻi, the end of the work day, is called pau hana by the locals: “done with work.” As Storrs Olson and Helen James noted in a 1991 summary of their staggeringly large haul of thirty-two new species from the fossil record, the bird was named by them “in reference to the lamentable extinction of the species.” The Stumbling Moa-nalo—or the Clumsy Moa-nalo, as it’s also known—is part of a larger group of remarkable large, flightless birds that populated the Hawaiian Islands, and probably browsed in understory

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Artist’s reconstruction of the Stumbling Moa-nalo, Ptaiochen pau (Image by Katie Bertsche)

vegetation. Scrape beneath the surface of a scientific or Hawaiian name and you will learn something, and often extinction and its spectre become visible. The phrase “moa-nalo” means “lost bird” in Hawaiian. It’s a clever synecdoche: the birds are lost in more ways than one. After centuries of isolation from key predators—no nasty cougars, tigers, or other fast-moving mammalian meat eaters to contend with—these birds lost their ability to fly, since it was no longer necessary. There were flying menaces revealed in the fossil record: at least six different hawks, some owls, and a large eagle. But a duck that could fly wouldn’t have conveyed much defense against faster and more agile fliers. Flying, after all, is extremely taxing for a bird in terms of both metabolic and embryogenic energy. Normally, the bones of a bird that flies make up only about 5 percent of its total body weight. But when flight

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isn’t necessary, a bird can benefit from having a more robust skeletal structure: it can grow to a larger size, and it can walk—and thus feed, in some habitats—more effectively than a flighted bird. As a group, the moa-nalo all appear to have shared the same basic configurations: large and extremely sturdy and robust pelves and hind limbs.9 At the same time, the bird’s wings and pectoral girdle were all greatly reduced. And because its flightlessness meant that it was reliant on land plants, it evolved—in most but not all examples of the group—to have blunt, strangelooking toothlike projections in the beak. Ecologically, the moa-nalo were more analogous to tortoises than to anything else: relatively slow-moving, unable to fly or climb, and reliant on plant matter close to the ground. Because the moa-nalo lacked the large breast and pectoral muscles necessary for flight—typically about 15–20 percent of total body weight—it didn’t have to metabolically support that extra tissue. As a result, it could survive on considerably less food and water than that required by a similar flighted bird. And while flying is a faster means of travel, it also requires more resources. As a result, whenever resources became scarce in the islands, as they did at least several times a century, the bird’s lower energy requirements would have been in its great favor, and could have transformed a population of birds from flighted to unflighted in just a few hundred years.10 There is another side to the coin. Tensions are inherent in evolutionary processes; it’s an arms race among competing species, including humans, and it’s essentially about compromise. A number of factors are distinctly not in the moa-nalo’s favor when it comes to long-term survival. These flightless birds were what biologists term “naïve”—that is, they had no fear of humans. That wouldn’t have helped them in the least upon the arrival of the Polynesians in the islands, nor when confronted with their dogs and pigs. We do know from the fossil record that Ptaiochen pau was primarily an upland bird, favoring cooler and wetter climates. It’s also possible that its large body size increased its susceptibility to extinction. The bigger a bird, the more constrained its population density is—and thus, its total populations are smaller than those of small birds. So any environmental change affects larger species more than it does smaller, more numerous species. We know from modern examples that larger birds also are slower to

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rebound when their populations decline, and also tend to lay fewer eggs— another factor that would have put the moa-nalo at greater risk.11 What might the bird have looked like? It’s hard to say. “We can use anatomy to come up with the body form, and we can use taphonomy [the processes of fossilization] to come up with the ecosystem, but the plumage, of course, has to be a guess,” Smithsonian avian paleontologist Helen James observed. As her colleague and former husband Storrs Olson noted, “If you had bones of Palmeria, the Crested Honeycreeper [the ʻAkohekohe, with a bizarre little crest of feathers coming from just in front of the eyes, of all places]—if you reconstructed the thing [looking as it actually does], people would’ve said, ‘This is ridiculous—no bird could possibly have looked like that.” So, in the process of helping artists reconstruct how the moa-nalo might have looked, they’ve been broad in their thinking. “We also sometimes remind ourselves that birds are beautiful,” James noted. “You shouldn’t be too conservative in reconstructing the plumages.”12 Just four species of moa-nalo have been described: Chelychelynechen quassus (which translates as “Turtle-Jawed Goose”), found only on Kauaʻi; Thambetochen xanion, found only on O‘ahu; Thambetochen chauliodous, found on Lanaʻi, Maui, and Molokaʻi; and the aforementioned Ptaiochen pau, found only on what is now Maui. They were probably the top herbivores of the animal kingdom in prehuman Hawaiʻi. Originally thought to be geese, they are likely descendants of small dabbling ducks. This insight was gleaned, as usual, from some small bones: the syringeal bulla of specimens of both Thambetochen and Ptaiochen, found in lava tubes. These bullae are resonating chambers formed by the bronchi where they meet up with the trachea. Asymmetrical in shape and simple in structure, these bullae are much more akin to similar structures in ducks than they are in geese. How do geese and ducks differ from each other today? To the uninitiated, they seem vaguely similar, but they are not. Both belong to the same family— Anatidae—but as a gross rule, ducks are stouter and geese are more elongated. These speculations about the moa-nalo as direct descendants from other ducks were at first contested by other biologists. After all, they had goose-like size and morphology. But they were in fact derived from ducks— a fact that has been confirmed by ancient DNA analysis.13

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In contrast to today’s smaller ducks, the moa-nalo were pretty heavy— somewhere between nine and sixteen pounds, depending on the species— about the size of your Thanksgiving turkey, if you’re in the United States. The birds’ body configuration reflects their role in the ecology of the islands before humans. Their serrated beaks were ideal for eating fronds from ferns, and they were probably the principal browsers on the Maui Nui landmass. The morphology of at least one of these moa-nalo, particularly the construction of their head and neck, has invited speculation that they fed on leafy vegetation in the shrub and herb layer, rather than on taller plants. If you’re interested in an intensely detailed analysis of the poop of these flightless birds, look no further than a 1997 article by Helen James and David Burney detailing these matters, and thus, the food supply of the birds, which appeared to have consisted especially of fern fronds and other leafy vegetation.14 A long time ago, the Hawaiian archipelago was very different. One to two million years ago, the islands we now know as Molokaʻi, Lanaʻi, and Maui, and possibly Kahoʻolawe, were a single large landmass, about the size of the Big Island today. This landmass is known as “Maui Nui,” or “Big Maui.” This meant that the moa-nalo could readily travel on foot among what would later become separate islands. It’s also possible that the sea level rose and fell several times, separating and then reuniting the islands. When the water subsided, individual populations would have become isolated and would have evolved in isolation from their friends on other islands—thus creating related but distinctly separate bird species over the millennia. This meant the Big Island, youngest in the Hawaiian chain, was only a dream in Pele’s mind when the moa-nalo lost their ability to disperse over water. It would not emerge from the Pacific until a relatively recent half-million years ago. Once they evolved into distinct species, though, things stabilized, and their probable evolutionary course was very slow. “We can go back, over a hundred thousand years on Oahu at a Pleistocene site, and these flightless ducks, the moa-nalo, were not changing,” noted Helen James. “They had established their morphology and they stayed the same, even through glacial cycles when there were big climatic changes. They were morphologically

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exactly the same up until their extinction in the late Holocene”—when humans caused their demise. Polynesians in Hawaiʻi would’ve been in need of some easy, immediate protein, and the lumbering, naïve moa-nalo would’ve fit the bill perfectly, so to speak. As Pat Kirch has noted, “The bones of moa nalo are so scarce in archaeological deposits that it would seem they disappeared very fast, shockingly fast.” And that, for the moa-nalo, was that.15 Do bones sing? Can one bone talk? And are comparative anatomists and paleontologists the magicians of the bone world? To better understand this bird, and its importance, we need to know something of how, and why, fossils are important to the study of living birds. Paleontology—the study of the fossil record—is based on the fossilized remains of plants and animals, and, in the case of Hawaiian birds, subfossilized remains. (“Fossils” is an imprecise term in Hawaiʻi, because virtually no ancient bones there have been permineralized, or turned to stone. “Biological remains” is more suitable, although a more general term. But for our purposes, I’ve used “fossilized” to refer to these remains.) I love the parts of the word for this discipline—“paleo,” meaning “old,” and “ontological,” which is a term used more often in the realm of philosophers, cultural anthropologists, and existentialists of all stripes. It gets right to the heart of things. It’s a field that has engaged anyone who cares to scratch below the surface, as it were. Plus, as Storrs Olson, the world’s foremost Hawaiian avian paleontologist, noted in an interview, “It’s fun.” He also observed that “it puts dinner on the table, and you’ve got to make a living somehow.”16 Skeletal remains of birds, dated by radiocarbon in bones, have played an essential role in understanding what birds existed in the islands before human settlement, as well as which ones went extinct after settlement. As a character noted in Macbeth, “What’s past is prologue.” Put another way by an avian paleontologist, “The current status of Hawaii’s birds cannot be fully understood without the perspective of the fossil record.” Paleontology is based on biology, and influenced by geology. As my friend Dave Bottjer, a University of Southern California paleontologist, remarked to me, “I ask biological questions, but my data have turned to stone.”17

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And although everyone’s work life is challenging from time to time, or maybe most of the time, bone and stone people really do have it tough. One paper by James and Olson on Hawaiian fossil bird discoveries notes the difficulties of the work—not just the fieldwork, which can be dirty and exhausting, mind you, but also the museum work: “At times nearly complete skeletons of single individuals may be available, but just as frequently we must deal with masses of unassociated material. Each major bone in the skeleton may potentially have diagnostic features and may yield numerous different measurements. The simple physical processes of cleaning, sorting, cataloging, numbering, and storing such vast amounts of material is staggering by comparison with the curatorial responsibilities of the skin taxonomist.”18 Other allied disciplines contribute to our knowledge of the prehistoric record. Paleoecology, or the study of a prehistoric environment, accounts for not just the remains of animals, but those of plants as well. Digging through the earth’s strata makes amazing things possible. Some dating techniques are very accurate, and paleoecologists (and their cousins, palynologists, who study plant pollens and spores) can estimate with considerable accuracy just when humans arrived somewhere by the appearance of the pollen of introduced plants. They can identify extremely thin layers of charcoal particulates—evidence of persistent local or regional burning activity, since naturally occurring fire was rare, unless caused by molten lava or lightning.19 Paleontologists can also locate and analyze middens, or piles of domestic waste, which can include not just botanic material but also animal bones eaten or used for food or other decorative or practical purposes; excrement; and shells and other stuff that humans use, make, and accumulate. There are side benefits to these human accumulations, too. For instance, shells have a high content of calcium carbonate, which tends to make the middens alkaline. Alkalinity (although it’s bad for the preservation of pollen) slows the rate of decay typically caused by soil acidity, leaving a substantial amount of organic material intact—remnants of food, tools made from organic materials such as wood or plant fibers, and even human remains. That all helps scientists locate details in the underground archive that is the stuff of paleoecology.

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Countering this, though, is the truism that the fossil record is necessarily distorted. The remains of larger birds survive more frequently than those of smaller ones. Bones of birds eaten by humans survive more readily because they are accumulated in middens and other waste accumulations. Species that disappeared quickly after the arrival of humans, or which existed only in relatively small numbers, would also be represented less thoroughly in the fossil record.20 Of course, humans above ground are necessary to make sense of animals from below ground. Storrs Lovejoy Olson, a Smithsonian avian paleontologist, deserves closer biographical attention because no single person has contributed more to our knowledge of the fossil record of Hawaiian birds. Over a quarter-century, Storrs and Helen James, with the assistance of many associates, discovered the remains of fifty extinct bird species new to science, including the Stumbling Moa-nalo. Beyond that, however, he has also made significant contributions to other aligned (and occasionally maligned) topics. He is also a wry commentator on extinction, having had a ringside seat at many of its remains for decades. Storrs has a historian’s sensibilities, and has been deeply interested over the years in helping to understand historic events related to the study of birds in Hawaiʻi, much of which had to do not with fossils, but with the living bird, or at least its capture, collection, and description. The son of an oceanographer and the grandson of a well-known conservationist, Storrs began his childhood with a fascination with fishes. Growing up in Tallahassee, Florida, he began collecting at a young age. His attention was turned permanently towards birds, however, when he participated in a Christmas Bird Count at the age of twelve. Storrs also hunted. “I had plenty of incentive to buy guns and go hunting from about age fourteen on from all my male acquaintances in school,” he told me. In hunting birds, he became interested in their historic ancestors. He has very often worked at the intersection of human habitation and bird life. “I got into studying rails and that took me eventually to islands because so many rails colonize islands,” he noted in a 1996 interview. “And one of the first places I went in search of extinct rails was Ascension Island.” A few bones had been found on the isolated island in the South Atlantic Ocean by a British expedition,

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and Storrs found many more. It was there that he made striking fossil discoveries, as well as on Saint Helena, also in the South Atlantic, including the Saint Helena hoopoe and the Saint Helena crake.21 Storrs published his first two scientific pieces at age sixteen, the first a brief co-authored note in the Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union; and the second in Bird-Banding. His output since then has been prodigious; his publications list notes a total of 457 items. In significant ways, his role in American science recalls that of Robert Ridgway, another bird guy who worked for the Smithsonian. Ridgway, who became interested in birds at around the same age, served as the naturalist on the 40th Parallel Survey beginning as a sixteen-year-old, was the Smithsonian’s first Curator of Birds, and had a similar publications record during his long career. Olson, however, is nothing like the cripplingly shy Ridgway. Ambitious and hard-charging—an Indiana Jones of the Hawaiian bird world— Storrs would go on to become the world’s greatest expert on Hawaiian fossil birds, discovering numerous species new to science and transforming our understanding of the Hawaiian avifauna. He’s also an effusive, articulate spokesperson for Hawaiian birds. If I could put him on a poster I would, although like Ridgway he would probably be highly embarrassed by such a maneuver. Olson earned an undergraduate degree in biology from Florida State University in 1966, and spent the first year of graduate school at the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1967. “I didn’t like it there,” he told me, and he returned to Florida State to receive his MS degree in biology in 1968. He was first hired by the Smithsonian on a summer internship through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1968, and from there became the resident manager of what was then the Smithsonian’s Chesapeake Bay Center through 1969. A key event in his career trajectory had already taken place when he came up to Washington in 1967 to visit Alexander Wetmore, an avian paleontologist who had served as the secretary for the Smithsonian. That meeting led to two major milestones for Olson: he started the PhD program at Johns Hopkins in 1970 in what was then the School of Hygiene and Public

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Health, now the Bloomberg School of Public Health; and as of August 1971, having just passed his qualifying exams for the doctorate in paleo-ornithology, and having what a member of his dissertation committee called “an obvious and intense devotion to his research,” he was given office space at the Smithsonian, “with the unstated intention of never leaving,” as one biographical sketch of him noted. He completed his PhD at Johns Hopkins in 1972, and his Smithsonian ties provided a home base for a variety of fellowships, a postdoc, a presidential internship, and “soft-money” funding under S. Dillon Ripley, the Smithsonian secretary. He became a curator in the Department of Vertebrate Zoology in March of 1975 and, like Ridgway, remained a Smithsonian employee in the National Museum of Natural History for the rest of his career, retiring in 2008.22 His talents were obvious from the start. In a letter to the search committee at the Florida State Museum in 1977 on behalf of the thirty-threeyear-old Olson, paleontologist Clayton E. Ray—then a research curator in the Smithsonian’s Department of Paleobiology—wrote, “Regarding qualifications, what can I say except that he does it all—modern birds, fossil birds, field work, curation, research, publication. I don’t know of any one at his stage of career who has proven himself in so many areas.” Storrs’s wideranging interests and curiosity would remain in play for his entire career. “He has been publishing by the pound,” Ray noted, and observed that Olson’s publications record to date could well be the envy of many researchers at the end of their careers. “He will be a worthy successor to Alexander Wetmore and Pierce Brodkorb, the giants of paleoornithology,” Ray concluded.23 Like all things, the study of fossil birds has a history, and, until 1926, no one suspected the presence of fossil bones in Hawaiʻi; it’s a volcanic archipelago, after all, forged from lava. They had been considered as a possibility at the end of the nineteenth century, when the newly formed Hawaiian Geographical Society had noted as an especially desirable goal the collection of a series of fossils. “No such collection has ever been made,” the Hawaiian Gazette noted in 1897. It’s possible that nineteenth-century naturalists working in Hawaiʻi might have discovered fossils if they ever had brought along a lighting source, but they didn’t because it was so rarely

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A young Storrs Olson at Chesapeake Bay Center for Environmental Studies (now the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center), 1969 (Smithsonian Institution Archives, SIA2011-1096)

needed, and so when they did stumble upon a cave or lava tube, they were not able to enter. “We got no further than a cave at the foot of Hualalai and did not get far into it for want of a light,” lamented bird collector George Munro in his diary in 1891 while on a collecting expedition.24 But in 1926, as workers dug a tunnel a hundred feet belowground to transport water from the mountains for irrigating sugarcane—itself an alien species, brought to the islands by Polynesians during settlement—they came across some old bones. And those bones—found by the Japanese foreman of the tunnel gang—were pale and cream-colored, warped, and cracked, and seemed to have been exposed to very high temperatures,

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located between an ash deposit and a lava flow near the little town of Pahala, close to the southeastern tip of the Big Island. The fossils passed into the hands of William O. Clark of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association, and thence to the Smithsonian for examination by Wetmore. This find supported the idea that if anything was found, it would be a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, and not really something to be pursued systematically. The very large bird appeared to be a goose, and the lava flow immediately over the bones was some 9,000 years old, which effectively dated the era of the bird’s demise.25 After a long delay due to a lack of useful material available for comparative purposes, as well as the fragmentary and scanty nature of the find, Wetmore finally wrote up the discovery in a formal description in 1943, shortly before becoming secretary—the Smithsonian’s top job. The bones were limited to the right tibiotarsus (the bottom of the leg), pieces of both femurs, some pelvic vertebrae, and a few other bits, all in fragmented form. Wetmore, who had a classical education, noodled around with a variety of names, and filled a notebook page with possible monikers in Greek characters as he contemplated a name. Wetmore ultimately named it Geochen rhuax—from Geos, “earth,” and che¯n, “goose.” The specific name rhuax means, approximately, “lava stream” in Latin, a nod to its location when found. And although Clark was no paleontologist, he remained very interested in the discovery, and Wetmore sent Clark parts of his manuscript for review before it was published.26 So, what is in a name? Plenty, because name changes in biology and paleontology reflect new understandings of a living thing’s origins, evolution, and family tree. Although Wetmore placed the bird in the genus Geochen, Olson’s twenty-first century analysis of the bird and its lineage demonstrates that the bird is part of the same lineage as a more modern, larger goose that probably went extinct during Polynesian settlement. As a result, he has suggested that the name be changed to Branta rhuax, to reflect its older goose lineage—a taxonomic maneuver that puts it in the same genus as the Ne¯ne¯, or Hawaiian Goose: Branta sandwichensis. But fossil birds and Hawaiʻi seemed disconnected, despite the few examples in Wetmore’s care and his 1943 article. Once fossil birds began to

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be unearthed by Olson and James, the specifics were astonishing. As Storrs told me, “No one had ever even imagined a flightless ibis, for example, until we started paleontological work in Hawaii. None exist anywhere now and even in the fossil record the only other flightless ibis known so far is from Jamaica. We are absolutely certain of the distribution of ibises in Hawaii (Molokai, Maui, and recently Lanai), and that they did not occur on Big Island, Oahu, or Kauai.”27 “Avian paleontology” was thus not a term used in conjunction with Hawaiian natural history. At least, that was, until 1971, when an amateur naturalist, Joan Aidem, discovered bones of extinct birds in sand dunes on the island of Molokaʻi. It was an extraordinary moment. Joan had moved with her husband from California, and she was a beachcomber but also a natural historian. I talked to Joan several years ago about her experience discovering these remains. A self-described treasure hunter who had spent two years at Sacramento State doing archaeology, “looking for things,” as she called it, Aidem had also recently taken a class in ornithology. She was out one day looking for glass floats—buoyant spheres used by fishermen to support nets, and a familiar sight to those of us who grew up in the islands; most family homes have one or more of these as decorative objects. Walking along the dunes at Moʻomomi, on the northwestern end of the island of Molokaʻi, about fifty yards from the ocean, Aidem saw a beak sticking out of a dune, in weakly cemented sand. “Strange,” she thought, but then didn’t think more about it, and walked on. But she decided that it was worth returning along the dune to see it, and carefully pulled the beak out of the sand and took it to Alan Ziegler, the legendary naturalist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Ziegler immediately recognized its significance, and he went with Aidem to the dunes, excavated more of the bird, and sent the specimen off to Alexander Wetmore at the Smithsonian. Joan would prove to be only the second person to discover a fossil bird in Hawaiʻi, after the one first unearthed accidentally in 1926.28 The material sat in Wetmore’s office for several years after it was written up, along with several other fragmentary remains from other locations that had turned up in the intervening years. “When [Wetmore wasn’t in] I’d go in and look at it,” Olson noted about his first years at the Smithsonian.

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“At the time the islands out there meant nothing to me.” It took a while for him to decide to write it up, and he put Wetmore’s name on the article along with his. “At first, he didn’t want to, and then I convinced him, you know; he’d read the manuscript and worked with me on it to some extent, so we published that first paper describing what we thought was a flightless goose at the time.” The article, “Preliminary Diagnoses of Two Extraordinary New Genera of Birds from Pleistocene Deposits in the Hawaiian Islands,” was published in 1976. Olson was off and running. The fossils were of two birds—one a new genus of Ibis, and the other a species of what would turn out to be a flightless waterfowl, Thambetochen chauliodous, one of the moanalo. Olson’s clever names for birds are visible with this first new Hawaiian bird—the generic name for the bird is from the Greek Thambe¯tos, “astonishing,” and the aforementioned che¯n, or “goose.”29 Joan’s interests in Hawaiian fossil birds also continued; she went on other formal Smithsonian expeditions as an assistant, and as they washed up on the Smithsonian’s shores, these island fossil finds helped to inspire Olson’s work. Storrs described Joan to me as “the dearest, sweetest, most unselfish and helpful person we ever dealt with in the islands.” Without her accidental discovery, it’s very possible that vertebrate fossil studies in Hawaiʻi would not have progressed for quite a long time, perhaps decades.30 Wetmore and Olson’s article in 1976 proved to be just the tip of the boneyard. In large part because of the work of Olson and James, thousands of fossil bones from the Hawaiian Islands have been collected since Aidem’s discovery. The fossil record is necessarily incomplete, and there is some disagreement among experts as to just what the number might be. Not all species fossilize well. Not only are fragile birds harder to locate and identify, but birds with smaller populations are more likely than more common ones to be missed in the fossil record. The remains of birds that went extinct following settlement but before European contact may have burned or scattered, or otherwise have been disarticulated or destroyed after being eaten. Some birds collected in the postcontact era, such as the Lanaʻi Hookbill, are known only from a single specimen, but aren’t known to have occurred in the fossil record, although they’ve presumably existed for thousands or

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millions of years. We know we have missed much, and a great deal more remains to be discovered under our feet.31 The outspoken Olson was a legend at the Smithsonian. He responded in his unique fashion to misbehaviors by Larry Small, the highly controversial secretary of the institution between 2000 and 2007. Small had tried to close the Smithsonian’s Conservation and Research Center in Virginia—a very unpopular move. He was also convicted of violating federal bird protection laws by dint of owning a personal collection of Amazonian tribal artifacts including at least 219 items containing feathers of protected bird species. Small was sentenced to two years’ probation and ordered to make a public apology in newspapers and the National Geographic magazine. (All of the publications declined to publish his apology, a Smithsonian spokesperson noted.) Olson responded to these shenanigans by having hundreds of little paper stickers printed up that said “dump small.” He gave out “batches to co-conspirators against Small and we stuck them all over the Institution,” Storrs told me. “I myself put one on the bumper of the Director of the Air and Space Museum, a loyal military man, and apparently this caused a great furore at the Museum as perhaps the Director thought some of his staff may have been involved.” According to Pamela Henson, the Smithsonian’s Institutional Historian, Small was apparently furious. But as a renowned scientist and a credit to the Smithsonian’s scientific reputation, Olson was difficult to touch, and Small knew it.32 Olson also never hesitated to reach for colorful descriptors of colleagues with whom he disagreed. “I think my contribution is superior in every way to the pathetic bathos of puerile, pseudonymous drivel” penned by an anonymous author writing in Systematic Zoology, Olson wrote the managing editor of that magazine in 1979, upon the rejection of a contested article of his—a very rare occurrence indeed. In what is perhaps the ultimate dismissive response to a rejected submission, he continued, “It occurs to me that perhaps in the years ahead it will reflect well on my judgment never to have contributed to Systematic Zoology and I appreciate your offering me the opportunity to keep my reputation intact.” No man is an island, and one of Olson’s best friends was Alan Ziegler, a vertebrate zoologist at the Bishop Museum. The two men shared a love of

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fossil birds, and Ziegler bequeathed to Olson a bird bone the latter was especially fond of—a large, heavy tibia from a cassowary, polished from long use scraping plants. Ziegler—endlessly curious about the island’s natural history, and the author of the single most authoritative text on the natural history of the islands—is due his own biographical treatment, for his work has influenced several generations of naturalists in Hawaiʻi. His family legacy continues, as his daughter Marjorie, who is the executive director of the Conservation Council for Hawaiʻi, plays an important role in conservation matters in the islands. “My dad was a southern gentleman, a brilliant scientist, and an eccentric and fierce environmental advocate,” Marjorie told me. “Bones were his thing, and in the Hawaiian Islands, that means birds and fishes. He loved the fascinating ‘fossil’ bird discoveries of Hawaiʻi and working with Storrs Olson and Helen James. When I was growing up, I’d visit his office at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California Berkeley, and later, at the Vertebrate Zoology Department at the Bishop Museum. I can still see the shelves of bottled specimens, smell the stuffed specimens in museum cases, and remember ‘things’ drying in the sun, boiling on the stove (eaten whenever possible), and stored in the freezer (clearly marked ‘Not for Consumption’).”33

Alan Ziegler in his Bishop Museum office, June 1983 (Photo courtesy of Carla H. Kishinami)

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In 1991, after years of hard labor in the islands—and, we hope, a few fruity alcoholic beverages—Olson and James published an extraordinary two-part account of thirty-two new species of birds unearthed from the fossil record in Hawaiʻi—stunning news about an island chain that had previously been considered to have very few fossils of any kind. One paleontologist noted that it “surely ranks as one of the most outstanding studies of avian biological archaeology ever undertaken.” At the time they published their monumental work, Olson and James had actually discovered a total of about fifty-five new species of birds in the islands, but they had enough distinct material to publish only thirty-two coherent identifications. Some of these proved interesting indeed, such as Corvus impluviatus, so named because it had been found underwater in 1977; “impluvium” is Latin for a basin in an atrium floor that receives rainwater. The nearly complete skeleton had been found in a flooded cavern at Barber’s Point on Oʻahu. It was this publication that, in one rush, transformed our understanding of just what had been lost in the prehistoric era at the hands of humans in Hawaiʻi.34 Storrs also has at least six species of prehistoric bird species named after him, including the Huahine Rail, which bears the scientific name Gallirallus storrsolsoni, along with a living species of crab and even a genus and species of fish, Storria olsoni.35 His strong opinions about accepted dogma have made it into print in other ways. In an open letter Olson wrote to National Geographic in November 1999, he called the theory that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs “the paleontological equivalent of cold fusion.” He noted, “The idea of feathered dinosaurs and the theropod origin of birds is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith. Truth and careful scientific weighing of evidence have been among the first casualties in their program, which is now fast becoming one of the grander scientific hoaxes of our age.” One of the unfortunate consequences of Olson’s public rejection of the dinosaur-origin-of-birds theory is that it has been widely co-opted by creationist groups which would like to use it to weaken the foundational aspects of evolution. Nothing plays better in the creationist press than

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scientists bickering about what the public sees as established and sometimes dogmatic scientific beliefs about aspects of evolution, and Storrs’s letter was promptly co-opted by many dozens of creationist websites.36 Storrs did not work alone in the Hawaiian Islands during his decades there. His colleague, and later wife and, ultimately, ex-wife, Helen James, graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1977 after studying archaeology and biological anthropology. “When I first started doing this work, I actually had not set out to become an ornithologist,” she told me. She began volunteering at the Smithsonian during college, in the Paleobiology department, where she met Storrs. Storrs and Helen started going out to the Hawaiian Islands around the same time—he in 1976, the year they first met, working under the supervision of Smithsonian secretary Sidney Dillon Ripley II, himself an ornithologist, and she in 1977. They married in 1981, and did fieldwork in the islands for more than two decades. They were pioneers. “We would find, on average, three new species a year out there,” she told me, and at the same time they were developing new fossil sites on different islands. “You would find this bit of a species here, and that bit of it over there, and then you would find something related to it, and another bit of it would turn up on another island,” she noted. She described it as “a great big puzzle,” and it took some years before they were able to publish the results of their work in detail. Beyond working in the field, they also spent six weeks visiting European and U.S. museums for comparative osteological purposes. They had hoped to find evidence of some of these birds in existing collections, but it quickly became apparent that the birds they were finding in Hawaiʻi had all disappeared before any ornithological collectors arrived from other lands. I think it’s safe to say that their astuteness, natural abilities, familiarity with the context of the work, and their sheer cussed determination have made their work on the diversity of avian life in precontact Hawaiʻi one of the great landmarks in systematic ornithology of the past century.37 For this chapter, I had initially hoped to identify a species that had definitely gone extinct before humans arrived. That, however, proved almost impossible, because the fossil record is stingy about these kinds of details. As Storrs noted in an interview, “We have no evidence, virtually no evidence, of

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prehuman extinctions.” But Helen did mention the bone of a small songbird she had found in the Pleistocene lake beds at Ulupau Head on Oʻahu, which might’ve qualified. However, “It’s very hard to find a bird that you can definitively say became extinct prehistorically,” Helen told me. I told her I’d find it very appealing to write about her little songbird. “That would be a lot of writing about something that consists of just one little maxilla!” she laughed. The one-bone bird, as it were. In fact, that one bone was almost lost. Helen had been accompanied by Julian Hume—an artist who wanted to become (and since has become) an avian paleontologist. As they walked along a steep site where water had cut through ancient silt layers to reveal many bird bones, Julian came up the beach and said, “Helen! I’ve found . . .” She turned abruptly, rock hammer in hand, and fell into him, knocking the fossil out of his hands. They scrambled around and found the bone, which had been broken in two. It remains the only known bone of that species—evidence both of the rarity of some fossil birds in the records kept by the earth, and of the uncanny ability of paleontologists to identify a whole from smaller parts.38

Helen James exploring a cave on Maui (Photo courtesy of Carla H. Kishinami)

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So how does a paleontologist identify a bird from one bone? This is something other paleontologists have successfully done for a long time— Georges Cuvier used it as a kind of parlor trick to amaze an audience—but it is an essentially useful thing. It’s all about comparative anatomy. The ability to work with large bone and fossil collections across institutional specimen holdings allows researchers to compare newly unearthed bones and skeletons with named ones, to reach conclusions about their relationships with allied species, and to determine whether or not something is new to science. Because Hawaiian birds evolved in isolation, but also simply because of how evolution works, bones are often extremely specialized. As a result, their structure and morphology can be unique—depending on the body part. Some seabirds, for instance, can be readily identified by their toe bones. The beaks of those species might cause more trouble, but the beaks of Hawaiian honeycreepers might be very clearly differentiated. “It just depends on the group,” Helen told me. “And you have to do the work.” It’s really by the process of exclusion that something is determined to be a new species.39 A great deal of paleontology fieldwork is tedious, endless, and sometimes thrilling work. Field labors can be rough. “It’s not exactly your typical day at the beach,” Helen remarked about time spent on the aforementioned dunes. “You’re not really near the water; you’re only on dunes that are inland. It can be very windy and very hot; you’re trying to keep sand out of your eyes and face; and you’re trying to keep an excavation going in very loose material.” The wind sometimes was so strong, she noted, that she and her co-workers would have to hold the mesh screens they were using to sift sand to find bones almost vertically. You also have to be in the right place, sometimes at the right time; extremely promising sites get destroyed or damaged by natural events, or by human ones, including being located on bombing ranges in the islands. “You also have to have the right collection for comparing field specimens with,” Helen noted, because you want to have some confidence in knowing that something is new, or not new, as well as in knowing just what it is and where it fits into evolution’s tangled skein. Their time working in the islands was nothing short of remarkable, both scientifically and personally. “We have enjoyed what you might call an

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age of discoveries in the Hawaiian Islands,” James remarked in one interview. “We began making annual field trips to look for fossil or subfossil material, and we began looking in ancient sand dunes, where material could be rapidly buried and preserved and later reexposed. We looked in lava tubes—the islands are of volcanic origin—and lava flows leave behind empty tubes or caves, which, if they have an opening to the surface, can trap animals.” This was the downfall of the Stumbling Moa-nalo. “These bones are preserved from sunlight and other destructive processes, and can be preserved for a long time.” And in those different locales and contexts the duo began to find dozens of extinct species of birds. It was slow work. “This was a process that took place over a period of fifteen years, so we slowly pieced the puzzle together to figure out what had happened.”40 Olson and James’ work revealed a dramatic ecological collapse in the Hawaiian Islands that had not been previously recognized. It also necessarily has involved intersection with other experts: specialists in genetics, paleobotany, archaeologists, and others. “One of the things I enjoy most is field expeditions with people who have other specialties in addition to my own,” James observed. “Of course, my own specialty is very narrow; I know about fossils of birds, bones of birds, and how to interpret them—but our work is very multidisciplinary . . . So it’s always very rewarding to have inputs from these different specialties, when we’re all interested in answering the same types of questions.”41 In the course of their work, it also became clearer just how prehistoric bird remains could come to exist without the usual stratigraphic layering that preserves material in the fossil record. Sometimes sand dunes could bury material, and sometimes sand could be cemented into a kind of rock called eolianite, which protects long-dead plants and animals. Animal remains could also end up in pond deposits and lava tubes. They’ve shown up in middens, as previously described, placed by humans and then covered up. But birds would also enter “fly-in” caves accessible only to flighted birds, get disoriented in the darkness, and be unable to get back out. And sediment accumulation could occur over thousands of years, as in a raised limestone reef on Oʻahu that contains sinkholes in which sediment has accumulated, and in a rare Pleistocene lake deposit on the Kaneohe Marine

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Corps Air Station. “We had to arrange a cease-fire to get out to the site, but it’s a very good site,” Storrs noted about their time fossilizing at the lake deposit.42 How did the moa-nalo come to lack the ability to fly? It’s a radical change. For a bird, being unable to get off the ground is usually a big disadvantage. Escaping predators becomes much more difficult. In areas with cold winters, a bird wouldn’t be able to fly to warmer climates, as migrating birds do. But in Hawaiʻi, there were no harsh winters. The founding population most likely flew to the islands originally but became flightless, or nonvolant, over time. One problem confronting evolutionary biologists in Hawaiʻi had been the fact that none of the islands were old enough to have supported this kind of dramatic evolutionary change. Selective pressures must’ve led the bird to evolve flightlessness, the reasoning went, because it didn’t need to escape from predators, and had an ample food supply on Maui Nui, the large region that now consists of four separate islands. But how could the wing structures of the birds have evolved so dramatically in such a relatively short period of time? In 1970, Storrs Olson found the critical clue—not while studying Hawaiian birds, but as a graduate student examining an extinct flightless rail on geologically young Ascension Island. In a flash of insight, he realized that the adult bird wasn’t flightless because it had evolved a new wing structure—it was flightless because its pectoral region—an essential function for flight—had simply remained in the juvenile stage. Rather than an entire suite of adaptations taking place, just a single mutation occurred to render the bird flightless. Storrs has always connected with his subjects, and as he noted about the tiny Ascension Rail after returning to the Smithsonian to work over its bones, “I cannot help but feel an infinite respect for this little bird. At some time in the past its ancestors crossed more than a thousand miles of open ocean to land on one of earth’s harshest landscapes. In a new and hostile environment, it quickly adapted and for a while survived. But now what was once a tribute to the tenacity of life must be reckoned as one more memorial to the destructive thoughtlessness of man.”43 This phenomenon of adult members of a species retaining juvenile characteristics, known as neoteny, has been long recognized as a fact by

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evolutionary biologists. As Alan Ziegler explains in his wonderful 2002 book Hawaiian Natural History, Ecology, and Evolution, the flightlessness would’ve probably occurred when “a mutation resulting in the failure of the entire pectoral region to mature properly appeared in a young rail—or perhaps was inherited by an entire brood through mutated ovarian cells of the female parent.” Flightlessness evolved not because it was a necessity for survival, but because flight wasn’t necessary for survival.44 So what of the humans, and their arrival in Hawaiʻi Nei? One of the most evocative of the necessarily speculative, but solidly supported, descriptions of the preparation and departure of Polynesians going to the Hawaiian archipelago for the first time is Patrick Kirch’s telling in his 2012 book A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief. As he recounts, various factors propelled Polynesian peoples out of their western Polynesian homeland, known as Hawaiki, as the first millennium AD ended. The reasons for their movement to the northeast were complex, but, suffice it to say, they travelled extensively across the Pacific.45 It might’ve been a bird that started the whole thing, the human settlement of the Hawaiian archipelago. Noticing that the bird later known to Hawaiians as the ko¯lea (Pluvialis fulva)—in English, the Pacific GoldenPlover—always took off to the north, and eager to explore new island universes, those on the first boats leaving the Marquesas (from which the original human colonists of Hawaiʻi came) followed the birds as they migrated north to Alaska and Siberia. Willing to take a risk that following the birds might lead to new lands, Polynesians moved north and west, to Hawaiʻi.46 Perhaps it would have been a different story if the birds they were following were not charismatic; a bird with negative associations would have been an evil omen, not a good one. People need their leaders to stand out, and the plover’s striking appearance would’ve aligned with spiritual and cultural notions of mana present in Polynesian culture. “The Golden Plover is an aristocrat among birds,” notes a 1959 book on the birds of Alaska. “Everything about it is distinctive. The jet black breast and belly, the golden yellow back and striking head markings of the breeding plumage would in themselves be enough to set it apart in any assemblage of its relatives.”47

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In any case, the ko¯lea was probably the impetus for the starting direction of the great vaka moana—the big open-water double-hulled canoes the Polynesians had invented long before they were conceived of by Europeans. Looking for ways to raise themselves to higher political and cultural status by commanding new lands, the Polynesians made extensive plans to do so. Once under way, the canoes and their crews of perhaps forty people—likely all adults, both men and women, outfitted with carefully prepared supplies for the new lands they hoped to find—would have been under the leadership of exceptional Polynesian navigators. Their ability to move across ocean waters was extraordinary, making use of not only the flight of birds, but the stars, ocean currents’ movement, and patterns of wave, wind, and weather. These navigation techniques were passed along through oral traditions from experienced guilds of navigators to apprentices, often through song. Naturally, stars were an essential tool: their rising and setting on the horizon, their motions and positions, and other markers. A clarification of terminology is useful here: “endemic” is meant by biologists and ecologists to mean a living thing that is exclusively native to the biota of a specific place. The Hawaiian honeycreepers, which evolved in isolation and are found nowhere else, are a classic example of endemism. “Indigenous” refers to a living thing that can be found both in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere, arriving through its own agency but also going elsewhere. Examples include the Green Sea Turtle (Chelonia mydas), which can be found around the world but which has a distinct Hawaiian population, or the migratory ko¯lea, found worldwide—or Newell’s Shearwater (Puffinus newelli), known to forage up to 1,300 km from Hawaiʻi during breeding season, loosely sprawling across much of the Pacific. The earliest vertebrate nonhuman inhabitants of the islands arrived with humans, stowed away in the sloshing bottom of a canoe: rats, chickens, pigs, dogs, jungle fowl, and lizards. Humans also brought snails and dozens of new plants. But these aren’t really considered natives, or endemics, or indigenous—because they didn’t arrive under their own power. The same goes for the approximately thirty-two plants the Polynesians introduced. So to return to a key question of this book: when is a native not a native? One confounding aspect of determining just what constitutes an introduced

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versus a so-called native species relates to short-term evolutionary change. If the term “native” means a species that has not been introduced by humans, either accidentally or intentionally, does it also apply to subspecies that have evolved from other species in relatively short periods of time—or which have somehow otherwise genetically differentiated themselves from a mainland population? Plants and animals introduced by the Polynesians have now been established in Hawaiʻi for a thousand years, and have evolved. Even short-term evolution of some species introduced to the islands in the nineteenth century has occurred, as we’ll see in Chapter Four. This fact has enormous implications for our cultural and scientific understanding of introduced species.48 Native peoples’ culpability in extinctions consisted not just of their taste for big flightless birds. It was also manifested in their introduction of the Polynesian rat, which probably arrived as cargo with the first settlers. Perhaps their arrival was accidental, but maybe not. “[They] were probably [brought] as deliberate cargo as the rats would later be eaten,” Olson told me. The little rodent had a profound impact on not just Hawaiian forest birds, but all bird life in Hawaiʻi, and has continued to greatly impact the flora and fauna. It’s been proven beyond a doubt that the rats’ impact on the lowlands of Hawaiʻi was devastating. As one scholar argues, “The main source of destruction of the native forests was the introduced Polynesian rat, Rattus exulans.” Pat Kirch, the dean of Hawaiian archaeology, noted, “It is a sobering thought that the delicate and vulnerable Hawaiian lowland forests may have been subject to a tidal wave of exploding rat populations, hundreds of thousands of little jaws munching away at the defenseless vegetation.”49 At least one other key factor influenced the land, and thus the bird habitat, shortly after the arrival of Hawaiians: the clearing of land, typically using fire, as the primary tool for removing vegetation to plant crops and gardens. These systems of land clearing removed native tree cover. This was not exactly precision work; fire can get out of control very easily, especially during droughts or in windy conditions. As environmental historian John McNeill dryly remarked, “The areas burned bore little relation to the actual needs of agriculture.”50

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All in all, though, the Polynesian rat may well have been the single most dramatic cause of the extinction of lowland birds—maybe more than all other sources combined, including land clearing, agriculture, ceremonial uses of feathers, or any other human activities. None of the island groups reached by the Polynesians escaped being populated by this little brown rodent. Native Hawaiians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were certainly not fans of the creature. They named it ʻIole, and their view of it is reflected in the phrase ho¯ʻiole, which means “to steal, cheat, or lie in wait in order to assail.”51 An abundance of rat bones from sinkholes that can be reliably carbon-dated also shows that the rats had a relatively high population density. They would have had ridiculously easy access to food in the forests, as they could outperform most birds in terms of opening seedpods; climb almost anywhere, and generally exploit ecological niches in a variety of ways. They could also breed like—well, like rats; they were capable of having four to six litters, for an average of four young per year, and consequently their population would have exploded, growing exponentially. “In just a decade or two,” notes one group of scientists, “rats could have densely covered an entire island like Oʻahu up to their elevation maximum.” In fact, it’s possible they had consumed all of the native lowland forests in Hawaiʻi within fifty years.52 How do we know this with any confidence? It’s because of the modern intersection of three things. The first has been the use of paleoenvironmental coring research, which lets scientists drill down to examine samples of pollen and microscopic charcoal particles. This has revealed some surprising information: Hawaiʻi’s lowland vegetation before human habitation had been very different than that noted in historical accounts by naturalists on the first Pacific exploration voyages. These coring techniques also revealed key information about early human activities on the islands. For decades, it had been assumed that lowland forests in the islands were cleared by humans using slash-and-burn agricultural techniques to convert the land for agricultural purposes. But the pollen particles showed virtually no charcoal in key locations. They also showed the abrupt and complete disappearance of plant species in the lowland forests. The evidence also

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revealed a startling fact: substantial areas of the islands were transformed before humans had settled those particular areas—in other words, rats in particular had spread across the islands much more quickly than had humans in the earliest years after arrival. It’s also reflected in the paleontological record, where extinction events occurred with every establishment of humans on each island. Despite the rats’ rapid work, other changes to the islands’ flora took much longer. Some of the transformation was much more gradual and greatly influenced by incremental increases in forest clearing for agriculture. Hawaiians, as we’ll see, were excellent managers of sustainable agricultural land. But the Polynesian rat continued to be an enthusiastic consumer of Hawaiian crops well into the second half of the twentieth century—in particular, sugarcane, which was grown commercially on plantations in Hawaiʻi between 1835 and 2016, when the last plantation was phased out on Maui. With a half-million acres under production by 1966—the peak year of sugar production in Hawaiʻi—the rats feasted on cane, with a density as high as thirty rats per acre. The costly damage they caused led to considerable study of the problem. Was the sweet cane juice a luxury, consumed because rats were eating other things in the cane fields, or was it a necessity for their survival—and thus much more difficult to eradicate? Analysis of both wild and captive rats’ feeding patterns showed that although fully two-thirds of their diets consisted of sugarcane, it was a supplemental tasty treat rather than a staple of their diet—what one scientist called a “luxury consumption.” In any case, the rats have had a long and tangled history with the islands, starting with their arrival a thousand years ago.53

Is there an impetus, in some “natural” set of biological systems not involving humans, for life to diversify and flourish, or to diminish and decay? Both scenarios are true. Biological diversity has been increasing from at least 3.5 billion years ago at the microbial level, and plants and animals began to diversify on land about 450 million years ago. Life is persistent,

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and being persistent means adapting. But the fossil record shows that this diversification has not been continuous, and we know that a species goes extinct every million years or so—across a million species, that means one species a year goes extinct from nonhuman causes. We also know that only one in a thousand species has survived since life began—in part due to the five great extinction events that have preceded our own ongoing extinction crisis here in the Anthropocene. So the great majority of species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. It’s all about tempo. If the background rate of extinction is like the flame of a burner that glows relatively steadily but flickers a bit, human-caused extinction is like a roaring forest fire: run for your lives! The ultimate consequences of the fire are uncertain, but we know that, in the short run, it’s devastating. Does this mean we shouldn’t fight against extinction? Absolutely not. The battle is now joined worldwide to save as many species as possible, with an increasing emphasis on preserving noncharismatic species like insects, as well as continuing to save more visible taxa like birds, reptiles, and mammals.54 It’s not just birds that disappeared in droves prehistorically. “The herbivores are all gone, the native predators are gone, in Hawaii almost all of the granivores are gone, and you may have lost important pollinators,” James told me. Extinction changes things. Each disappeared species had relations with others. Those others, lacking the old attachments, will either die out or will adapt to its new circumstances. As Beverly and Stephen Stearns have noted, “The chain of reactions continues to alter the structure of the natural world.” Storrs described the problem of island extinction in starker terms: when you consider both prehistoric and historic extinctions, “we are faced with one of the swiftest and most profound biological catastrophes in the history of the earth.”55 Stone-age Polynesians were responsible for the extinction of between 1,000 and 2,000 species of birds—about one-fifth of the world’s current count of species—on some forty-one islands in the Pacific. This is because of the insular nature of islands, the vulnerability of birds that evolved without major predators, the off-island species that accompany waves of human arrivals, and the short-term bird-related needs of humans for food, cultural and spiritual relations, and currency (in the form of feathers).

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It’s not so much a matter of blame as it is of belonging. Humans, the ultimate invasive species, felt they had a right to move to lands uninhabited by other humans.56 That was then, and this is now. But part of the problem with even acknowledging extinction is our stubborn present-mindedness about our existence, and that of others still here, even if they’re still threatened. We’re walking—or perhaps staggering—along a long arc of understanding towards a future we can’t understand, and we can’t really even recognize the warning signs as we pass them. “I know from experience that the belief in the continued existence of an extinct species dies very hard,” British ornithologist Alfred Newton remarked to R. C. L. Perkins, a collector who worked with birds and insects in Hawaiʻi. “People can’t understand why things cease to exist and therefore think that they go on.”57 “We haven’t learned nearly as much as we could from these extinctions,” Helen James noted. The drumbeat and pace of previous centuries were much slower, and still things blinked out. “The fact that so many extinctions occurred before the modern industrial era shows that relatively simple causes can have disastrous effects.”58 It’s also true that extinction isn’t a simple event with just one or two causes. There are many contributing factors, and identifying them in instances of ongoing or recently completed extinction events can be difficult or impossible. Imagine, then, how much more complex this would be with the fossil bird record, never having been able to observe the living bird and its full range of behaviors, habitat, and interactions. It remains an enduring myth in Hawaiʻi that the “pristine” Hawaiian Islanders, in the era before European contact, were natural conservationists and lived in a state of equilibrium without any notable effect on the environment. Evidence of rapid species disappearances after Polynesian arrival has left that idea in tatters, and we now have an extensively documented story of dramatic ecological change in island environments more generally. One scientist has described the process as a “well-rehearsed sequence of human discovery, landscape modification, and biotic adjustment (or collapse) . . . repeated hundreds of times on the isolated landmasses of the world’s oceans.”59

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In ancient Hawaiʻi, conservationist taboos existed but affected the sea considerably more than they did the land—and the kapus, or taboos— brakes on behaviors of various kinds—often existed “to buttress the power of elite groups, and enforcement could lapse when convenient,” environmental historian John McNeill notes. “Their reverence for nature must not be confused with a conservation ethic. Under the pressure of population growth or the instructions of their rulers, islanders used the tools at hand to shape their environments and inevitably damaged parts of them in the process. They were human beings, not ecological angels.”60 But now is not then, and the adverse effects of Hawaiians upon the land doesn’t mean that ancient Hawaiians were not superb observers and users of their environment, and occupants who learned cause and effect from their surroundings. Many Hawaiians are close to the land today—very close culturally, and often physically, and they work diligently to remain so. It also seems obvious—even essential—that their ancestors had an extensive relationship with their environment, with a subtlety and a reach that are necessarily lost today, even among those who have made it their life’s work to understand the islands’ intertwined cultural and natural systems. Ancient Hawaiians must’ve been filled with dismay at the sight of their forests disappearing. Perhaps they understood its root causes; perhaps they blamed supernatural forces. But from the ahupuaʻa system of wedgeshaped land holdings running from the mountains to the sea that served as a water management and sustainability strategy, to modern sensibilities and conservation strategies involving native peoples, coherent and practical resource management has been central to the ways of life, work, and beliefs of legions of people in the islands. We can learn useful things about the Hawaiian case from the extensive studies of native North Americans—the heterogeneous Indian tribes that originally came from Asia tens of thousands of years ago, and which lived in intimate contact with the land for centuries. As Shepard Krech III notes about the origin stories and histories of native peoples on the North American continent, “People modeled relationships with sentient other-thanhuman beings on human relationships, and towards many acted with respect (culturally defined) and in expectation of reciprocity; or expressed

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kinship or alliance with them in narratives, songs, poems, parables, performances, rituals, and material objects.”61 One key to understanding the relationship of Hawaiians to birds in prehistoric times is to grasp the idea that, in some ways, humans a thousand years ago in Hawaiʻi were no different from humans anywhere else, islandbound or otherwise. Henry M. Brackenridge, travelling on the Missouri River two centuries ago, noted that people who viewed the Indians there as manifesting “primitive innocence and simplicity in what they call the state of nature” were mistaken. “They have amongst them their poor, their envious, their slanderers, their mean and crouching, their haughty and overbearing, their unfeeling and cruel, their weak and vulgar, their dissipated and wicked; and they have also, their brave and wise, their generous and magnanimous, their rich and hospitable, their pious and virtuous, their frank, kind, and affectionate, and in fact, all the diversity of characters that exists among the most refined people.” We might gain some insight from Krech’s analysis of the extent to which native North Americans have been ecologists or conservationists. Surely they confronted some of the same issues as Hawaiians before white contact: the role of unwittingly introduced species; the sustainability or destructiveness of their practices on the land; the role of fire in the landscape; and a host of other habitat-changing issues related to survival and life close to the earth.62 Other writers have championed the idea that natives can’t claim a moral high ground in environmental matters—most inflammatorily, Paul Martin, a palynologist and geochronologist who wrote in 1967—just as the U.S. government was positioning itself in Hawaiʻi to identify and protect the state’s native land birds—“that business of the noble savage, a child of nature, living in an unspoiled Garden of Eden until the ‘discovery’ of the New World by Europeans is apparently untrue, since the destruction of fauna, if not of habitat, was far greater before Columbus than at any time since.” Others like Krech, who wrote a polemical and complicated book, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, offered up a much more nuanced set of questions and understandings about what he described as “the fit between a noble image of American Indians and American Indian behavior.”63

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The unknowing introduction of species that dramatically transformed the islands’ ecosystems seems primarily like a bad but inevitable accident. Voyaging Polynesians were no doubt much more occupied with other matters, like finding a new home, and surviving in that home, than with a few rats leaping from their canoes upon arrival, and in any case they could not have anticipated the rodents’ effects. The fellow travelers more on their minds were probably the chickens as well as the pigs that came with them—and the pigs, especially, were a primary source of protein in the coming centuries, working their way into ritual and economic matters. The pigs alone, despite their foraging ways, probably had a relatively minor impact on the land in precontact Hawaiʻi. But the holes made by their hooves and their wallows, and the subsequent standing water ripe for mosquito larvae, provided an intersection for avian disaster: habitat for the mosquitoes introduced in the 1820s and the subsequent arrival of mosquito-borne avian pox and malaria were implicated in a major way in the extinction of Hawaiian forest birds as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Still more impactful, at least in the precontact era, was Hawaiians’ inability to sustain species of large flightless birds they ate. The moa-nalo’s disappearance may have been partially due to habitat loss, but killing them and eating them would not have helped the species’ chances of survival. At the same time, a very important distinction is necessary here: it seems certain that the societal, agricultural, cultural, and spiritual norms of the original human colonizers of Hawaiʻi Nei were vastly different from those that would follow in subsequent centuries, as the people assimilated more and more integrally with their new home. It’s more difficult to glean knowledge about earlier practices than about later ones, which were handed down by oral traditions from a more recent past. Despite several generations of clever anthropologists studying societal remains, the lack of a written record—petroglyphs not withstanding—makes it well-nigh impossible to sufficiently parse and understand shifts in attitudes about birdlife and nature in Hawaiʻi in the centuries between arrival and Western contact. The moa-nalo seem to have disappeared quite early in the course of the islands’ human habitation, and as societies grow and change, so too the conservation ethic of the Hawaiians likely changed, as populations

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increased, responses to drought became more sophisticated, and land use patterns became modified. It would have been fairly obvious what had been lost. Getting a comprehensive grasp on environmental attitudes and actions by precontact Hawaiians concerning the environment is difficult. Without a long dissertation on the subject, perhaps the most coherent way to understand Hawaiian ecological practice is through the lens of the ahupuaʻa—an ancient land subdivision system that helped to create a mode of property management and related aspects, including economic, social, agricultural, climatic, hydrologic, and geologic elements. Used on each populated island, the ahupuaʻa did not comprise a system of private property, but each slice of land did involve regulation by a high priest or king. More specifically, in the precontact era the ahupuaʻa served as a unit of tribute collection and conquest land redistribution, and then, under the monarchy after contact, served primarily as a unit of tax collection, at least in political and economic terms. Upon Western contact, the islands contained nearly a thousand ahupuaʻa, spread across all of the islands including Niʻihau and Kahoʻolawe, with more than 40 percent of them located on the Big Island. Maui and Oʻahu, in descending order, made up the bulk of the remainder. Each ahupuaʻa contained perhaps ninety households totaling about 500 people.64 Each piece of land was also subdivided down further for various uses. Ahupuaʻa were an ancient construct, dating to perhaps the fifteenth century, but maybe considerably earlier. They typically ran in narrow strips from high mountain ridges down to the ocean, usually (but not always) in wedges, and usually (but not always) following stream drainages or mountain ridges, because both served as convenient delineators to adjacent properties, as well as useful routes from lowlands to highlands and back again. Above all else, the ahupuaʻa were about community resources, from high to low: access to water and timber in the mountains, taro and sweet potato farming in the fertile midlands, crop farming in the lowlands, and fishing and gathering at the water’s edge, as well as shore-side salt sources. A key aspect of the ahupuaʻa was water: coming down the side of mountains to the sea, providing irrigation and life for animals and plants resident within each ahupuaʻa. Although there was no private ownership of

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property, use of the land by the makaʻainana (commoners) was stable. The overseers, or konohini, in charge of each of the ahupuaʻa paid regular labor taxes and annual taxes to the high chief, or aliʻi, of the island, and in the course of their oversight duties regulated the use of land, water, and ocean resources. The community was sustained and maintained via ma¯lamaʻa¯ina—a strong emotional and spiritual attachment and sense of stewardship of the land. I find it ironic that this deeply embedded system of ahupuaʻa—the essence of Hawaiian-ness—gets its name in part from an introduced species, and a highly impactful one at that—the pig: an “ahu” is an altar of stones, upon which was placed a carving of the head of a pig, or a “puaʻa.” These cairns topped by a pig’s head were a key part of the symbology of the ahupuaʻa, and they also provided practical evidence of boundaries between adjacent ahupuaʻa. They also served as rallying areas for tribute collection. Another practice that reveals much about traditional Hawaiian relations with birds is that of bird hunting for feathers. Traditional Hawaiian bird hunting, commonly called ka¯pili manu, has been written about in fragmented fashion over the past two centuries, and the historical record is inconclusive about many aspects of this important task. However, new details of the practice have come to light in the past several years—most significantly through the work of Noah Gomes, a graduate student at the University of Hawaiʻi. Noah’s master’s thesis provides an essential contribution to the analysis of this issue. He wrote the entire thing in Hawaiian, which renders it available to a much smaller audience. However, he followed it with a shorter, excellent piece of English-language scholarship in the topic. “Like you, I’m also interested in what role, if any, Hawaiians traditionally might have had in what we now call ‘conservation,’ ” Noah told me. But he learned that pragmatism then, as now, was the watchword. “From what I can tell, there are a lot of things that Hawaiians did in traditional bird catching that may have had positive impacts on the birds that they were hunting, but in each and every case (in my opinion at least), they didn’t do it because they were thinking of the welfare of the birds or of the ʻa¯ina [land]. Their actions were because they were thinking of their own welfare, and the birds just so happened to also benefit. In learning

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about the bird catchers in old Hawaiʻi, I have really come to appreciate that Hawaiians in the old days were very practical people, and that’s what drove so many of their actions.” More than any other physical aspect of being in the islands, life within these segments of land would have reinforced the necessity of closeness to the land in structured, organized ways as well as a sense of oneness with the natural world and an awareness of the limitations of the land. Perhaps this awareness grew over time, but perhaps extinction was simply an inevitability in their worldview, as it sometimes globally seems today. The clearing of land for farming would have removed suitable habitat for birds, and any taxon that was already small in numbers or very localized in distribution could have been put at risk from dramatic changes to the land, modification of the courses of water through the mountains, and other changes wrought by humans trying to survive and thrive. Another resource management tool for the ancient Hawaiians was the kapu system, the code of conduct and regulation encompassing religion, politics, gender roles, and other aspects of social and cultural life in the islands. It forbade certain actions, and sometimes even accidental ones, often under threat of immediate death. Many of the kapu related to elements such as relationships between women and men; these ʻai kapu prohibited women and men from eating together, usually necessitating two hearths, and disallowed women from eating most varieties of bananas, for instance, as well as coconuts, because both embodied gods. Other kapu codified and dictated resource and environmental matters. The term “kapu” has resonances of sacredness and veneration as well as restriction, and thus could be protective of natural resources. For instance, for half the year some fish, such as mackerel scad (o¯pelu), could be eaten while others, such as bonito (aku), were kapu; the conditions were then reversed for the other half of the year.65 Gomes also echoed what decades of archaeological and paleontological work have shown: “I think it’s obvious that—intentionally or not—the ancestors of the Hawaiians caused an ecological disaster here,” he observed. With extinction events, there would also have been a cascading effect on other resources. In the case of seabirds, their extinction (or their extirpation on specific islands) would have led to impacts on the food chain. Vanished

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seabirds would mean that marine ecosystems would be affected. As Storrs Olson has asked, “When surface predators that feed on millions, perhaps billions, of tons of squid and fish are removed from the marine ecosystem, what happens to the nitrogen cycle on the islands?” The effects would be dramatic. “We’re talking about major alterations of the entire ecosystem just by eliminating seabirds alone, even if you never cut a tree.” With the birds gone, the squid and fish would then become available to other predators, causing changes in those populations and in the populations of the predators who were able to exploit the newly-available food resource.66 But Olson also doesn’t buy Paul Ehrlich’s idea that the Earth is an airplane, and that each extinction is a pulling out of a rivet, and that eventually, with enough rivets missing, the plane will crash. “There’s no evidence for that,” he says. “All these birds were exterminated on these Polynesian islands, and the people went right along just fine. They had their taro and sweet potatoes and bananas, and the fact that the birds and the snails . . . went extinct makes very little difference.” He cautions, though, that getting rid of everything in your environment, as happened on Easter Island, isn’t conducive to survival. But, he says, “I think we need to look at it [extinction] in terms of some other set of values. If we are going to take over the Earth for human comfort, then we can manage with fewer species.” He also observed that we can’t be disingenuous about what extinction really means. “Maybe you’ll find a cure for cancer in some plant, but you’re probably not going to find it in a snail darter,” he noted. He thinks that enjoyment is a high virtue, and that enjoying nature is important—something that also applies to our aesthetics about extinct species. In a real sense, it’s an appreciation for what we’ve lost. He thinks that the world has to reconcile the views of people who care mostly about getting food to eat and don’t give a hoot about extinction; and those who care about extinction because they want to have an aesthetically pleasing world to live in. He thinks that most people, at least in Western society, have this latter view. The interests of humans of all stripes, and the messy aggregate of these interests, are usually not good for endangered living things with which they share an island. This is true whether they be people of Hawaiian or Asian extraction, mainland haoles of European extraction, Filipinos of

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Austronesian extraction, or any other mix of ethnicities—because none of us are a single race, really; what would that even mean, given our ancient bloodlines back to proto-humanity? We wandered, comingled, entered new environments, bred. Yes, everything on an island is from somewhere else. The “island” they share might not even be surrounded by water—it might be a section of Amazonian jungle, or a particular elevation at which only certain animals or plants are found. But people need to eat, be social beings, and survive, and maintaining habitat for those creatures isn’t always in our own best interests. “A culture or a country can have a wonderful conservation ethic, but do a really lousy job of conservation,” renowned University of Hawaiʻi ornithologist Sheila Conant told me. “Sometimes there isn’t the will to do the right thing—but I think that humans in precontact Hawaiʻi were probably like humans in a lot of other places. They thought things were so abundant that it would be unlikely that they would hunt or harvest them to the point that the populations wouldn’t survive, or would decline drastically.” She reminded me that “they were better than white people in the New World, or white people in the Pacific, by far—but they still did a lot of damage. Any culture does. Take the Maoris—they had thirteen species of Moa, and they were all gone before Europeans got there. They were huge, and they were extremely edible. You have to eat, you know.”67 People treat their lands poorly unless it is in the interests of their survival to do otherwise—and even then, they sometimes fail. It’s only with the luxury of hindsight, and the visible loss of needed things, that attitudes begin to change. Often, it’s too late, but sometimes, it’s not. You have to be able to be reflective as a society about what you’ve lost to change what it is you hope to become, or not become. And beyond being reflective, you need to make a coherent, sustainable plan. Species evolution—and its terminus, extinction—is a cascade. Conservation biologists have an evocative term—”extinction debt”—which refers to the future extinction of a species as a result of events or changes in the past. Like a man who’s survived a terrible car accident only to succumb to the cumulative effects of his injuries years later, the cause of death isn’t immediately obvious.

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The Faulkner quote that ends the first paragraph of this chapter is well known. But the character’s commentary later in the book is revealing: “The past is something like a promissory note with a trick clause in it which, as long as nothing goes wrong, can be manumitted in an orderly manner, but which fate or luck or chance, can foreclose on you without warning.” The earliest humans in Hawaiʻi simply happened to have impacted a place, as all humans do when they move about on the planet.68 Were the islands pristine the day before the canoes of voyaging Polynesians first arrived, bearing their payload of foreigners, their species from afar, their occupants’ needs and desires and their feelings—longing, anger, hope, fear, anxiety, sorrow, and joy—all of which would have had impacts on the land? Inasmuch as we understand that term “pristine” to mean “without humans,” yes, it was. But no longer. Humans everywhere prey on our natural world, because we want to survive, and to “thrive,” whatever we understand that to mean. We are a fact upon the land, as much as any other living thing, and we wrote our promissory note with its trick clause the moment our feet touched the first rock or beach of the land that we know as Hawaiʻi Nei.

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Counting Extinction ¯ ʻo¯ and Hawaiian Observing and Surveying the Kauaʻi ʻO Forest Bird Habitat

“I know from experience that the belief in the continued existence of an extinct species dies very hard—people can’t understand why things cease to exist and therefore think that they go on.” —Alfred Newton to R. C. L. Perkins, June 16, 1892

l o n g a f t e r b i r d s w e n t e x t i n c t in prehistoric times at the hands of Polynesian settlers who had no apparent understanding of their role in extinction, a dramatic new understanding emerged, as represented ¯ ʻo¯, through observation and documentation in this chapter by the Kauaʻi ʻO between 1966 and 1982. It also demonstrated the dramatic role the federal government could play in conservation matters in the islands. It was essential work, for it provided an enormous abundance of information previously unknown to science: the distribution, density, and presence or absence of birds in Hawaiʻi, especially forest birds; the identification of threats; and, possibly, clues to their future survival. The work done in this period was complex, for it involved the development of recovery plans and management solutions in the face of limited funding, conflicting agendas, and other complications. It also involved a lasting commitment to island conservation by The Nature Conservancy (TNC). These critical observations and data gathering transferred information from the scientists working in the islands in the 1960s and 1970s to people in a position to see to it that Hawaiʻi’s endangered forest birds, and other allied species, were protected. 52

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¯ ʻo¯, Moho braccatus, seemed to have gone extinct durThe Kauaʻi ʻO ing the twentieth century, and more than once. But its survival, and the details of its life history, were not documented until field biologist John Sincock came along. He had been working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife ¯ ʻo¯. It was a WednesService for four years on Kauaʻi before spotting the ʻO day—the 26th of May, 1971, around 9:50 in the morning, in the Alakaʻi Swamp. Sincock was out doing forest bird counts. Suddenly, he heard a ¯ ʻo¯. There, within fifteen feet of him, hair-raising sound: the call of an ʻO were a pair of the birds, flitting around in the lapalapa and ʻo¯hiʻa trees. They had last been heard in 1968 by Ian Atkinson, a University of Hawaiʻi grad student, who recorded one at the Koaie cabin area on a wet and windy day. Atkinson did not see the bird; in fact, none had been sighted since September 1963, and despite a few unconfirmed reports in recent years it was thought to be extinct. Sincock watched them for a half-hour with his binoculars. Beyond his field report to his boss at the Patuxent Wildlife Center in Maryland twelve days later, and an article in the Kauaʻi newspaper The Garden Isle in early June, no contemporary record exists of this encounter. For the first time, Sincock had left his camera behind; the batteries for his light meter were low. He returned to the site late in the afternoon, where he saw them again, feeding on ʻo¯hiʻa blossoms, foraging briefly in a Broussaisia umbel, and frequently scratching and grooming themselves. The birds were relatively small—about eight or nine inches long—the smallest of the family of the five birds (at least those known from the historical record) to which it belonged. Its diminutive nature was reflected in its ¯ ʻo¯ a¯ʻa¯, or dwarf ʻO ¯ ʻo¯. The other allied species—from Hawaiian name: ʻO the family Mohoidae—that had lived on other islands were all long extinct.1 Returning the next day in heavy rain, Sincock set up mist nets in an attempt to capture the birds, probably to take measurements and band them. The birds watched him with interest but had the sense not to fly into the nets, and frequently sounded their melodious call. Sincock made his next trip with his wife, Renate, on May 31, five days later—now loaded heavily with still cameras and 8-mm movie cameras— and again spotted the birds, this time in a heavy downpour. Renate took many still photos, in the process becoming, as the Kauaʻi newspaper noted

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a week later, “probably the first woman in history to photograph an ʻo¯ʻo¯.”2 These were the first photos ever taken of the bird. She also captured about five minutes of what John Sincock later described in a memo to his boss as “fairly good” film, and a couple of “fair” 35-mm color slides. In subsequent weeks and months, he returned to the area regularly, flown there each time by his friend and helicopter pilot Jack Harter. During one visit he climbed as close as he could get to the nest for photographs—about fifty feet off the ground, in the large ʻo¯hiʻa tree where the birds were nesting. “I touched the nest and felt young birds, picked one up and was able to determine that one more was in the nest,” he wrote.3 Perhaps knowing every observation was critical for the species’ future survival, and that the pair might well be the only ones left on the planet, he recorded every detail of their feeding, flight, and call activities, including the size of their nesting cavity, descriptions of the birds’ feathers and bills, and other details, including the plumage of the juveniles. He also found and ¯ ʻo¯ nest and sent it to his bosses at Patuxtook an apparently abandoned ʻO ent. He wasted no time in contacting local and national media, including National Geographic.4 Sincock had actually first encountered the bird several years earlier, less than a year into his tenure on Kauaʻi, probably on the afternoon of May 5, 1968, when he heard its call but was unable to see it. He noted in his memo to his boss in Maryland, “Heard a loud call, frequently repeated ‘took’ ‘took’ in the slopes leading to Koaie Valley which I believe was an OO—at least that is the way Munro describes the call of the OO and the call I heard could be described in no other way. Most often the call was a single, loud clear ‘took.’ ” He thought he probably heard the bird again the next month as well. So he would have remained attuned to the possibility of the bird’s existence, and by process of elimination alone he very likely correctly identified the call in 1968, by then having been very familiar with recordings of Hawaiian bird songs and calls, as well as having gleaned experience from many hours in the field.5 The birds appeared frequently during the early and mid-1970s, mostly in the Alakaʻi, and he took extensive photographs of them. Sincock, fellow federal biologist Mike Scott, and Fred Zeillemaker, the manager of

John Sincock in Alakaʻi Swamp with tape recorder, ca. 1970 (Scott Collection, Huntington Library)

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Kauaʻi’s National Wildlife Refuges, made extensive audio recordings throughout the summer of 1975, and at least once in the summer of 1976. Not only had a handful of the birds survived, but, based on courtship activities, they appeared to be attempting to breed. “We had fantastic looks ¯ ʻo¯ including a pair heavily engaged in courtship activities,” at several ʻO Mike Scott recounted to me.6 Several firsts took place in the next few years, including very important extensive documentation of the bird’s life history. “We were fortunate to be the first ever to see a young oo bird just out of the nest and photographed the adult feeding it,” Sincock wrote in 1973. Some of his details of the bird’s habits are potentially of great value, especially if the bird does, improbably, somehow survive today. The birds spent much of their time feeding throughout the valley, he wrote in a memo in 1974. “Frequently they land on the upper dead branches of Ohia trees, sit side by side, and give their melodious call. Calling starts at just about 6 AM and ends at about 7 PM; often calling slacks off from 11 to 3. They are far more active during the brief periods of 5 to 10 minutes of sunshine, and during the frequent periods of cloud cover and rain they are quiet and difficult to locate. Their beep-beep call, heard in previous years was not heard during this trip and must only be used during their active nesting.”7 The bird was down to a very small number of surviving examples by the mid-1970s. Sincock noted in the summer of 1975, “I fear that the population of oo may be even lower than my guess of possibly two dozen. This one location of 2 or maybe 3 oo is all that I can find.” Sincock would see the birds many times in subsequent years, but never more than two at a time; perhaps they were the same pair. The bird was last seen in 1985 and last heard in 1987. Hurricane Iniki, Hawaiʻi’s most damaging hurricane on record, devastated the entire island of Kauaʻi in 1992 and would most likely have decimated any surviving birds. After surviving for millions of years, the bird was gone.8 ¯ ʻo¯ has a long history in print, and was first described in 1855 by The ʻO ¯ ʻo¯ name as American ornithologist John Cassin, who quibbled about the ʻO the Hawaiians had rendered it: “Mr. [Titian] Peale . . . is quite confident that it is Oo, which we should pronounce simply as a double o. Mr. [Andrew]

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Bloxham . . . says that it is ‘Uho,’ while M. [René] Lesson appears to have derived his generic designation from the same native name, ‘Moho.’ ” Much was learned about the bird from historic accounts by these men, as well as ¯ ʻo¯ foraged on from Sincock’s observations. We know that the Kauaʻi ʻO trunks of live and dead trees, large and small branches and twigs, foliage, and epiphytic mats. The bright-red, brush-like flowers (which lack petals) of the ʻo¯hiʻa lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha), which is one of the few honey ¯ ʻo¯’s primary nectar source, as it has been plants native to Hawaiʻi, were the ʻO for several other forest birds. When it was more common in the lowlands earlier in the nineteenth century, it also apparently ate fruit quite readily. “Mr. Knudsen writes, that the Oo is a fine songster which in the districts, where bananas grow wild, feeds on the fruit, hollowing it out before it is ripe,” wrote Leonhard Stejneger in his 1887 article “Birds of Kauai Island.”9 The ʻo¯hiʻa accounted for about 88 percent of the Alakaʻi’s vegetative cover during Sincock’s first years on Kauaʻi, although it began a very rapid decline in the early 1970s. On well-drained sites healthy trees would reach between thirty and sixty feet in height. A key cause for the bird’s decline was probably directly related to the misfortunes of the ʻo¯hiʻa because of its ¯ ʻo¯’s primary food and habitat. In June 1975 Sincock would role as the ʻO note in a report that “it seemed that less than one out of a thousand Ohia trees had bloom; we discussed the desirability of periodic aerial surveys employing photography to document ohia bloom.” Sincock described one outing in the summer of 1977 to Halehaha Stream in the Alakaʻi Swamp: ¯ ʻu¯, Psittirostra psit“Up at dawn to check for the presence of oo or ou [ʻO tacea] but a grim silence hangs over the valley, broken only by the disturbing calls of about one dozen chinese thrush in the little valley normally occupied by the oo. . . . There is virtually no bloom to be seen for miles and I only hope the oos have moved temporarily looking for food.”10 This issue of ʻo¯hiʻa die-off in the islands continues today, and was not new in Sincock’s time, although the etiology was not well understood then. It was widely thought at the time that a contributing factor was something called shoestring root rot (Armillaria mellea), a root-destroying fungus first discovered attacking other forest trees in Hawaiʻi in 1962. It was subsequently found on ʻo¯hiʻa and koa trees the following year, and seemed to be

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the prime suspect for the dieback. However, after years of research, the disease hypothesis was abandoned, and physical stresses rather than biological factors were implicated. Dieback was triggered by drought, soil conditions, wind, and other environmental factors, in a process known as cohort senescence. However, ʻo¯hiʻa has been susceptible to a variety of diseases, includ¯ hiʻa wilt or, more ominously, Rapid ʻO ¯ hiʻa ing new ones in recent years. ʻO Death, as it’s also known—Ceratocystis wilt—was noticed in 2008 and first described in 2015. Although as of this writing it is present only on the Big Island, its spread is so rapid, and its mortality so certain, that it’s been described by a variety of scientists as not so much a tree disease as a house on fire.11 On Kauaʻi, the ʻo¯hiʻa dieback continued. In July 1978 Sincock saw an ¯ ʻo¯ that, for the first time, did not vocalize at all. “Dep[ar]t in helicopter at ʻO 9:45 for Halehaha in Alakai Swamp. Set up camp; and while doing so observe one oo—the first observation since last May. This turned out to be the only observation during my stay and unlike any other time that I saw the bird in the area there were no vocalizations.” In response to the die-off, Sincock raised money to make an aerial survey of the trees in the Alakaʻi. His work with the ʻo¯hiʻa also included collecting several hundred ʻo¯hiʻa inflorescences to determine the variation in the number of flowers. The photographic survey focused on the trees’ abundance and phenology. In the summer of 1978 he was able to report, based on 450 slides he took, that only 4.67 percent of the trees exhibited ʻo¯hiʻa blossoms. The rest of the results were grim. “Total estimated blossoms in this 20,500 acre universe of the Alakai Swamp was only 283,069; estimate only 48.53 acres of canopy with bloom,” he wrote to his boss on the mainland. That was not good for ¯ ʻo¯, nor for many other forest birds that had evolved over hundreds of the ʻO thousands of years to make extensive or exclusive use of the tree for nesting and feeding purposes. “Very little bloom on ohia trees, perhaps 1 tree in 100 bears some flowers,” he reported in 1978. Sincock’s disappointment about ¯ ʻo¯s was sometimes encapsulated in brief, almost elegiac the absence of ʻO notes in his memos. In October 1979, he noted simply, “Sept. 30, Sun: Flight to and from Alakai Swamp.”12

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The bird’s flickering perch on the precipice of extinction was well known, as Sincock talked frequently to colleagues about it in the first half of the 1970s. An expedition in early July 1975 to the headwaters of the Halehaha Stream, near what was known as “Sincock’s Bog,” was well documented in a 2008 article in the Wilson Bulletin. “We had a whole week,” Sheila Conant told me. The group was a trio of young scientists who would become three of Hawaiʻi’s leading ornithologists—Doug Pratt, Conant, and Rob Shallenberger—the first two with freshly minted PhDs and Rob just starting his doctoral research, but all relatively green at the time. They set up their camp and settled in. I spoke to all three about their experience ¯ ʻo¯ singing. It there. “I awoke the next morning because there was an ʻO was surreal,” said Conant. She spent time up in a tree observing a pair of the birds and watching them feed on ʻo¯hiʻa nectar. “I came to the conclusion that they were probably trap-lining. Birds typically have a line along which they travel to feed, and they take nectar from flowers at the different stops. And because time elapses before they get back to the same inflorescence, there’s been time for nectar to build up again.” She also noted that ¯ ʻo¯ were vigorous defenders of their feeding territory against ʻIʻiwi. the ʻO Conant recounted first contact. “The first morning when we woke up, ¯ ʻo¯. [It was] probably the biggest the first thing we heard was the [Kauaʻi] ʻO ¯ ʻo¯ sound is hard to describe. It has a hauntbird thrill I’ve ever had. The ʻO ing quality and there’s nothing else like it in Hawaiian forests.” Mike Scott, another leading ornithologist working in Hawaiʻi to document endangered birds on the Big Island, was not on the trip but had encountered the birds earlier that year while visiting Sincock to see the challenging terrain for himself and to discuss recovery strategies and sampling protocols. Mike described the sound to me. “It really raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I’d never heard anything like it in my life.” He described it as a magical moment but in retrospect, a highly sobering one. “Little did we know that in ¯ ʻo¯ would be less than a decade there would be only a single bird and the ʻO evolutionarily extinct,” he observed; “gone, with no heroic effort like the one launched in 1980 to save the California condor.” Shallenberger, a professional biologist and photographer who worked most of his career in Hawaiʻi as a refuge manager and as the Hawaiʻi Island conservation director for The

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Nature Conservancy, also recounted to me his recollections of the trip—his first and last to the Alakaʻi. “I was blown away the first time I heard the bird—from inside my tent. I was even more thrilled to hear the birds’ duet while my recorder was running. Most of my time on that trip was spent in the tree limbs where I could shoot photos from the same or greater height than the birds.” During the week the group saw numerous Ka¯maʻo and ¯ ʻu¯, both now extinct, but only Conant also got a glimpse of another nowʻO disappeared bird, the Kauaʻi Nukupuʻu (Hemignathus lucidus hanapepe).13 The week was a thrill to all three, though Doug Pratt took a more relaxed approach even as he had spent a lifetime leading up to that moment. Doug is one of the world’s leading experts in the identification of the birds of the tropical Pacific, and the author of a seminal work on the Hawaiian honeycreepers. In the fine tradition of the artist/naturalist, he is also well known as one of the best twentieth-century illustrators of Hawaiian birds. “You have to understand that for me, the Kauai Oo had been the Holy Grail of birds ever since I first became aware of it through Peterson’s 1961 western field guide (I was still in high school at the time),” he told me. “Before that, I had become interested in Hawaii generally (not sure why; maybe [it] had something to do with my being one of the Charlotte Boys’ Choir’s ‘ukulele boys’ when I was younger) as one of those truly exotic places that I eventually wanted to visit. Peterson’s new guide was the first book to announce the rediscovery of all of Kauai’s supposedly extinct birds by the Richardson and Bowles expedition [of 1960, but not published until 1964]. I vowed right then that I would eventually go there and see those birds.” It took him a decade, but eventually he made it. “So you see this was not just another research trip for me; it was a lifelong goal,” he noted. He told me he had always wondered how he might react if he ever encountered ¯ ʻo¯, and as it turned out he was as mellow as Hawaiian honey. the Kauaʻi ʻO He didn’t leap out of his tent like the others. It was still very dark, and he ¯ ʻo¯. “Rather than was awakened, as were the others, by the song of a single ʻO jumping up and chasing around in the dark, I just asked Rob and Sheila if they had heard it (they had), to make sure I didn’t dream it, and went back to a very contented sleep.” As they later prepared breakfast after dawn, they heard the bird again, very close by. It shortly came right into their camp,

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perched low in the understory, and sang loudly, affording them all close looks at the bird.14 Pratt and Shallenberger took hundreds of photos and made sound recordings, and some of Rob’s recordings of the Ka¯maʻo, which they also saw and heard during their time there, are perhaps the best ones ever made of the bird. But both later wished for better results. “I will always regret the fact that my images are not as sharp as I had hoped,” Rob told me. “Of course, I was shooting (and pushing) high-speed Ektachrome through a $50 400-mm lens. What I would give to have that opportunity again with quality equipment!”15 This extensive observation and documentation in 1975 provided priceless information. The bird was seen again in 1981 and 1985, and then heard and recorded, but not seen, in 1987, by naturalist David Boynton, in a faint but distinct recording. That last record seems to be the final evidence of the bird’s existence. John Sincock was a careful, analytical, and often dispassionate biologist—at least in his memos to his bosses at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. But he also had a great sense of humor that remained mostly intact despite the often miserably wet and rugged conditions he encountered almost daily during his thirteen years as a field biologist on Kauaʻi. He has been universally described by his friends and colleagues as an exceptional person. “The phrase that always comes to mind, for most of us when we talk about him, is ‘cowboy biologist,’ ” Conant told me. He sounds, from every account, like the quintessential tough guy. Mike Scott described him as “a bulldog in the field under even the toughest possible conditions.” In one 1969 memo, Sincock described coming nose to snout with a wild hog as he crawled through dense underbrush. “Apparently soaking wet and with a week’s beard I was uglier than he was, for he took off,” he wrote his boss. The handsome Sincock “would jump out of helicopters; he’d camp in bad weather with bad gear, and not mind; he always had his bottle of brandy on his camping trips; and he typically had his shirt unbuttoned to his waist,” Conant recounted. Scott noted that Sincock almost always had an ivory gull pendant hanging from his neck. Once, trying to work his way up the terrain south of Lihue, Sincock was so beleaguered and frustrated by the dense

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undergrowth of lantana, guava, and wiliwili plants that he simply set down his ninety-pound pack, climbed down a steep cliff, jumped into the Huleʻia River, and swam back to Lihue. A helicopter ride was necessary to retrieve his gear. Sincock was good at lots of things—he also had a pilot’s license and about 600 hours of flight time in land aircraft and seaplanes, as well as extensive scuba experience.16 Bruce Benson, a science writer for the Honolulu Advertiser for more than a decade, spent considerable time with Sincock in the islands for a piece he wrote about the field biologist’s time in the Alakaʻi. He also produced a half-hour documentary, “Beyond Honolulu,” about wildlife in the Leeward Islands. John saw the documentary and asked Bruce if he would join him in the Alakaʻi to try to capture the bird on film. (I contacted Bruce, who responded that he still had the footage, which had never been aired ¯ ʻo¯, but that I was publicly, and probably showed less than a minute of the ʻO welcome to it. The reel of film proved to contain a full twenty-four minutes ¯ ʻo¯ and its habitat on Kauaʻi.) Although Bruce noted that he hadn’t of the ʻO known Sincock well, he described him as “an absolutely dedicated wildlife scientist. I remember him as thoughtful, considerate, more of a quiet guy than an extrovert, someone I was happy to hang out with.”17 The weather on Kauaʻi was especially challenging because of the incessant rain. “It was a cold, wet, miserable night in which the tent leaked through every pore,” Sincock reported about one outing in November 1967. The part of Kauaʻi where he worked is often described as the wettest spot on earth. Mount Waialeale, the focus of much of Sincock’s survey work, receives about 450 inches of rain annually, with rain falling between 335 and 360 days each year; the runoff spills down into the Alakaʻi Wilderness Preserve. The salutation for his report for February 24, 1969, began, “Biologist, Kauai—The wettest biologist on earth.” He continued, “Rain, rain rain—I thought I had seen it rain before . . . but!” He continued, “Only the more common forest birds were seen all week. I think the endangered ones drowned.”18 Beyond these comments, though, Sincock was not one to complain. “He was unfazed dealing with the discomforts of working and camping in the Alakaʻi,” Benson told me. “Slogging through the bogs was just another

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day at the office for him.” Conant echoed those thoughts. “He would just get out there and put up with it,” she told me. “You couldn’t really imagine him complaining about it [conditions in the field].” Doug Pratt recounted a story told by John’s wife, Renate, of his walking out of the Alakaʻi Swamp all the way back to his house in Koloa the week before the 1975 visit by Pratt, Conant, and Shallenberger because the weather was bad and he was tired of waiting for his helicopter transport. The trek would have been more than half the width of the entire island, with some terrible terrain along the way. “He’s probably one of the few men, certainly among haoles, who could have done that,” Pratt observed. In some ways, Sincock’s incredible fortitude and energy are reminiscent of those of British naturalist R. C. L. Perkins, who also subjected himself to grueling conditions routinely in nineteenth century Hawaiʻi. And although Perkins famously went barefoot much of the time while in the field—apparently to save money on boots, which got wrecked quickly by hiking over rough lava—Sincock went through three pairs of boots in nine months during one year, although his terrain was usually wet and slippery, with relatively little of the sharp aʻa that Perkins encountered.19 Sincock also got lost frequently due to the difficulties of the terrain. “I realized that being lost is one thing, but being lost with a 50 lb backpack where the choice of direction can lead you to an impassible [sic] pali [cliff ] is something else,” he observed. “Trail marking saflag [sic: flags] will be standard equipment henceforth. In most areas the maps were almost useless because of the dense vegetation and the non-distinctive lay of the land. Rain was constant during the week and fog not uncommon.” Sincock, armed with a machete, relied regularly on these tags, taken from a roll of colored ribbon, to find his way. But despite the weather and terrain, he saw, and reported on, a great deal of bird activity of both endemic and introduced species, recording every bird sighted and its location, no matter how common.20 John Lloyd Sincock was born January 9, 1928, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where he grew up and graduated from high school. He loved animals as a child, and after he was photographed in National Geographic ¯ ʻo¯, his mother noted in November 1977 for his work in Hawaiʻi with the ʻO

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in an interview in the local Uniontown paper that when he was a boy, she would occasionally find copperhead snakes that young John had placed in her bathtub. Sincock served as a radioman after World War II and married Isobel Lininger, a childhood sweetheart. He received both his undergraduate and master’s degrees from Penn State University, finishing in 1953 and publishing a thesis on the feeding habits of wild turkeys. He then went to work in Florida for the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission as the state waterfowl biologist, where—in typical Sincock fashion—he banded more than 7,000 waterfowl. In 1958 he went to work at the Fish and Wildlife center in Patuxent, Maryland, where he emerged as a candidate for the Hawaiʻi job.21 Overseeing Sincock’s work from Washington, DC, was Ray C. Erickson, a biologist in the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, and a member of the Committee on Rare and Endangered Wildlife Species. Erickson served as the assistant director of the Patuxent center during Sincock’s time in the islands. The Patuxent Wildlife Research Center was founded in 1936 as the first wildlife experiment station in the United States, and ever since has been a leading international research institute for wildlife and applied environmental research. Among their signal successes has been a Whooping Crane research and restoration program. Patuxent has had a long and productive relationship with endangered species and those who work to invigorate their populations. Virtually all of Sincock’s correspondence with Patuxent quoted in this book is addressed to Erickson, although he is almost never named in the paper trail. Erickson had been the person who had advocated for funding to rear the Whooping Crane in captivity. He ended up in charge of the Endangered Wildlife Research Program through most of Sincock’s time in the islands. In the early days following passage of the 1966 federal Endangered Species Preservation Act (ESPA)—the essential precursor to the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA)—Erickson received $350,000 in funding to support endangered wildlife research. That money was the key driver for the efforts that would follow in Hawaiʻi. Under Erickson’s leadership, four field biologists were assigned to Hawaiʻi. The first to arrive was Winston Banko, who was assigned a broad

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task: to work on the endangered birds of Hawaiʻi. Banko, whose son Paul has more recently been a formidable figure in our understanding of the Palila, arrived on Oʻahu in 1966, moving the next year to the Big Island of Hawaiʻi—much more productive territory for endemic birds. Sincock was assigned to Kauaʻi in 1967, still under the supervision of Patuxent but taking a cut in pay. In 1974 Mike Scott joined Banko on the island of Hawaiʻi, and in 1977 Cam Kepler was assigned to Maui. The four men, who communicated frequently with each other, had a broad mandate: to discover what Hawaiian birds still survived, and where, as well as to understand what efforts had preceded them in quantifying and understanding Hawaiian birds.22 John Sincock moved from Baltimore to Hawaiʻi in June 1967 with Isobel and their ten-year-old daughter, Cindy. He arrived in the islands just three months after the first list of endangered species was issued under the ESPA. The “Class of 1967,” as the members of this first list were called, included eighteen bird species found only in the Hawaiian archipelago— exactly half of the thirty-six birds on the entire U.S. list. Sincock’s official duties involved assuming responsibility for studying endangered species on Kauaʻi, where four of the birds on the list were known to exist. Of the four men, he had been assigned to the westernmost main island, so he was also tasked with surveying the Leeward Islands, which included four other birds on the list—the Laysan Duck, the Laysan Finch, the Nihoa Finch and the Nihoa Millerbird.23 Perhaps at least in part because of the long, isolating hours and the challenges of living in a remote island environment, Sincock and Isobel were divorced in 1969. Sincock married Renate in 1971, with the ceremony taking place in the Alakaʻi Swamp.24 Sincock was by no means the first westerner to study birds on Kauaʻi. A number of important naturalists visited there for months at a time to study birds, insects, plants, and other natural elements. The first was Norwegian-born Valdemar Knudsen, who moved there in 1856. He learned the Hawaiian language to get by in rural Kauaʻi, and was especially interested in plants and birds. As a collector and long-time resident, he caught Walter Rothschild’s eye. Responding to the great British collector, he noted,

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“I am not a Dr nor have I any title but simply Mr, tho’ I am a graduate of the University of Norway in Christiana. Here I have lived since a young man on my own plantation and ranch and take very much interest in Hawaiian birds and every thing Hawaiian.” He often hosted visits from other naturalists and those interested more generally in the island.25 Beyond the work of naturalists at the end of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, other important work preceded Sincock’s. Although the 1920s and 1930s represent the most under-studied or underreported era of bird research in Hawaiʻi—this period has often been described as a gap in the historical record—some primary sources can usefully illuminate these years. New Zealand collector George Munro kept a detailed field journal for his time on Kauaʻi between 1936 and 1940, noting very specific locales and birds sighted by number and density, habitat, and habit. The most extensive publication about Kauaʻi’s birds prior to Sincock’s arrival was certainly Frank Richardson and John Bowles’s A Survey of the Birds of Kauai, Hawaii, published in 1964 by the Bishop Museum, four years after the pair’s investigations on the Garden Isle in the summer of 1960.26 Along with his rugged individualism, Sincock brought twentiethcentury tools and sensibilities to the work. Besides being a workhorse, he was also a strong statistician and surveyor, and he had a good ear and eye. His official duties involved not only birds, but some plant collecting and pressing of specimens, and other botanical work. The one thing he resisted greatly was writing, preferring to be out in the field. He wrote endless reports, as well as draft manuscripts for potential publication, but published very little. He balked at the work. “Manuscript will require moderate revision—this manuscript writing and revision becomes as depressing as a rainy week in the Alakai Swamp—I’d still prefer the Alakai!” he noted when trying to polish off a co-authored manuscript on endemic passerines in Hawaiʻi. Kelvin Taketa, a Nature Conservancy legend in the islands, told me that Sincock was “a direct, straight-shoot[ing], consummate field biologist and not very interested in the politics of the USFWS [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] or any other bureaucracy, for that matter.” By 1977 Sincock was chafing at his job and made inquiries into a gig with the Office

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of Biological Survey in West Virginia. But he remained in the islands until 1984, when he retired and moved with Renate back to Pennsylvania. He died in Markleysburg in late 1991 of a heart attack, at the relatively young age of 63. “John shared with me several times that no male member of his family had lived to see his fiftieth birthday,” Mike Scott told me. “He was forty-six when I first met him, and I believe that the pace at which he did his work and lived his life was influenced by his belief that he had a limited time left.”27 For Sincock, living a full life meant being prone to regular accidents. In late May 1968 he tore a ligament in his left knee while in the field, and was on crutches for a month. This did not stop him from hobbling around and checking traps and, as usual, overdoing it; one day not long after the injury he walked about two miles along a dirt road, causing his knee to swell badly. At times he became violently ill, probably from his own cooking. Given the omnipresent mud and rain, he often slipped, once breaking his wristwatch, sometimes spread-eagling himself on the trail. He suffered other indignities, including temporary deafness from an ear infection after debris fell on ¯ ʻo¯. One Thanksgiving, a dog him while climbing a tree to photograph an ʻO tried to enter his house to attack his daughter’s dog. Running at full speed to intercept the mutt, he fell down four cement steps and broke a bone in his right foot, spending the rest of the holiday in the emergency room. A few years later he broke a toe demonstrating to his daughter the dangers of minibikes, and he regularly had accidents on his motorcycle.28 Sincock had other troubles with driving and vehicles. Once, after four sleepless nights owing to rough seas on a trip to the leeward Hawaiian Islands, he proceeded to fall asleep while driving home after a visit to his helicopter pilot in Lihue, crashing and totaling his truck. A Hawaiian court fined him $10 for “inattention to driving.” (Later that same week he gave a talk to the local Rotary group, and the judge who had fined him was among those in the audience.) “So ended the most unfortunate summer of my life,” he concluded in his 1969 report to his bosses in Maryland, referring no doubt as well to his divorce. He made plans to take a defensive driver training course on Oʻahu that year, although it’s unclear whether he actually followed through. It seems unlikely he would have gone to such trouble on

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his own, so perhaps it was a suggestion, or a mandate, from his bosses in Patuxent.29 Medical problems also cropped up. Sincock suffered intermittently from retinal edema, which left him with vision problems, as well as from carpal tunnel syndrome—perhaps from the endless hated reports he had to compose. He also endured many hours of cervical traction for compressed cervical vertebrae from unspecified causes—perhaps his ridiculously heavy pack played a role. “Have been fitted with a brace and collar to prevent the head-down position,” he noted when his neck problems recurred in 1974. “All I need is a dog license.” At one point he suffered from a persistent fungus on his right hand. More ominously, in 1972 Sincock was diagnosed with a metabolic disease—Type IV hyperlipoproteinemia—now understood to be a genetic defect that puts those with the gene at risk for various heart conditions, including coronary artery disease. It may have been this disorder that led to his death from cardiac arrest in his early sixties.30 Life in the wet environment of rural Kauaʻi was very hard on gear, and repair and maintenance facilities were not always affordable or within reach. For a while Sincock tied the passenger door of his government-issue truck shut with a length of rope to keep it from falling off its hinges, and he handpainted the vehicle with a brush when the estimate to have the job done professionally came in at $600. His truck frequently leaked oil, transmission fluid, and gasoline. The brakes and gearbox once failed simultaneously; after it was towed in for repairs, he discovered that the rear axle was also broken. A shed where he kept personal and government property caught fire in 1972, destroying his diving gear, a rubber boat, ten mist nets, and some camera gear, as he noted in a memo that year. He asked forgiveness for his bad typing, noting he had broken the tip of his little finger in some unspecified accident a week earlier.31 The specifics of place most certainly play a role in the specifics of belonging. Any area that qualifies as unique includes life that is well adapted to the region. Hawaiʻi is full of otherworldly places, and one of these is the Alakaʻi—often described as the Alakaʻi Swamp but officially known ¯ ʻo¯’s home turf—the area that as the Alakaʻi Wilderness Preserve, the ʻO was the intense focus of Sincock’s work. It occupies about 9,000 acres, or

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fourteen square miles, and is difficult to access, bounded on three sides by steep pali, or cliffs. Hawaiians climbed nearby Mt. Waialeale for worship purposes; a heiau—a stone temple—was found on one of the ridges leading to the plateau that constitutes the swamp, as well as at the summit. The only real access is from the southwestern side, as the terrain rolls downhill from Waialeale into the Waimea River basin. Even when it’s not raining, which is hardly ever, the Alakaʻi is truly rough going in places. Where the drainage is good—in about half of the swamp—the land is more open, and more passable. Where the drainage is poor, however, the growth is low, stunted, and entangled, making passage extremely difficult. Fallen logs are everywhere; vines and branches intertwine, and footing is slippery and treacherous. But it was Sincock’s professional home, and it’s hard not to get the sense that he embraced its difficulties, as well as its secret treasures.32 Kauaʻi was his home base most of the time, but Sincock also worked in other parts of the archipelago. Because of his mandate as the federal biologist manning the westernmost islands, he spent considerable time in the remote northwestern portion of the Laysan Islands chain, on tiny dots of land such as Tern Island, French Frigate Shoals, Nihoa, Laysan Island, and other locales, where he and colleagues ran transects to estimate bird and plant populations, counting up more than 12,000 Laysan albatross chicks. They also surveyed and tagged seals and turtles, suffering the occasional bad injury as a result. On Tern Island, “A yearling managed to bite through the tarp and chomp down on my right ring finger and little finger—I still have them at the moment but thought he did,” he reported. He was also bit by adult seals. The team often worked until 1 a.m. or later banding birds. Sometimes Sincock would get into the water, such as his time on Midway. “With only the top of a wet suit I dove with them for about one hour, but the cold water, strong currents and age soon told me that was a young man’s sport,” he noted. “The sharks confirmed my conclusion.”33 One of Sincock’s favorite stories about his time in the Leeward Islands was told to me by his helicopter pilot, Jack Harter. During a bird survey in the islands, John and his team made a stop at Gardner Pinnacles— a pair of guano-coated rock outcrops jutting out of the ocean. There was no

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Ernie Kosaka and John Sincock measuring a turtle in northwest Hawaiian Islands, spring 1970 (Scott Collection, Huntington Library)

place for their boat to land or tie up, so Sincock made a perilous leap from the boat to a ledge. He then climbed high enough to get information about the birds atop one of the pinnacles. Climbing up was difficult and a bit dangerous, so when he finished, a jump into deep water seemed like the best way down. “It was a long, scary drop, but the easiest way to return,” Harter recounted. Sincock pumped up his courage and leaped. On the way down, one of the waiting crew shouted, no doubt as repayment to Sincock for his many pranks, “SHARRRK!!”34

Sheila Conant Work in the hot, sandy, and remote Leeward Islands—no malasadas or manapua to be had there, not to mention cold beverages—was its own reward, particularly the conservation efforts and successes which emerged from those endeavors. Sincock’s extensive labors in the Leeward Islands were echoed by those of Sheila Conant, who has spent decades working

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there. The range of her work has taken her across the entire archipelago. If you look up a list of her publications, it’s clear she has taken an approach to studying birds that is both deep and broad, ranging from genetic studies and molecular ecology to translocation and other fieldwork topics, but also including numerous nonbird topics such as mongooses and ants. I asked her how being a woman had helped her in ornithology. “Well, women are better than men at doing a lot of different things,” she remarked. “We seem to have a better ability to communicate with animals, for instance. And when you have that empathy, then you’re more driven to do the kind of work that benefits those animals. I also think that most women are better communicators, and they’re not hung up about being sure they’re playing the role of the scientist correctly.” Although a full professor at the University of Hawaiʻi, she continued her education; she was one of the first grad students in the University of Hawaiʻi’s Conflict Resolution Grad Certificate program. Her capstone paper was entitled “Nature, Culture and Astronomy on Mauna Kea,” and the paper detailed her experience facilitating a long series of meetings about natural, cultural, and astronomical resources on the Mauna Kea summit. Despite these other activities, Conant has been the scientist’s scientist. Her hardiness and her constant curiosity also kept her sanity intact on places like tiny Nihoa Island, where she has probably had physical contact with more individual living endemic Hawaiian birds than anyone else mentioned in this book, and maybe more than anyone alive: she has banded thousands of songbirds in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, in the midst of tick infestations, nausea-inducing heat, and grimy dust. Mike Scott noted that Conant’s efforts, and those of her numerous doctoral students working in the Leeward Islands, provided essential mentorship and collaborative efforts on the natural history of the birds of Hawaiʻi. She has authored and co-authored numerous works on the land birds in the main islands and on the Leeward Islands extending to the northwest of the archipelago; Scott observed that her efforts have generated more than fifty refereed publications. “Along with John Sincock and Gene Kridler, Sheila’s work in the Leewards significantly changed the way those islands and their endemic land birds have been managed,” Mike told me.

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Sheila Conant with ‘Iʻiwi, Keauhou Ranch, Island of Hawaiʻi, July 1978 (Photo courtesy of Sheila Conant)

Conant’s influence has been wide among her students as well. Her heart’s desire as a college professor was to mentor graduate students, and she shepherded a total of twenty-six of her own, including fourteen doctoral students. Beyond her work with biology students, she also served on qualifying exam, thesis, and dissertation committees for forty-two students in zoology, botany, entomology, geography, and anthropology, plus— somehow, not surprisingly—one in philosophy.35 Her work in the Leeward Islands sounds highly energizing. Even at night, birds on the Leeward Islands are very active. “The petrels, the wedgetails, the Christmas Shearwaters, the Sooty Storm Petrels—they all have their prime time [vocalizing at night], and it’s like listening to a radio program,” Conant recounted to me. “The first birds that tune up after dark are

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the Bulwer’s Petrels; then the Wedge-Tailed Shearwaters do it, then the Christmas Shearwaters, and so on. It’s almost like they’re dividing up the airtime so they can hear their own kind.” Like many others I talked with, she expressed her deep enthusiasm for field biology. “That’s what you just live to do,” she laughed, “even if your field time is just going to another island and doing a bird count. I had a grad student who did this ‘before and after’ drawing of me once—the ‘before’ drawing showed me with very tightly curled hair and a grumpy face, and was titled ‘Conant the Barbarian.’ The second drawing depicted me after I’d come back from the field. The tight curls in my hair had relaxed and I had a beatific smile on my face. This one was titled ‘Conant the Librarian.’ ”36 Conant is warm and empathetic; she is generous with her knowledge and her many opinions; she laughs readily and is good with people, and it’s easy to see how her personality has helped her succeed in her line of work. She also views herself as part of an earlier tradition. “When people ask me what I do, I don’t say I’m a biologist. I say I’m a naturalist. And naturalists have been out of fashion for many, many decades. I really love birds. But I do love bugs and plants and snails too.” (She’s not the only woman biologist to characterize herself this way; biologist Kay Kepler, who played important roles in the Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey in the 1970s and 1980s, also describes herself as “an old-fashioned naturalist.”) Conant was born and raised in Honolulu, and every Saturday she and her two brothers would hike up to Ma¯noa Falls and make collections of snails, lizards, and other things that crawled and crept—slow enough to catch, but fast enough to be interesting. She also lived in Southern California for a while, studying spiders somewhat desultorily—and then, while working on little Necker Island in the Pacific, discovered not one but two species of Trapdoor Spiders— apparently unheard of out on tiny islands in the middle of the ocean. They’re not terribly intimidating to study because they’re timid and rarely bite, and they do indeed build a burrow with a little trapdoor, which they use to capture prey.37 Her route to biology, though, was not straightforward. In college she decided she wanted to be a professor—but an English literature professor, not a scientist. She took a couple of English courses but decided they

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weren’t much fun. Around this time her mother asked her to take her brother to Sea Life Park in Honolulu. It was a revelatory moment, and she decided she wanted to study animals, not literature or conjugation or linguistics. “In the mid-1960s, the Oʻahu ʻElepaio was still pretty common, and all I had to do was to walk out the door and out my back gate to see them.” The little monarch flycatcher is endangered now, down to perhaps a thousand birds on the island, and thus on the planet—and it was a great thrill to go out with Sheila one early morning on Wiliwilinui Trail, in the southern Koʻolau range, and to see a pair flitting about in the trees above us. Conant also has an interest in plants that is grounded in an MA degree in botany, along with her MS and PhD degrees in zoology, all from the University of Oklahoma, and her experiences with botanists colored her future. “My best biologist friends have been primarily botanists and entomologists,” she remarked. “They are kinder, gentler biologists, I think.” She recounted her pedagogical approach to me in detail. She taught courses on endangered species, island ecology, and wildlife and plant conservation, and her goal, broadly, was to cover biological principles of ecology and biological material relevant to conservation. “I wanted students to learn and think about how government agencies worked, and how laws, regulations, land zoning, water regulation, etc., affected wise management of natural resources,” she recounted. Conant’s first job out of grad school was working with the International Biological Program (IBP), a decade-long global effort between 1964 and 1974 to coordinate large-scale ecological and environmental studies. The organization worked to apply the methods of big science to ecosystem ecology, and to pressing environmental issues, such as the ones confronting Hawaiʻi. Sheila was based on the Big Island, in and around Volcanoes National Park, and described it as a dream gig. “My job was to assess bird communities in different habitats. I did that for about a year and a half, made observations in the field, going out on transects, and counting birds. I’d also take measurements in the plant communities, which showed which habitats species preferred, among other things.” She was off and running, next landing a job at the University of Hawaiʻi at Ma¯noa, thereby launching a long and illustrious teaching career.38

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In the course of her work, Sheila became expert in Hawaiian feather artifacts, advising the Bishop Museum and others on the subject. She is heartened by the abundance of women in the field, too. “I think women make really good biologists, but I think they make exceptional conservation biologists,” she remarked. “They’re not as confrontational, and so much of conservation work—problems with natural resource management— involves working with people.” She also noted that while she couldn’t recollect any specific role models among women scientists, she did recall knowing that “there were women out there doing amazing things as biologists, so naturally I thought I could do whatever I wanted, and I pretty much got to do that.” But misogyny dies hard. She told me several horrifying stories of one prominent male ornithologist colleague’s misbehaviors. And, she noted, “I remember a wildlife biologist from the Fish and Wildlife Service telling me women didn’t/couldn’t/shouldn’t work in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Talk about throwing down the gauntlet! Every field camp I’ve been in out there since 1980 has had more women than men, and they are good at getting along in the field.” She observed that women biologists excel at virtually all facets of natural resource management because they are more interested and willing than men typically are to make things work even if it requires compromise. “[Women] are good at developing and implementing plans, especially if it requires working with the local communities,” she observed. “They think about the importance of communicating with stakeholders at the outset of a plan or project, rather than waiting until it has started and local people are offended because they weren’t asked for input or assistance.” Conant has also had a dog’s life; she’s been a dog trainer, trial competitor, and both show participant and judge for more than thirty years. She bought a border collie in 1985 and has been training dogs and attending dog shows ever since. She even has birdy intersections with her dogs, much like those of ornithologists of the early twentieth century. “I trained two of my dogs to find seabirds and Wedge-Tailed Shearwater burrows, and downed or dead birds that ran into utility structures,” she told me. Though not a major part of her work, she’s tried to encourage interest in using dogs in resource management activities in Hawaiʻi.

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Recently retired from the University of Hawaiʻi, Sheila remains active in a number of conservation activities in the islands. She does have a sense of her legacy, remarking, “Having been a conservation advocate for native organisms and ecosystems for fifty years, it’s comforting to know that when I eventually get too tired to do something I think is important, it’s likely that some younger person I influenced will do it.” The majority of her students now work in the natural resource management field, and many for government agencies, “and they do a damn good job,” she noted, pointing to their work translocating endangered Nihoa Millerbirds, building Hawaiʻi’s first predator-proof fence, discovering dozens of new endemic land snails, and rediscovering many more snails thought to be extinct.39

Newell’s Shearwater and Sincock I’ve characterized Sincock’s time as one of observation and documentation rather than of conservation, but he was also involved in various efforts that marked the transition to the more active conservation efforts itemized in the next chapter. Key among these was the essential role Sincock played in the survival of Newell’s Shearwater, or ʻAʻo. An endangered endemic seabird, it’s a medium-sized shearwater about a foot long, with a glossy black back, a white underside, and a sharply hooked bill. The name “shearwater” itself is evocative, describing a bird that skims extremely close to the surface of the water as it flies. It’s typically a bird of the open tropical seas, but is also found in offshore waters near its breeding grounds. Although difficult for us to imagine, some seabirds remain at sea for several years at a time, returning to land only to breed—a process involving courtship, copulation, and raising of chicks. Newell’s Shearwater also goes into the water to catch prey, swimming as deep as thirty feet, using its wings to propel itself downward, and then to surface. The ʻAʻo went unnoticed by foreign naturalists for a long time, given the fervor by outsiders in the last decade of the nineteenth century to document bird life in the islands. “As you will see in the Auk I have described a new Puffinus from Maui,” mainland transplant Henry Henshaw wrote in 1900 to Ernst Hartert, the ornithology curator at Walter Rothschild’s

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private museum in Tring, England, referring to the bird’s first published description. “It ought to be common but if so how did [collectors Henry] Palmer, [Scott] Wilson and [R. C. L.] Perkins overlook it?” Henshaw named the bird after its discoverer, Brother Matthias Newell, a missionary in Wailuku, in 1894. One of the sugar plantation workers employed by Werner von Graevemeyer, a manager, caught one of the birds, skinned it, and had it sent immediately to Newell to be stuffed. Henshaw noted at the time that the species was “numerous enough” but that the mongoose was rapidly exterminating the birds. The ʻAʻo had been first discovered by nonnatives in 1893 when one blew ashore on Maui after strong southerly winds and heavy rain, but nothing came of it until the following year. It had apparently been long known to the natives. William Bryan and Alvin Seale noted in their report on a 1900 collecting trip on Kauaʻi (a report that, oddly, omit¯ ʻo¯), “The fact that the native name of this bird has ted any mention of the ʻO come down to us through all these years, but that the species to which it had been applied by the kanaka naturalists should but so recently come to the light of science speaks much in the favor of those skilled old bird-catchers who had worked out the ornithology of their land with such exactness.” Very little was known about the ʻAʻo, and Henshaw noted in 1900 that “as to nests and notes upon the breeding habits of Hawaiian birds I assure you the gaps will be long in filling.” By 1908, it was thought to be extinct. However, a trio of the birds was sighted offshore in the summer of 1947 between Kauaʻi and Niʻihau. Eight years later the bird was confirmed to exist, and in 1967 it was discovered by none other than John Sincock to be breeding on Kauaʻi. The field biologist located the bird’s long-lost breeding grounds and would go on to fill in just the kinds of gaps Henshaw had lamented decades earlier. As a result, more than sixty years after Henshaw’s initial description of the bird (the 1947 sighting, buried in a report on Alaskan birds, went almost entirely unnoticed), the shearwater received some renewed attention.40 The nesting locations of the Newell’s Shearwater on Kauaʻi and other islands had been known to both natives and foreigners in the early twentieth century, but were forgotten. It was later discovered that colonies existed on other islands, but mongoose predation, feral cats, and Barn Owls

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had dramatically reduced their numbers there. Henry Henshaw noted that natives had found the birds in the burrows on Maui and brought them to Matthias Newell alive. Ornithologist William Bryan, writing to Richard Sharpe at the British Museum, observed in 1908 that “P. newelli . . . nest[s] in the high cliffs 2000–4000 [feet elevation, on Molokaʻi] in holes under the roots of trees etc. in the tangle of trees—undergrowth and vines and are very hard to locate. They have to be hunted with specially trained dogs. Altho I went with a party of natives and dogs to the locality where the natives got the birds the year before—we were not able to find a single bird.” In fact, it was a dog that led Sincock to the nests in 1967, when a hunter found his dogs at 1,500 feet with black and white feathers in their mouths. This news worked its way to Sincock, and about two weeks later he and Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources colleague Gerry Swedberg took a helicopter ride to a knifelike ridge in the Makaleha Mountains and located the burrows and birds. Kauaʻi, the only major island without mongooses at the time, had long seemed like a possible home for breeding shearwaters.41 After this rediscovery, Sincock became especially interested in Newell’s Shearwater and played perhaps the most pivotal role of anyone related to its survival; his work has gone virtually unnoticed in the literature, yet it was critical for the bird’s continued existence. “Surely his [Sincock’s] most effective and least-appreciated work dealt with the Newell Shearwaters,” Sincock’s helicopter pilot Jack Harter noted to me. “Newells have a couple of peculiar traits. Their legs are set so far forward from their center of gravity that they have great difficulty getting airborne from level ground. For that reason, they nest in burrows on steep, high ridges from which they launch. Newells are attracted to lights en route to the ocean for feeding. They crash in football stadiums, on highways, and any place there are bright lights. Unable to get airborne, they are often smashed by cars or killed by dogs.”42 It couldn’t have helped that the bird seemed predisposed to crashing even without lights. Due to high wing-loading—the result of relatively large body mass and small wings—shearwaters are susceptible to crashing noisily into vegetation, which they do primarily in their breeding colonies in the mountains. In one of the few articles Sincock published during his career,

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he noted about the bird that “some of the Ao reached the ground in an astounding manner. After calling and circling the area they crashed into the tree tops and tumbled pell-mell through the branches into the dense understory.” In fact, Sincock found at least one bird near the burrows hanging by its neck, dead in the crotch of a tree—evidence of mortality even without the presence of lights or humans. One interesting aspect of this crash-landing style is that it provides further evidence of the mechanisms of evolution as being simply good enough to get a particular job done most of the time, rather than being a perfect match between organism and environment.43 Sincock didn’t make these investigations alone; he had an accomplice in Tom Telfer of the Division of Forestry and Wildlife within the Hawaiʻi State Department of Land and Natural Resources. But it was John who was instrumental in a “Save the Shearwater” program that involved public awareness, shielding of bright lights, and cages at all the fire stations where birds found on the ground could be taken for safety. John and his wife, Renate, would retrieve them and then launch them into flight from some suitable ocean overlook. “Most important was John’s discovery of their nesting burrows on the steep slopes of the Anahola ridgeline, where he jumped into heavy brush from my helicopter,” Harter recounted. “A radar bird-counting rig was brought to Kauaʻi from Alaska and a census was taken after dark when they fly to the ocean. The birds are still found on the ground by helpful citizens. When we were still driving to Lihue each morning, we usually found at least one Newell’s Shearwater along the road, and we would drop the bird off at a fire station. This started our day with a happy note.”44 With its long, elegant wings and overwater presence, the bird has always been captivating to humans. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Henshaw described the shearwater in almost mystical terms. “I have seen their ghostlike forms several times in peculiar conditions of the atmosphere by reflected light,” he wrote to Hartert. He also noted the difficulty in locating them for collecting purposes. “Puffins [shearwaters] are very hard to get. The breeding burrows away up on the mts have been invaded by mongoose and are now deserted. Nevertheless every starry night there are hundreds in the air above Hilo attracted by the lights. At least the bird is more likely to be a Puffin than anything else.”45

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The birds’ innate attraction to lights became an obvious problem with the increasing electrification of the island, and Sincock noted that the birds would frequently crash near the extensive lighting at the Kauaʻi Surf Hotel. Light seemed to paralyze the birds; when confronted in the field with flashlights or flash from photography, they would often remain immobile for thirty minutes to as long as two hours. Hotel manager Bill Johnson was very cooperative, agreeing to test color filters over the lights to reduce the attraction to birds. He helped to pick up crash-landed birds, and recognized the favorable publicity that helping protect the shearwater could provide. Johnson made plans to print a brief brochure to explain the program to hotel guests.46 “Another decade or two of accelerated development of night lights without some major modification and management of night lights and the population will be greatly reduced,” Sincock warned. Streetlights seemed to be a key culprit. After some research, he found that Kauaʻi—still very rural—had no more than 500 streetlights on the entire island, and that streetlight covers to block the upward lighting could be purchased for $10 to $15 each. “So if $5,000 to $7,500 could be obtained a major management effort could be made for 3 endangered or threatened seabirds (Newell’s shearwater, Dark-rumped petrel [Hawaiian Petrel] and Harcourt’s petrel), for unshaded street lights are a major cause of mortality to fledgling birds each October to December.”47 He considered his proposal tremendous conservation bang for the buck, and it was. Kauaʻi County government was supportive of the plan, and within several months covers were in place. Sincock also identified other lit areas of high mortality for the birds, including tennis courts, football stadiums, and plantations. In most of these settings he had tests conducted on the type and intensity of light being emitted. Especially troublesome was the high-output fluorescent lighting on the sugarcane haul roads, which were an especially high area of mortality for the shearwaters. For Sincock, this was all fieldwork, and he was tireless in his pursuit of data, and a solution, to reduce shearwater deaths. As well as working on mechanisms to lower mortality, Sincock also spent quite a bit of time rehabilitating injured shearwaters, feeding them a mix of squid puree, Ringer’s isotonic solution, Karo corn syrup, and

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Wesson salad oil—a regimen on which they seemed to thrive. “I realize Patuxent may frown on some time devoted to this, but I can’t throw a bird into the ocean that sinks or floats away on its back,” he noted. “However I am learning a lot about care and handling of these birds that should augment future studies.” Some injured birds succumbed to their illnesses, but others were rehabilitated. Sincock named his oiled or injured birds. “Wesson,” a badly oiled bird, was released successfully, as was “Lolita.” Also in his brood were “Monty” and “Scarface,” both of which had leg paralysis; they swam out to sea “in good fashion” less than a month later.48 He also nurtured a Wedge-Tailed Shearwater for a sustained period in 1967, the year he first arrived in the islands; he claimed that no bird of this type had been raised in captivity over a longer period. The bird then declined rapidly and died, and the autopsy revealed a pin-size hole in its gizzard; it had some thirty sharp squid beaks in its stomach. “Made skin from the fattest, downiest bird I ever saw,” Sincock wrote to his boss in Patuxent after the bird’s death. He then raised another one more than a decade later for nearly a year in 1978–79, and learned a tremendous amount about appropriate enclosures, feeding techniques, and behavior—information he felt could all be useful in further technique development to establish the Newell’s Shearwater colonies in areas free of mongooses, cats, and other predators. He named this second fledgling “Batch.” Like a mother bird, Sincock would do anything to keep endangered birds alive at the species level, but he also cared for individual birds. Batch died on July 9 the following year, forty-nine weeks after hatching; an autopsy determined he died from kidney malfunction. Avian malaria was also found.49 Sincock also contemplated, and then tried out, some translocation work with the shearwaters—now a critical element in conservation of endangered Hawaiian birds—and at-risk species of birds worldwide. Working to lower the shearwaters’ tremendous fledgling mortality by devising a plan to relocate them to safer areas seemed a worthwhile pursuit. “All goes well with this experimental translocation (except funding) and anticipate fledging of remaining chicks over next several days,” he reported in 1978. He was a determined cuss in the face of the constant bureaucracy about which he complained. “Having spent several months in designing this

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study, obtaining required permits, study plan approval, busted my rump locating nine eggs, hand-reared one wedge-tail chick for 70 days, etc. most acts of God will not prevent me seeing this study through for the next week, let alone the inactions of others.”50 These early experiments in translocation would prove invaluable to later efforts to save Hawaiian bird species. As Conant told me, “These early translocation efforts have made us braver about doing them today.”

Eugene Kridler Another key person who was involved in the arduous and hazardous fieldwork along with Sincock and his cohort was the legendary and somewhat polarizing Eugene Kridler. He was the first U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist stationed in the Hawaiian Islands, arriving there in 1964. At his post in Hawaiʻi, where he was officially named Wildlife Administrator and Manager for the Hawaiian Islands, Gene was a relatively low-ranking federal employee. However, he had a huge job; he remarked that his area of responsibility included over 3 million square miles and more than 2,000 mostly tiny islands. In the course of his work he had to deal with admirals, generals, and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) administrators, among others, with some regularity. There’s no doubt that Kridler had the upper hand in most of these dealings, however. “Gene Kridler was a piece of work,” recounted fellow biologist Rob Shallenberger. “He had little time for doctoral students, figuring that one could learn much more in the field. He could be awfully gruff. I remember one time when I tagged along on a meeting about a prospective refuge on James Campbell Estate land in Kahuku, Oahu. The Estate officers were not happy about the possibility that the proposed refuge would impact their aquaculture and development plans. Gene sat quietly as the officers said their piece and then, rather abruptly, told them that if they didn’t cooperate he would see to it that the government would take over the land by eminent domain. That caught their attention.” Working for the federal government had its advantages at times. Shallenberger noted that Kridler’s legacy was very important. “For all his personality quirks, Gene should be remembered as a refuge manager

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who accomplished or set in motion a huge amount of land protection— Pearl Harbor, James Campbell, Huleia and Hanalei.” And like Sincock, he had a deep work ethic. Between 1959 and 2004, he banded some 100,000 birds for longevity and migration studies. Mike Scott also observed that it was Gene’s work that served as both the catalyst and the glue for much of the conservation work done in the Leeward Islands. Ten refuges in all were created under Kridler’s administration—work that eventually led after Kridler’s death to the establishment of the Papaha¯naumokua¯kea Marine National Monument in 2006, encompassing an area of 140,000 miles; a decade later President Barack Obama quadrupled its size to form the second-largest protected natural area in the world. Stories about both Kridler’s virtues and vices abound. Doug Pratt described him to me as a by-the-book bureaucrat totally devoid of common sense. Pratt once picked up a road-killed Newell’s Shearwater north of Kapaʻa and made it into a study skin rather than leave it to rot or be eaten by a cat or other scavenger. This was technically illegal at the time because the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed the species as threatened. But from his perspective, a chance to preserve a specimen was reason enough to scoop it up and make it into a study skin. Returning to Honolulu, he took the specimen to Kridler in his office, “whereupon he became totally indignant and threatened me with prosecution,” Doug told me. “I told him to go ahead; I would demand a jury trial, and we would see who got laughed out of court.” Kridler did not follow through on his threat. Pratt then formally requested that the specimen be given to Louisiana State University, his home institution, which was a USFWS prerogative at the time. “As it turned out, Gene kept the specimen in his desk drawer for a year before sending it to LSU, and by then it had been destroyed by insects! So, in his eyes, I was a criminal for salvaging a rare and valuable scientific specimen, but he could destroy it by neglect with impunity.”51 To Mike Scott, however, Kridler was a hero for conservation in the Pacific. “He came to the islands first, and was the common denominator for me and John,” Scott told me. “He was a force of nature in getting things done in Hawaiʻi and the broader Pacific area. Gene was not bashful in

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giving his views on issues. He could be gruff and difficult to work with, but at the end of the day he was a very good friend who, with John, was very generous with his time and advice to a wet-behind-the-ears researcher. Gene . . . believed very strongly that research in the islands by public employees had to be management- and policy-relevant.”52 ¯ ʻo¯ was made in 1987, By the time the last audio record of the Kauaʻi ʻO the bird was a member of the living dead—a species whose looming extinction was certain. It was one of five honeycreepers, split from a founding pair of birds derived from its closest mainland relatives, silky flycatchers, sometime between 14 and 17 million years ago. Writing a species account of the bird in 1944, George Munro described it as “in danger of extinction.” He noted that when he had arrived in the islands in 1891, “it was a common bird over all the Kauai forests. Its notes could be heard from near sea-level in the valleys on the north side to near the top of Mt. Waialeale at over 4,000 feet elevation. It was still not uncommon when I left Kauai in 1899, but on four visits to the Kauai forests between 1928 and 1936 I failed to hear or see it. . . . However, if it still exists no effort should be spared to save what would be the last of the famous Hawaiian oos.” Just what those efforts might have involved, he did not specify.53 In a handful of cases, conservation efforts similar to those used today ¯ ʻo¯, in the form of translocation from one island were implemented for other ʻO to another. Is moving one native species from the only island on which it’s found to another island where it’s never existed historically a case of introducing a species, and what are the possible consequences of that? There was at least one attempt to populate other islands with one of the Mohoidae—Francis Gay, a businessman involved in sugar and ranching on ¯ ʻo¯ (Moho nobilis) in the mounKauaʻi and Niʻihau, liberated five Hawaiʻi ʻO tains of Kauaʻi. “They seemed healthy—three males and two females,” George Munro wrote in his journal in March 1892 about the event. A few weeks later Munro wrote, “F. G. tells me that he released the oos in a flowering tree . . . and they were seen singing round there for several days one of the females died and they have not seen the other so it will be a pity if it has ¯ ʻo¯ were still fairly common by the early 1890s, it died.” Because Kauaʻi ʻO was probably not a case of trying to replace the Kauaʻi bird with one from a

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different island, but more likely a conservation move for the Big Island bird, ¯ ʻo¯.54 given the rapidly disappearing Hawaiʻi ʻO Queen Liliuokalani also noted that she had received twenty pairs of ¯ ʻo¯ on Oʻahu, and had sent three pairs to Kauaʻi—perhaps Hawaiʻi ʻO because of the potential leavening effects of a mongoose-free Kauaʻi. “On making inquiry I found that only one pair was now known to be living there,” she noted in 1898, but that the two birds were thriving. “This single pair of birds was kept near to a house, and were often seen on this fragrant mimosa-tree.” She also noted of the Big Island birds that they were “true Hawaiians: flowers are necessary for their very life.”55 ¯ ʻo¯ survive longer than the others in its little Why did the Kauaʻi ʻO family? There seem to be four solid contributing factors. The first is that the bird’s yellow feathers were much fewer in number and less visible than those of its congeners on Oʻahu, Molokaʻi, and the Big Island. As Munro noted in his 1944 account, “They [the feathers] were smaller and not nearly so fine as the plumes of the other oos and their gathering was early discontinued.” The second reason may have been that finding and killing birds for decorative or ceremonial reasons on Kauaʻi was harder. John Sincock made many of his trips by helicopter to the remote parts of the island at higher elevations, including the Alakaʻi Swamp, because of the sheer difficulty in getting to the regions—perhaps areas that the native bird feather collectors rarely or never got to. Third, it’s also possible that the remoteness of the Alakaʻi meant that the habitat remained intact for considerably longer than the more accessible locales of the Big Island bird. And finally, the lack of predation by the mongoose may have protected the bird’s eggs from harm.56 ¯ ʻo¯ was very abundant in the 1880s The better-known Hawaiʻi ʻO through the end of the century, when its population crashed. It was common enough that Henry Henshaw made up preprinted labels that said “Moho Nobilis / 189_ / Island of Hawaii.” He would then usually fill in the exact date, more specific locality details, the sex and age of the bird (adult or ¯ ʻo¯ juvenile), and a serial number. Even by late 1900, small pockets of the ʻO survived on the Hilo side of the island. Henshaw noted that a boy had come down from the mountains to tell him that the bird was rather numerous. “If the natives would let this bird alone I am sure it would increase and would

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reoccupy much of its lost ground,” he fretted to his friend William Brewster at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, “but the taste for yellow feathers still continues and as long as they can get money for them just so long will they continue their slaughter.”57 It was also the case that naturalists of the late nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, simply had no idea how to prevent extinction. Modern conservation strategies involving habitat restoration, reduction of threats from various sources, and other activities would have seemed impossible even if they had been known. Naturalists could just mourn and ¯ ʻo¯] you may be sure is do nothing. “The poor Acrulocercus [the Hawaiʻi ʻO doomed within a little—but I will not go on for moralizing generally has a demoralizing effect,” British ornithologist Alfred Newton wrote to Perkins in 1896.58 It’s also possible that some species suffered declines due to their attractiveness as a food source. We know with some confidence that the moa-nalo of Chapter One went extinct due to hunting, probably for eating ¯ ʻo¯ on the Big Island was also apparently quite tasty; purposes. The ʻO as Scott Wilson noted in his classic late nineteenth century work Aves Hawaiienses, “The O-O is esteemed a great delicacy by the natives, and used formerly to be eaten by them, fried in its own fat. I can vouch personally for its excellence, as one day, after bringing in a fine specimen from a collecting expedition, I placed it carefully on a shelf to await my convenience; but at dinner the Chinese cook, Ah Lung, set down in front of me a small dish, containing my lovely prize! . . . My host, Mr. Spencer, and I tried it, and found it excellent.” Henry Henshaw was also known to stew Hawaiian duck, which he proclaimed “very palatable.”59 ¯ ʻo¯ was not the only tasty bird—others are noted in Davida The ʻO Malo’s Ka Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Antiquities), written in the 1840s, which frequently noted of specific Hawaiian birds, “He manu ʻono ke ʻai ʻia” (“It is good to eat”). Endemic species he described as being ¯ ʻo¯, the Mamo, the ʻIʻiwi, the ʻAmakihi, the ʻAkialoa, tasty included the ʻO the Koloa, the Kukuluaeʻo, the Kioea, the ʻUaʻu, the ʻAʻo, and many others, including numerous seabirds. In fact, he included the category “Eia na¯ manu ʻai ʻole ʻia” (“Here are the things that are not eaten”), and on

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¯ ʻo¯ (from Aves Hawaiienses), December 1890 (Smithsonian Institution Kauaʻi ʻO Libraries, Cullman Library)

it are only six things—a bat, a moth, two butterflies, and two kinds of fly. Apparently everything else (including the ʻuhini, a grasshopper) was fair game. One scientist has described the larger, nonperching birds as “goodfor-the-calabash” species.60 Sincock also spotted other very rare birds, confirming their existence as part of his work describing endemic species on Kauaʻi. One late afternoon in the summer of 1972, he observed the Kauaʻi Nukupuʻu high in an ʻo¯hiʻa tree along the Halehaha Stream; it was his first sighting of the bird, and perhaps the second or third observation of the twentieth century. He watched it for about three minutes, and located its nest—which he described as only the second ever found—about fifty yards downhill from ¯ ʻo¯ nest he had located the previous year. the ʻO

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¯ ʻo¯, taking about The same day, Sincock also got a long visit with the ʻO 140 pictures of the bird. His field report for that week noted, in his usual terse language, “Undoubtedly the best field trip so far in observing endangered species.” He would make fairly regular observations of the ¯ ʻo¯ during the summer. Part of his work included setting up nesting strucʻO tures in the Alakaʻi, so that the bird would have more opportunities to better establish a toehold; in late April of that year he set up thirty nesting boxes, and many others at different times. He was very thorough in his planning, corresponding at length with the state biologist and others about erecting the structures, which included rat guards. He also offered up advice and opinions about the Ko¯keʻe Dam project, proposed to tap portions of the island’s prodigious rainfall. “Direct destruction of the habitat is probably not as much of a problem as the increased human activity that would further enfringe on the Alakai State Sanctuary,” he wrote. The $18-million dam and hydroelectric plant, proposed by state and federal officials, was never built.61 After seeing the Nukupuʻu, Sincock lacked just a single bird on the list of endemic Kauaʻi forest birds: the ʻAkialoa—a finch with a preternaturally long, curved bill, which it used to probe for invertebrates along trunks and branches of trees. He had yet to spot the elusive bird, and surmised it was extinct. At one point a schoolkid in Waimea seemed to have captured one. Sincock was alerted to the situation and was told that the boy offered to sell the bird, sight unseen, to a Waimea High School teacher for $50. Sincock was not amused at this attempt to make money on a conservation matter. “I had already given the kid my swiss army knife, the parents a case of beer and the kid who reported it $20 for the information—so hopped in the truck and drove to Waimea where I informed them they had no more right to sell the bird than I had to buy it.” Viewing the bird for the first time, he measured its beak, which was several inches long. “Wrote short note for Elepaio on the sparrow that looked like a[n] akialoa,” he wrote Erickson, “the one endemic I have not seen in 12 years, entitled ‘In Quest of the Long-billed Bird.’ ” Mike Scott saw photos of the mutant bird. “It was clearly a House sparrow with a very long upper mandible reminiscent of the Akialoa,” he told me.62

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Despite his tireless work ethic, Sincock did have friends, and his closest pal during his years on Kauaʻi was his helicopter pilot, Jack Harter, who was the best man at Sincock’s wedding. No doubt they had some concentrated time together, at least in the air, as the helicopter—an Alouette III, a light utility chopper—cost $2 per minute to operate. The two met in midMay 1968, when Sincock realized he might benefit from a ride to some of the very remote locations in the mountains. He had used a helicopter before on Kauaʻi to find birds, but took his first ride with Harter on May 20, along with state wildlife biologist Tom Telfer, and got religion. “I was much impressed with the fact that ‘the helicopter is “truly” the only way to travel on many parts of this island,’ ” Sincock reported.63 As Jack told me, “It was my good fortune to fly John into places so remote and inaccessible that not even the Hawaiians had been there. John spent some very lonely times studying birds when weather often made it impossible for me to pick him up on schedule.” In the early 1970s, Sincock worked out a clever pickup strategy despite the lack of two-way radios. “John made a deal with the local DJ on Kauai,” Mike Scott told me, “so when Jack dropped him off it was always with a predetermined date and time for a pickup. John would go into the forest for days, and sometimes as long as a week, by himself. He had a battery-operated transistor radio, and there was one disc jockey that John would tune in to the night before his pickup—and early in the broadcast, the DJ would say, ‘And this is for the bird man of Kauai.’ He had two tunes, and ‘Walkin’ in the Rain’ was one of them, and if John heard that song, it was his cue to pack up and slog out because the weather was too bad for a pickup.” The other one apparently varied, but it didn’t much matter—as long as it wasn’t “Walkin’ in the Rain” following the DJ’s intro for “the bird man of Kauai,” Sincock knew he had a ride. The song must’ve been the 1972 hit “Walkin’ in the Rain with the One I Love,” by the soul trio Love Unlimited, and it featured Barry White as a voice on a telephone—which somehow seemed appropriate to Sincock’s situation.64 Jack Harter clearly had great affection for Sincock. He was John and Renate’s ride to their wedding, which took place atop Mt. Waialeale on Kauaʻi (a rare day without rain), and afterward he dropped the couple on an

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isolated beach for their honeymoon. In early March of 1973 Harter was severely injured in a helicopter crash on the Big Island while trying to rescue firefighters in Volcanoes National Park. Ashes and cinders covered his helicopter, his visibility dropped to zero, and he crashed into the side of the mountain. He suffered two badly broken knees, severe back injuries, and multiple severe cuts. (My late father, a general surgeon at Hilo Hospital, where Harter was taken, would have certainly been involved in his care, although Harter told me that he was so heavily drugged at the hospital to relieve the pain he has virtually no recollection of his time there.) He recovered and, now in his early eighties, owns a popular helicopter business on Kauaʻi and still flies.65

Nineteenth Century Antecedents Several important antecedents help explain the route to Sincock’s role in the islands. In nineteenth century Hawaiʻi, collectors could work with relative impunity in collecting even the rarest birds. Several key naturalists and collectors were essential precursors to Sincock’s observational work. I cover them in some detail here, because many of their stories about collecting work in Hawaiʻi—especially those of Henry Henshaw—have not been told before in any depth. Some, such as R. C. L. Perkins, have been covered extensively in print elsewhere, but much of what I present here is new, in part or in whole. Key among these antecedents was George Campbell Munro, who arrived in Honolulu on December 13, 1890, twenty-four years old and eager to learn about birds and help fellow New Zealander Henry C. Palmer with his collecting efforts. Munro’s name would become synonymous with Hawaiian birds for much of the twentieth century. Palmer, a collector for Lord Walter Rothschild in Tring, about forty-five miles northwest of London, had been a friend of Rothschild’s taxidermist Frank Doggett. Palmer was one of the two most significant collectors working on behalf of English institutions in Hawaiʻi during the last decade of the nineteenth century—the other being Perkins, who spent seven years collecting for the Sandwich Islands Committee, formed by the British Association for the

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Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1890. When Palmer and Munro arrived, the first systematic and extensive collecting work in the islands commenced; Perkins would not come along for another fifteen months. The two entities had different goals: the BAAS wanted to better understand the status of what was known zoologically in Hawaiʻi, and Rothschild wanted materials for his collections. Palmer and Munro had arrived in Hawaiʻi in somewhat ragged form after a long steamer voyage from New Zealand, where both men were based at the time. Palmer complained in his diary about the “innumerable delays and crochets of Capt. Walker.” They had squabbled with the captain (apparently because of Palmer’s refusal to share with the captain some of the liquor he had brought along), and the captain would not allow them to participate in several landings in the western Hawaiian archipelago, thus dampening Palmer’s initial collecting plans.66 Munro was totally unversed in Hawaiian birds on his arrival in Honolulu. The Common Myna caught his eye first, although he had no idea what it was. “I have noticed only one bird,” he wrote. “I think it is a starling, a handsome slaty bird, pretty common about the town, it sings pretty well.” Once he learned the name, he wrote it incorrectly in his journal for a while as the “miner.”67 Munro is better known to us than his boss Palmer because he remained in Hawaiʻi for three-quarters of a century until his death, and he kept detailed journals for many years. Palmer’s notes and journals appear to be lost, according to Munro’s later telling, and they have not come to light. Most of what we know about Palmer comes from Munro himself, who collected for Palmer for about a year and a half before taking up residence in Kauaʻi. (Munro is also known for the collection in 1913 of a Hawaiian bird in the Kaiholena Valley on Lanaʻi—the Lanaʻi Hookbill [Dysmorodrepanis munroi], which has proved to be the only specimen in existence— providing evidence that perhaps we’ve historically missed any number of rare living species in the past two centuries.)68 Munro was almost immediately successful in his work, learning quickly and collecting very actively. Already by late 1891, less than a year after he began work in the islands, a bird from the Laysan Islands was

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proposed to be named after him, something he described in his diary as “rather a surprise to me.” They had a particular focus on the Big Island during their fifteen months of collecting. “[Frank] Doggett [Palmer’s taxidermist] tells P[almer] to thoroughly do this Island [the Big Island] which is news we wanted very badly as to only follow [Scott] Wilson’s instructions would leave a lot of country which would not be advisable considering how local some of the birds are,” Munro noted in his journal.69 This focus by Palmer and Munro on the archipelago’s largest island caused Newton to suggest, or at least imply, to Perkins that he cede some of the territory on the Big Island, and he urged Perkins to move on to Oʻahu: “Hawaii is so big a place, that you would be so to speak, lost in it besides the fact that so far as I know Rothschild’s man (Palmer) has been working the best districts, or what are believed to be such.”70 By the end of his first year of collecting, Munro could boast of more than forty endemic species in his collection, preserved with his own solution constituting arsenic, pepper, soap, and camphor. Munro was also a close observer of insect life, detailing many observations of spiders, bees, flies, beetles, and other creatures such as lizards.71 He also grew somewhat tired of being an underling to a better-known collector. At the end of his stint with Palmer in February 1892 he noted, “So has ended my natural History tour and I am going to settle down to more solid work on Makawili ranch [on Kauaʻi]. My position as assistant has been enjoyable enough while out in the mountains, but I have felt it rather ackward [sic] when in towns, and working for a small salary I have naturally tired of it, considering that my strongest indeavours for natural science goes to the credit of another.” He also critiqued Palmer as a boss and collector: “Have got on very well with Palmer who is a good collector and a good hearted fellow as well, extremely zealous for his employers [and] inclined to be premtory [i.e., peremptory] at times which I did not at all like, he is rather a curious mixture altogether, but a good combination for a ornithological collector.”72 Palmer’s new assistant, Edward “Ted” Wolstenholme, arrived at Kawaihae on the Big Island at 4:30 a.m. on Valentine’s Day of 1892, immediately riding up to Waimea with Munro and putting in a day’s work without

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delay. Munro noted many years later that “Palmer treated Wolstenholme rather badly but was pretty fair to me but I was under no contract and could leave him any time I wished to. I was really sorry to leave the study.” Munro spent the late spring of 1892 on Kauaʻi, getting set up with the Robinson family at the ranch, working without salary but receiving room and board, and continuing to collect birds. The Robinsons had New Zealand roots, and this would’ve helped bond Munro with the family, which also owned the island of Niʻihau.73 Munro left the islands briefly in early April 1892 to return to New Zealand to get married. “I worked my passage back to New Zealand ‘passing coal’ in the stoke-hold [the coal bunker for a ship’s furnace] of an ocean liner a rough experience,” he recalled many years later. He spent three months in New Zealand, then returned to the islands with his new bride in early July 1892, where he took up permanent residence for the rest of his life, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1906.74 The couple settled into life on Kauaʻi, and on March 19, 1893, Munro’s Scottish wife, Jean—whom he almost never mentioned in his journal—gave birth to James, a baby boy. “It came a little unexpected but, we had a good Portuguese woman at hand and Mrs. Gay and young Mrs. Robinson came along and were very kind and helpful.” He described his son as “a fine large boy rather thin about 7 lbs.” The couple’s second child, Annie, arrived on November 19, 1895. She warranted a single sentence in his journal (“Another child was born to us last night, everything going well, a [female sign], a very bright little thing.”) A third child, Ruby, came along around 1906.75 Munro bore witness to many extinctions in the islands during his very long tenure across the twentieth century. His day job kept him busy. In 1911 he was hired to run the Lanaʻi Company’s cattle ranch—essentially, the entire island—a position he would hold for twenty-three years. He was, as one recent account noted, “a benevolent despot” over 44,000 acres and about 600 people. His land management decisions were sound and carefully considered, and preservation of the environment was a high priority for him, despite the apparent contradictions between raising thousands of cattle and protecting the land. He became interested in, and then expert in,

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George Munro, ca. 1960 (Bishop Museum Archives, Honolulu)

water and soil conservation—an interest he would retain to his death. He lived to the seasoned age of ninety-seven, passing away in Honolulu on December 4, 1963—a scant four years before Sincock showed up in the islands.76

Naturalists as Observers The approach of bird collectors in nineteenth century Hawaiʻi and elsewhere is often described as ornithology down the barrel of a gun. In fact, many were deeply interested in birds’ habits, habitats, and life histories, and made constant observations, many of which are of great use today. Big Island collector Henry Henshaw remarked to a friend, “The Island birds interest me increasingly. They interest me both as specimens and in relation

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to their habits. They are most curious creatures.” Collectors also saw the acquisition of specimens as more than a fetish; it was a hedge against the loss that extinction brought. “The time will come when H. [Hawaiian] birds can be had neither for love nor money, and I consider it as a sort of duty to do what I can to preserve a series,” Henshaw remarked midway through his decade in the islands. They seemed to consider extinction inevitable, and outside of their control.77 ¯ ʻo¯, Munro, like Henshaw, was especially interested in the Hawaiʻi ʻO the Kauaʻi bird’s congener on the Big Island, and noted in 1891, “They are not so numerous now and very shy, they must be approached in perfect silence the cracking of a small branch is enough to startle them, they were feeding on the ie [ʻieʻie, Freycinetia arborea] flowers in the afternoon.” He also wrote a detailed description of Hawaiian Hawks having their legs fouled extensively with spider webs and their stomach contents full of spiders. In one case, webbing had covered a claw of one bird completely, rendering it useless; in another, he found one whose throat was full of spiders.78 Birds’ responses to encroachments on their territory also perplexed naturalists greatly, and it is here that these observers come across most strongly as passive, lamenting what seemed to be inevitable. “It is mournful to see the way the forest is melting away in Olaa, probably the most densely timbered district in the islands,” Henshaw wrote to Harvard’s William Brewster. “15000 acres are to be cleared in the very heart of the bird district. What will become of the birds remains to be seen. Judging from their fate elsewhere in the Islands they will refuse to migrate and they must die. But why should they refuse to move a few miles? That is what puzzles me. All of the species but two are intensely local that much is sure but one would think that a little higher altitude and a few miles distance would not be insuperable obstacles when life is at stake. Will, we shall see for the experiment is upon us.” Henshaw wondered about this issue of locality frequently. “As you know H[awaiian] birds are astonishingly local,” he wrote to Rothschild, trying to determine the side of the Wailuku River on which some specimens of the Greater ʻAmakihi had been captured.79 Other observations captured something ephemeral about the living bird. Some birds’ colors change after death, and Henshaw commented on

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the striking coloration of the tarsus of the Greater ʻAmakihi, which went extinct in 1901. “The beautiful blue of the legs is retained in the skin for only a few days and then fades almost to black,” Henshaw commented to Rothschild, noting an aspect of the bird that would otherwise be lost to science, and to art.80 The systematists of the nineteenth century were the “professionals” of the era, but the study of the living bird became the focus of ornithology by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, marked by more thorough work learned through graduate degrees in ecology, zoology, and other allied disciplines. And as the twentieth century’s new approach to formalized degrees in the natural sciences became more mainstream, Henshaw sometimes felt the pull of formalized study. His relatively novel approach of discussing threats to bird populations put Henshaw right on the ecotone, so to speak, between the so-called professional of the nineteenth century and the university-trained professional of the twentieth who would begin to engage more actively in conservation work. “My experience has made me long for a thorough biological training such as a man may get these days easily enough,” he wrote Brewster in 1903.81 And what about the role of locals in the process of bird collecting and identification? Sometimes the natives who accompanied naturalists wanted to learn to skin birds. They also could serve as a source of inspiration. “Two natives have powerfully inspired me to collect H. birds,” Henshaw noted to Brewster. But many typical racist stereotypes also prevailed. “Natives anywhere are lazy, but here they are lazy and being somewhat cultivated with white mens ideas want exhorbitant [sic] wages, such as paid to mechanics,” Palmer complained to Rothschild’s ornithology curator Hartert. “Besides they [are] not like other island natives; have no love for forest and unexplored regions.” Munro also channeled opinions and prejudices; writing in his diary he noted, “Mr [Francis] Gay [Munro’s ranch boss on Kauaʻi] says that they [the natives] are perfectly untrustworthy, you can never depend on them to tell the truth, they never save money no matter how much they get.”82 In the same breath they also praised natives’ knowledge. Some had an unparalleled understanding of the islands. “Nothing will please me better

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than to try again for that Kauai new Thrush,” Palmer wrote to Hartert in 1893, but he noted the bird “most probably is further in the interior,” and that it would be “impossible to get without natives.” Hawaiian bird catchers also had renowned skills at capturing endemic species for their feathers. As a rule, the natives were tremendous sources of knowledge about many birds. Legendary collector R. C. L. Perkins noted about his collecting time on Molokaʻi, “An old woman in Pelekunu knew more about Molokai birds than any one I met on this island.”83 No collector in the last decade of the nineteenth century has enjoyed a more sterling reputation than Robert Cyril Layton Perkins, either during or since his time in the islands. Because he and his work have been the subject of extensive description elsewhere, I will not elaborate on his role other than to offer some previously unpublished descriptions by and of him, and to recontextualize him a bit. By every account he was an extraordinary naturalist, extremely careful, thorough, and talented. “So far as I can make out there has never been a naturalist here till Perkins came,” Henshaw wrote to William Brewster on the mainland. “He is a wonder in the way of quickness and keenness of observation. If you have a chance cultivate his acquaintance. He is an insect man and professes nothing in the way of ornithology. If ever he turns his attention exclusively to birds he will find few equals either as a field or closet [museum] worker. Such at least are my impressions of him.”84 Many others played a role in the study of Hawaiian birds, often at a far distance. Perkins’s boss Alfred Newton considered himself balanced and flexible about science and its self-correcting nature. He was a Darwinian and had called evolution “the grandest discovery of the age” when Darwin’s work was first published. Writing to Perkins about a disputed classification matter, he noted, “By this time you must know I am full of prejudices. . . . But you should also have known me long enough to be aware that I can shed my prejudices, as a snake sheds its skin; and so, when you have proved your case . . . I shall glide out glossy and smooth to congratulate you on being right after all. . . . I always uphold the outdoor observer provided that he be a trained man, and of course no one will doubt your training—why you must be the best authority on the ornithology (indeed the zoology in

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general) of the Sandwich Islands and a far better one than ever there has been before, or perhaps will ever be again.”85 As competitors for England’s finest collections of Hawaiian birds, Newton and Rothschild maintained a fairly cool relationship. “My correspondence with him has been going in a friendly fashion. Perhaps after all he was not so hostile as I had imagined, but only did not know how to behave,” Newton confessed to Perkins in 1893. The two men were far apart in age; when that letter was written, Newton was sixty-four, and Rothschild only twenty-five. But Newton also evidenced a strong anti-Semitism toward Rothschild, who was Jewish. “Part VI of his book is out at last but contains several blots,” he wrote Perkins in 1896, referring to Aves Hawaiienses. It may be the Jews will not hit them [the “blots,” or errors], but I am sorry all the same.” A few years later he wrote to Perkins, “I don’t expect that the forthcoming part to complete the Hebrew Gospel will instruct one very much, though I try to prepare myself for finding many surprises in it.” Shedding the prejudices about which he wrote Perkins must’ve proved difficult. Complaining about Rothschild again in 1896, he sounded bitter: “The old medieval belief that Jews stink, about the truth of which Sir Thomas Browne was unable to satisfy himself, is pitifully true in the moral sense, and all the golden waters of Tring reservoir will fail to purify them.”86 Newton also expressed disdain for Palmer’s work because of its private nature, being done as it was for Rothschild. “After what you tell me of the behavior of Rothschild’s collectors, it is of the highest importance that the distinctly scientific and public character of your mission—contrasted with the spirit in which they go to work—should be well understood by all persons in the islands,” Newton opined to Perkins.87 Despite the somewhat necessarily competitive nature of their work, Perkins and Munro became friends in the 1890s and maintained a close relationship until Perkins’s death in 1955. The two men collected together on a number of occasions, with Munro focusing on the birds and Perkins on the insects. Munro, after moving to Kauaʻi, kept a room exclusively for Perkins’s use when he visited. Munro enjoyed working with Perkins, noting of his bug collecting techniques that “he is getting a fine collection

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of moths of the small family. His greatest hauls are made at night by putting a lamp in the window to attract them, he works at them till the small hours.”88 Meanwhile, private collector Rothschild decided in 1894 that Palmer’s work in Hawaiʻi was done. The first two parts of the Rothschild-funded Avifauna of Laysan, which contained voluminous information obtained by Palmer on the archipelago’s birds, had been recently completed, and perhaps Rothschild felt the well had run dry. “It would not repay the trouble and expenses of collecting on the Islands again, and therefore he has given up the plan of sending you out again,” his assistant Hartert wrote to Palmer. “I hope you will always inform me about your address . . . we always think you did very well on the islands.” Speaking of him in the past tense would have been somewhat depressing to Palmer, who committed suicide in 1923 (rather than being “obscurely murdered” in New Zealand, as is often noted in print). His death certificate noted the cause of death as “Syncope,” which describes a condition of insufficient blood flow to the brain. In actuality, he died of a single gunshot to the head, apparently following financial woes and deep depression.89 Rothschild may have lacked Newton’s wit and slyness, but what he lacked in communication he made up for with a fat wallet. He was willing to pay extravagant sums for some of the rarest Hawaiian birds, such as the Black Mamo, which went extinct in 1907. Writing to collector Valdemar Knudsen in 1896 on Rothschild’s behalf, Hartert noted that Rothschild was willing to pay £25 for two birds, £50 for four, and £75 for six, and that Rothschild did not at all mind paying those prices. He had collectors working around the world, and indeed he would pay up to four figures for an especially attractive larger animal such as a rare rhino.90

Aves Hawaiienses Documentation of extinction is not a trivial task—especially if it relates to a bird that went extinct long ago. Even distinguishing one bird from another in the historical record is sometimes not easy, as we’ll see in the case of the historic descriptions of the Palila in the next chapter. Historic works that

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portray now-extinct birds usually include detailed synonymies—other names used for the same bird over the decades and centuries. Between about 1850 and 1920, much of the observational and descriptive work on Hawaiian birds was published in the serial literature— scientific journals and ornithological magazines. The greatest share of public and scientific attention to the topic, though, or at least the splashiest reportage, came as the result of the drawn-out publication of two large, lavish monographs. One of these great illustrated works on Hawaiian birds deserves some attention here. Scott Barchard Wilson, a British ornithologist and naturalist, was encouraged by Newton to visit the islands to explore and collect, and the result was the most famous of the color plate books on Hawaiian birds, Aves Hawaiienses. The work was published in eight parts over nearly nine years (Part I/Dec. 1890, Part II/Sept. 1891, Part III/May 1892, Part IV/January 1893, Part V/April 1894, Part VI/July 1896, Part VII/ June 1899, and Part VIII/July 1899 [the final part consisting of the volume wrappers, with date, contents, subscriber lists, price, and reviews]). The book was co-authored by Arthur Evans and illustrated by Frederick William Frohawk. Wilson, contrary to various accounts, paid his own way on the trip, and thus was able to retain the specimens he collected.91 Prior to Wilson’s work, published accounts of Hawaiian birds were fragmentary, being limited to accounts of individual species. The only other notable published work had been Sanford Ballard Dole’s pair of synopses of Hawaiʻi birds, published in 1869 and updated in 1878. Wilson made his own investigations and collections in the islands in 1887 and 1888, and because of active collecting taking place during the long gestation of Aves Hawaiienses a number of birds new to science were incorporated into the work. Wilson himself also returned to Hawaiʻi in 1896 to try to add to his collections, and his store of knowledge, for the final parts of his decadelong publishing effort on Hawaiian birds.92 Newton, despite his initial support for Wilson’s work, expressed some contempt a little more than halfway through the book’s publication. “Wilson . . . seems quite bent on going out again,” he wrote Perkins in 1895. “He is very easily led (or misled) and is given to do foolish things, but is not at all a bad fellow.” Wilson briefly met Perkins in the islands in 1896. “I need

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not tell you that I am disappointed at what he did—or didn’t [during this second collecting trip],” Newton wrote to Perkins. “I do so wish you had been able to get him between your finger and thumb, on his arrival, for then you might have squeezed him into the right shape, but Dis aliter visum [the gods have deemed otherwise]!”93 Wilson, who seems to have entirely missed or ignored Newton’s antagonisms, dedicated Aves Hawaiienses to him: “To Professor Newton,” the dedication reads, “Who first suggested my expedition to the Islands, and subsequently assisted me in the kindest possible way to lay the results before my readers in their present form.” This would’ve embarrassed Newton, who felt that dedications and honorary naming of birds were no honors at all. And not too many years later Newton would receive his own frank assessment by Warde Fowler, a British ornithologist who, upon Newton’s death, noted to a friend, “So we have lost old Newton. As a perfectly safe ornithologist I suppose there was no one like him; perhaps a little over cautious.”94 Besides Aves Hawaiienses, the other illustrated work on Hawaiian birds was Rothschild’s aforementioned Avifauna of Laysan, lavishly illustrated and published in three parts between 1893 and 1900. Its title was something of a misnomer because so much of the work related to birds other than those of tiny Laysan Island. One of the plates also contained a little “Easter egg”—the person shown in a lithograph by Frohawk, made from a photo and titled “Wrecked Sailor’s House,” shows a man looking at a White Tern in the doorway of a house. The man, whose face is obscured, was apparently meant to be Munro, and the dog in the image was an invention not present in the original photograph.95

Henry Henshaw One of Sincock’s most important observational predecessors was Henry W. Henshaw. Through his prolific correspondence as well as through his publications, Henshaw gives us a great deal of information about bird life in Hawaiʻi. Henshaw, a New Englander and one of the founders of both the Nuttall Club of Ornithology and the American Ornithologists’ Union, had

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Henry W. Henshaw shortly after his return from Hawaiʻi, 1904 (Archives of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard University)

served as a naturalist on the Wheeler Survey from 1872 until 1879, which gave him considerable field experience with birds. He moved to Hawaiʻi in 1894—not in pursuit of birds, but for health reasons. An attack of influenza in 1891 left him hospitalized for six weeks and rendered him a near-invalid. In 1894 he resigned from his job at the Bureau of Ethnology in Washington and headed to the Hawaiian Islands and their salubrious climate in search of relief.96 When he arrived in my rainy hometown of Hilo in the spring of 1894, the tropics didn’t provide any immediate relief. “There seems to be nothing the matter with me, lungs, liver or lights. I simply have no strength,” he complained to his friend Clinton Hart Merriam. “If you know of any method to enable a grown man to walk a couple of miles without falling by the wayside just ‘submit it in writing’ will you.”97

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But the islands mostly agreed with him, and his condition slowly improved. As his health returned, so did his enthusiasm for birds. And as his gaze returned to birds, he promptly noticed the fragility of the island’s avifauna. “They are a curious lot, these Hawaiian birds, and any change whatever in environment seems fatal to them,” Henshaw wrote to Merriam in 1896. “It is simply astounding the way they disappear. I have been in Hilo over a year and not one native bird have I seen here!” But that was only because he was relatively sedentary, rarely leaving the lowlands of the Big Island. In the fall of 1897, having spent several years working on what would become acclaimed landscape photographs, Henshaw found that his strength finally returned with a surge. “I find, or I believe, that I have gained much these past months,” he noted to Brewster, describing a recent thirtymile trip to the Kı¯lauea volcano region, at considerably higher elevation than Hilo. “I have much more endurance.” He proceeded to set aside his photographic work and returned to a life with birds.98 Henshaw, who was outside of British collecting intrigues and competition, got to know both Perkins and Munro. Perkins later recalled a visit with Henshaw in 1895, scarcely a year after Henshaw’s arrival and before his health woes had eased. Perkins noted the following about Henshaw’s abilities: “During my stay at Kilauea H. W. Henshaw the ornithologist and skilled collector of birds was staying at the hotel [the Volcano House Hotel] being in poor health and at that time not himself doing any collecting,” Perkins recounted. “At times I brought him some birds to skin, and learnt a great deal from him. He used dry arsenic entirely on his skins instead of the messy arsenical soap I had been using, and nothing but a pair of rather blunt-pointed scissors. He prepared excellent skins very rapidly. At the time he was collecting in America—I think with the geological survey— he told me that he had to make 40 skins each day and took 3 1/2 minutes a skin. Those he made in my presence took him a minute to a minute and a half more, but he said he was much out of practice, not having done any such work recently.”99 Henshaw also helped to improve Perkins’ shooting greatly. Henshaw showed him how to insert a short tube in one barrel of his shotgun, which would then accommodate a. 22 cartridge and enable the killing of small

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birds at close quarters without mutilating them. Perkins noted, “I found this of greatest value in collecting, as it killed birds with certainty at short distances and also saved a considerable weight to be carried, with many other advantages. Up to this point I had lost many rare birds.” Upon returning to Honolulu, Perkins modified his own gun accordingly.100 Newton, writing to Perkins in 1896, noticed Perkins’ newfound skills without knowing the training behind them—and he might have actually been unwittingly commenting on skins made by Henshaw, not Perkins: “Not only are the Chasiempsis skins better than usual, but the whole lot shews that you have wonderfully improved on your earlier performances, and these last will bear comparison with the very best handiwork,” he gushed.101 While naturalists of the era did not know how to take action to save Hawaiian birds, they worked hard to observe and understand as well as to collect. “Some species like the Elepaio, the Iiwi and the Apapane will always remain I think tho in lessened numbers,” Henshaw wrote to Brewster in 1899, “but the bulk of the birds are not adaptive enough to survive altered conditions.” The scarcity of many of the birds, and the need to record their details, seem to have begun seeping into Henshaw’s consciousness. “I began reluctantly feeling a sort of duty. . . . There is a strong incentive to study birds habits here—enormously difficult as that study is—in the thought that almost everything you record is a contribution of a positive kind.”102 Not long after arriving in the islands, Henshaw found that his desire to contribute data and evidence increased at the same time that his ardor regarding the killing of birds cooled. In 1895 he wrote to his close confidante William Brewster at Harvard, “Curious how dead within me is the instinct of killing, once so strong. And you feel the same way. Is it dead or only sleeping?” It was clearly an ongoing conversation between the two men. “You speak of your inability to kill birds,” Henshaw wrote in 1897. “I think it always went against the grain of us both to take life. Only the fierce thirst of possession which seized us as collectors and the almost equally strong impulse of the sportsman impelled us to many a deed of blood otherwise impossible. Like myself no doubt you had many a time to force yourself to take aim. That was in cool blood; but anon the sight of a

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rare bird or the sound of a voice from a long coveted target and all else was forgotten but the desire of ownership. It is all gone now; yet I fancy I could still pursue game birds with ardor; still I am not sure.” He repeated this sentiment again in 1899, although by then he was at the height of his collecting activity on the Big Island: “I have found it rather difficult to point my gun at living things . . . and not [be] able to resist the pleadings of mercy.”103 Unlike Sincock, Henshaw liked writing, and he published a number of articles and monographs. Henshaw was promised $100 for his important 1902 work on birds of the Hawaiian Islands—exactly enough to cover the cost of his beloved new typewriter. “The sum does not seem large for so much work, but it is a great deal better than nothing,” he wrote Brewster during its gestation in 1901. The brief book—146 pages long—was an attempt to fill in gaps left in other considerably more lavish publications about Hawaiian birds, as authored by Scott B. Wilson and Walter Rothschild. Henshaw was also prescient in his knowledge of what he didn’t know. In talking about his planned book on the habits of Hawaiian birds, he noted that “the trouble is with the nests and eggs. It seems as though it would take a century to learn anything about them.” Indeed, some decades would pass before naturalists gained a better understanding of the uses of nest and egg collections. The classic example comes from the 1960s, when naturalist Derek Ratcliffe used egg collections to compare the thickness of historic peregrine falcon eggs with modern examples, thus establishing a link between the use of DDT and other pesticides, and the decline of British birds of prey. The study of nests also demonstrates details of a bird’s life history that might not otherwise be evident. Nests and eggs also provide evidence of a particular species’ existence in a locality when the hatched bird is not present.104 Henshaw’s extremely useful and detailed Birds of the Hawaiian Islands first appeared in Thrum’s Annual in 1901, and was published in mid1902 in monographic form. It was information on the Hawaiian avifauna brought up to date for the early twentieth century, including considerable information not in Wilson’s Aves Hawaiienses, which had mentioned Munro, Palmer, and Perkins with fulsome praise but had not said a single word about Henshaw’s contributions. It was everything Wilson’s book was

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not: unillustrated, modestly printed, and filled with twentieth-century discussions of challenges facing Hawaiian birds. The front matter was full of new contributions, including a section on threats to the avifauna: environmental changes, habitat destruction, and the disease we now know as avian pox. Writing about the book as he proofed the last of it, Henshaw noted, “It is not a thing to be very proud of, but it contains for all that a good deal on Hawaiian birds which now for the first time is within the reach of the Hawaiian public for whom it is particularly intended. I would have preferred to have had more time to write it in.” Henshaw also especially wished to have included numerous notes he had written on the question of the evolution of the Hawaiian bird forms. “As it was,” he concluded, “the publisher was badly scared by the length of the paper in its present state.” As he noted to Lord Rothschild the year it appeared, “I wanted to get the paper where it would reach the people of the Islands, in the hope of stimulating their interest—at present very faint—in Hawaiian birds.” He confessed that he had really written it for island readers rather than a scientific public.105 Writing about his “little book on Hawaiian birds,” Henshaw observed to Brewster that “on the whole it seems to be about the thing I planned. Had it been larger and had it contained illustrations it would not have reached the readers I designed it for.” Books about Hawaiian birds for a wider audience were hard to come by, beyond Rothschild’s lavish productions, and thus “there are no means by which the laity can make the acquaintance of island birds,” Henshaw noted. “The path to speaking terms with them is an unusually thorny one and few there be who care to pay the necessary price. If nature study in the States was beset by the difficulties it is here it never could have become a fad.”106 Henshaw also commented in detail to Brewster on the new typewriter, somewhat self-consciously: “There is a difference between receiving a letter in a man’s own writing, and one in type. However clean and legible the latter may be it is not a chap’s own fist. I am prepared for abuse from my friends, and shall not hesitate to return to the habits of my youth if needs be. Still, Will, a machine is an immense convenience, and I do not expect to be sorry that I have learned to use one.” He later said he would never return to writing by hand.107

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By 1901 Henshaw was tired of many aspects of life in the islands. He claimed not to have good friends to speak of, at least none like his East Coast brethren—but he was also still wary of Washington and office life, even after seven years in the middle of the Pacific. He finally returned to the mainland in late May 1904, “much improved in health,” as the Hilo newspaper remarked.108

Difficulties and Motivations of Collecting Naturalists’ work in collecting Hawaiian birds was not a particularly influential factor in extinction, for they could rarely collect in extravagant quantities. One key aspect that helped mitigate against heavy collecting—at least in rain forests if not in dry upland forests with less cover—was the extreme difficulty of terrain and vegetation. Henshaw wrote often to colleagues about these difficulties. “The collecting in these forests is indescribably hard,” he wrote to Robert Ridgway, the Smithsonian’s Curator of Birds, in 1898. “No doubt there are localities where it is easier but in Hawaii a bird skin is worth its weight in gold.”109 Alvin Seale, a bird collector for the Bishop Museum, writing a couple of years later, remarked, “The difficulty of collecting in these islands, with their dense tropical jungles and knife-like mountain ridges, has been mentioned by all former collectors, and I can only add, that while I have collected in difficult places before, including the boggy tundra of Siberia, the high mountains of Alaska, the Tamerack swamps of Michigan, and the Everglades of Florida, I have found nothing that could discourage an Ornithologist so much as one of these islands.”110 Henshaw elaborated: “The difficulty is the height they [the birds] keep in the trees and the fact that you cannot follow them. You catch them in a tree and for a few brief moments, you may watch them with a glass but when they flit to the next tree it is usually good bye. By the time you have broken your way 30 or 40 feet thru ferns and climbers they are gone again.” Boggy ground also made for very difficult going in wet conditions; Munro noted slogging through “mucky vegetable mould.” At one point the muck turned to slush, and Munro once sank past his knees “and then found

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no bottom, but as such there is sometimes solid bottom of rock two feet down.”111 Over and over again, Henshaw detailed the extraordinary difficulty of collecting birds in the tropics. He griped to Brewster: “There are many places where the vegetation is dense and even denser than it is here but here the knife must be used to secure a passage through the forest. But added to the ordinary obstacles of collecting in a tropical jungle is culminating impediment of rough ground. Not only is the forest floor intersected in all directions by gullies, not only are there blow holes of dangerous [sic] on all sides but the ground is everywhere covered with volcanic debris which afford cavities in which the birds fall or hide and cannot be found unless with infinite difficulty.” He noted that the ground was covered with fallen tree trunks and dense branches, all marked with sweeping vines, which completely obscured stepping places. “When you put one foot down you know not what is to happen till you bear your weight on it,” he remarked. “To shoot a bird from the edge of a clearing means the expenditure of from 15 minutes to an hour in the effort to find it, and every moment of that time is spent in hard work.” Henshaw never made it to the Alakaʻi; his comments about the difficulties of collecting in the islands would’ve taken on an even more despairing tenor if he had visited Kauaʻi.112 In addition to his trekking difficulties, it didn’t help that Henshaw had a truly lousy sense of direction. Identifying one’s location while working was important, as collectors would often note these locales in their notebooks or on the leg tags of specimens they had collected. Often Henshaw’s localities for birds he’d collected were pretty sketchy. He confessed that “notwithstanding so much knocking about in the woods I have not a particle of topographical instinct, and could not construct a map give me ever and a day.” Moreover, he confessed, his sense of relative distances from one locale to another had disappeared over time.113 Nearly a century later, a 1986 work on Hawaiian birds noted that the difficulty of working in most of the forested areas in the islands was a key reason for the relatively sparse knowledge about the current status of endemic forest birds. “Hawaiian rainforests have been described as having some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world for conducting field

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research. The difficult conditions include rainfall of 10–20 m/year, continual cold drizzle for days or weeks on end, frequent dense fog, steep slopes, sheer cliffs, 10–15 deep gulches per kilometer along contours in many areas, nearly impenetrable vegetation, treacherous earth cracks and lava tubes, and remote areas far from road access.”114 Sometimes naturalists’ challenges were not topographical, but financial. By the early spring of 1899, even after five years in Hawaiʻi, Henshaw still had not visited the Kona district on the Big Island because of the prohibitive cost of provisioning and travel. And sometimes the difficulties were just logistical and quotidian. In a later era, begging his bosses in Patuxent for a proper work space away from his house, Sincock noted, “I hadn’t really expected to hear anything yet about my request for office space but hope it won’t be too much longer; my wife hopes the same thing! The neighbor’s cat persists in climbing up my back as I sit here in the carport typing. I don’t mind the cat so much, but those fleas have got to go.”115 Human relationships also posed challenges. Virtually every collector had a boss, because institutional support was necessary to get birds, or to do anything with them beyond showing them off in one’s own home. Perkins’s boss was Alfred Newton and the Sandwich Islands Committee. Henry Palmer was Munro’s boss, and they were both overseen by young Walter Rothschild. Storrs Olson and Helen James’s boss was the Smithsonian. And John Sincock was beholden to Patuxent. In every era, bosses (to use the term somewhat anachronistically, since by this I mean the twentieth-century word, freighted with various meanings not present in earlier centuries) were alternately concerned, worried, elated, and sometimes, just plain bossy. “As usual, you say little about your movements or plans,” Newton wrote to Perkins in 1894 while Perkins was collecting on Kauaʻi. “Your silence in regard to the latter [his plans] is again a great disappointment to us, and positively a detriment— because when one is asked respecting them by members of the Committee or others who are concerned in the Government Grant Fund one has no answer to make!”116 Sometimes Sincock expressed his own frustration with leadership and bureaucracy back in the mainland, especially when it came to funding

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and helping to plan for the vitally important censuses that were essential to their work. “Every dam [sic] year we wind up with the same thing—no money and no advance planning,” he griped to his boss.117 Virtually no one worked completely independently in the islands. One downside of making risky decisions in the field, besides the danger itself, was the possibility of a scolding from a higher-up, and the potential derailment of plans. After Sincock detailed a particularly dangerous outing along the infamous Kalalau Trail, Ray Erickson, his boss at Patuxent, wrote back: “In reading your hair-raising account, we were glad to note that your better judgement finally prevailed at the 7 3/4 mile point.” Sincock clearly thought his valor and risk-taking would be appreciated by his bosses, but that was definitely not the case. Erickson continued, “I wish I could stress the point in person because of my conviction regarding its importance. It will not serve you, your family, or our endangered wildlife research program in Hawaii to take unnecessary risks, in this case, traveling a trail which no one in his right mind should attempt. . . . When deciding upon a course of action, the first questions should be whether it is safe and necessary, not whether it is possible.” But that was not how John Sincock rolled, for better or for worse. Without question, the trails could be very dangerous. In 2007 David Boynton—a leading expert on Hawaiian natural history and the person who ¯ ʻo¯ via the sound recording he captured the last known traces of a living ʻO made in 1987—died in a fall on the north face of the remote Miloliʻi Valley, on the same steep and rugged Na Pali coast along which Sincock traveled. (Sincock very nearly met the same fate, once falling sixty feet down a cliff on ¯ ʻo¯ in 1985—a Namolokama Peak.) Boynton had also photographed the ʻO sole male tending an empty nest; it was probably the only surviving bird of the species by then. He used his poignant recording, and the story of the ¯ ʻo¯, to educate local schoolchildren about stewardship of the land. last ʻO And finally, the bird was last heard in late April 1987—twice on April 28 and three times on April 29—by Cynthia and James Krakowski. That, as far as we know, was the last time humans experienced the living bird.118 Tempering these difficulties were the lush comfort and beauty of the islands. Naturalists, and certainly others, swooned over the islands’ climate

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(Sincock being the notable exception—entirely understandable given the particular weather he endured). Writing from Hilo, Henshaw wrote, “It rains here far too much for comfort but such perfect days as intervene I never saw—and I may add as well, such perfect nights. . . . I doubt if the world contains another climate so equable, so balmy and so soft as these islands.”119 Collectors and naturalists over the course of the glorious exploratory and surveying century between about 1890 and 1990 were intensely motivated to continue their labors, and there’s no doubt that the very difficulties of the work were part of its reward. The chance to make new discoveries in a remote archipelago was deeply compelling. And as Henry Henshaw noted in 1902, writing from Hilo, “Absolutely the only thing that is keeping me in the islands is its biology in which I have become very much interested. I always loved outdoor work rather than indoor drudgery, and here the conditions all favor field investigations. Of course it is all outlaw.” More than eighty years later, Mike Scott, writing about the counterbalances to the

John Sincock and Mike Scott after completing transect, Kaʻu, 1976 (Photo courtesy of James Jacobi)

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difficulties experienced during the years of the Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey, would echo these sentiments, harking back to his ornithological ancestors. “There is pure joy in botanizing and birding in areas last visited 40–90 years ago by such legendary Hawaiian naturalists as R. C. L. Perkins, George Munro, W. A. Bryan, H. W. Henshaw, and J. F. Rock [Joseph Rock, a pioneer on indigenous trees of Hawaiʻi].”120

Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey In the years leading up to the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973, numerous scientists, politicians, and civilians in Hawaiʻi had a sense—to differing degrees—that the islands were probably at profound risk for species extinction. But there was no national mandate to spend money to conserve them, and just which species were at risk was not certain. In fact, no one had any comprehensive idea regarding what birds existed in the islands, or which birds were plentiful or scarce, or which had gone extinct—it was “just by guess and by gosh,” as Gene Kridler put it. When Win Banko arrived in 1966, his son Paul told me, “There were literally not a handful of people who could tell him where to find a native bird, or what they looked like.” Furthermore, earlier preconceptions died hard. Banko and his cohort of fellow biologists were told by old-timers as well as by land administrators that the ʻAlala¯—the Hawaiian Crow—had to be common, despite the fact that they were already greatly diminished in numbers and becoming difficult to locate. After all, they had been a pest bird early in the century. “ ‘You haven’t looked hard enough’ was a frequent comment by people in the ranks of the Department of Land and Natural Resources and elsewhere,” Paul added. “Even convincing people of the rarity of some of these birds was a hard sell for the early people dispatched from the mainland.”121 In 1966 Congress directed the secretaries of the interior, agriculture, and even defense, as well as the heads of all federal agencies, “to protect species of native fish and wildlife, including migratory birds, that are threatened with extinction.” An official list of endangered species was released on March 11, 1967, and it totaled seventy-eight species. In retrospect,

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the list—consisting entirely of vertebrates and known as the “Class of 1967”—was breathtaking in its lack of size and diversity. Invertebrates would not become eligible for protection until 1969, and plants would have to wait until 1973. But it was a start, and as a federal mandate it was essential for species protection. Today more than 1,200 species are on the list, and the majority of those are plants and invertebrates. However, the Class of 1967 is curiously similar to today’s endangered species from the Hawaiʻi perspective. A total of 24 percent of the original list consisted of Hawaiian species. Today, that number is nearly unchanged: 25 percent of the endangered spe¯ ʻo¯ was on the cies in the United States are from Hawaiʻi. The Kauaʻi ʻO original list, as was the Palila, the subject of the next chapter. The efforts of Sincock, Scott, Kridler, Kepler, and Banko anticipated the Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey (HFBS), which was first conceived in 1975. Sincock’s generosity was a key part of the entire cluster of efforts to document and resuscitate endangered species in Hawaiʻi. “He welcomed me to the islands and was quick to share his knowledge of the research challenges of the island,” Mike Scott told me. Sincock was an eager collaborator—and together with Gene Kridler the men put together plans for the HFBS during a visit to Honolulu. “John and I laid out on napkins at a bar the plan for conducting the HFBS,” Mike recalled. After getting an initial opinion from a University of Hawaiʻi statistician, they turned to Dr. Fred Ramsey, a good friend, statistician, and birding freak. Ramsey offered to help with conducting the analysis, and brought additional rigor to the project.122 Support for the enormous undertaking came from a variety of federal and state sources: primarily through funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but along with in-kind support from the Hawaiʻi Division of Forestry and Wildlife, the U.S. National Park Service, and the U.S. Forest Service. A great deal of the work was reconnaissance, and Scott, Sincock, and Kridler quickly identified key questions: How many species of endangered forest birds in Hawaiʻi were still extant? Where were they? How did their density vary across their ranges? What were their population sizes? One key aspect of the work was its intensely collaborative nature; the men

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worked with federal and state agencies, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), academics, and private landowners in the state to survey, synthesize, and analyze during the course of the project. Each person played a specific role. Banko’s key contribution was undertaking surveys of Hawaiian bird literature as well as of extant museum specimens, both necessary to give a historical context to the undertaking. Mike Scott, with a freshly minted zoology PhD in hand from Oregon State University, arrived in 1974 to work with Kridler, Sincock, and state wildlife biologists, and he quickly dove into matters of policy, land management, recovery planning, and implementation strategies. As early as 1968 Sincock and Kridler did detailed planning for forest bird surveys on Kauaʻi and on the Big Island. John’s work remains an important precursor for the Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey. It’s also important to understand that the HFBS was influenced deeply not just by Sincock’s efforts, but by the labors of earlier naturalists I’ve just detailed—the logical result of their earlier work to describe the Hawaiian avifauna. The first field labors of the HFBS took place in late 1974 and early 1975, when Sincock and fifteen others undertook an initial weeklong survey of the Palila and other birds around Mauna Kea on the Big Island. The lead scientists of the survey were Scott, Charles van Riper, and David Woodside of the Department of Land and Natural Resources. The young van Riper was the first serious field researcher to work with the ecology and life history of the Palila. Often a lone ranger in his fieldwork, Sincock greatly appreciated the multiplication effect of others working in concerted fashion. “This cooperative survey with 16 people appeared extremely successful and Mike Scott and others are to be complimented; one man could not possibly accomplish the same job in half a year’s work and even then the data would not be comparable,” he wrote to Erickson. “This led to discussions among Scott, Kridler and myself regarding the remaining status and distribution surveys that must yet be done in Hawaii as the elementary first step to further studies.” He noted how the work would need to proceed. “The logical and most productive way to accomplish the remaining status and distribution surveys is by an orderly team effort with perhaps a dozen

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trained, reliable observers in a coordinated study during one summer (three months), rather than the alternative of one man for several years. We plan further discussions of mass team effort next summer and request that the administration give this suggestion some consideration.”123 The next summer things got under way, and the survey officially began. It occupied seven summers, lasting into 1982, and covered the native forests above 3,000 feet on the islands of Hawaiʻi, Maui, Molokaʻi, and Lanaʻi, and the known distributional area for endangered forest birds of Kauaʻi. Oʻahu was officially excluded because of the relatively low incidence of endemic forest bird species, although Rob Shallenberger canvassed substantial areas of the island in the late 1970s. By the end of the survey, members of the HFBS had counted hundreds of thousands of birds, characterized vegetation, and documented occurrence of nonnative species and damage from feral animals, as well as the presence of rare plants and the discovery of new ones. The team set up a total of 9,940 survey stations during 20,789 count periods along more than 850 miles of transects. The team included fairly fresh recruits who were trained for the work, as well as much more seasoned veterans. “Observers were selected from applicants who were screened for birding experience, physical fitness, hearing acuity and birding ability,” noted Mike Scott in an unpublished report. “All field folks were then trained in the sampling methods, distance estimation (field characteristics, audio and visual) of the forest birds of the island as well as safety and sampling protocols.”124 The work involved a number of summer volunteers, dozens of dedicated workers, and often-rough conditions involving fieldwork for 10–11 days at a time, wet and slippery conditions, packs weighing up to 70 pounds, and laying trails though dense undergrowth. “The work is not without its rewards,” noted Scott in 1981, and added that “the always-present possibility of . . . rediscovering an ‘extinct’ species or finding a new one, as was done by team members Tonnie Casey and Jim Jacobi in 1973 on Maui, provides incentive to keep going through the forest.” Shortly before the survey was launched, University of Hawaiʻi students Casey and Jacobi spotted the Poʻo-uli (also known as the Black-faced Honeycreeper), a new species of Hawaiian bird, and the first honeycreeper to be discovered since 1923. This

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event raised awareness of the survey as it got under way, and some of the most respected birders and avian experts in the islands participated in the work, including Sincock, Jim Jacobi, Charles van Riper III, Carter Atkinson, Peter Pyle, Cam Kepler, Jack Jeffrey, Mike Scott, and Tim Burr. The HFBS’s work complemented Sincock’s earlier efforts on Kauaʻi, and Shallenberger’s surveys on Oʻahu. With the HFBS’s monumental labors came the next logical task in Hawaiian bird conservation: how do you get from counting birds to preserving acreages, and thus conserving birds? This is the task that Mike Scott and others have been engaged in for some time. Mike in particular was a linchpin in the development and progress of the HFBS. His efforts were focused on conducting statistically defensible and management-relevant research, with a burning cluster of allied goals: to better understand and document the distribution, abundance, habitat associations, and threat distribution of the endangered forest birds of the Hawaiian Islands. But it wasn’t just about learning these things—it was, even more importantly, about using the information gleaned through grueling transects, insects, terrible weather, and more, to serve as a catalyst for conversation regarding the need for additional protected areas in Hawaiʻi. Mike’s work would inform those discussions and subsequent decision-making for new conservation areas in the islands, and led to development of more rigorous methods for sampling forest birds. He led the effort to establish a management strategy for the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, and has served as connective tissue between a wide range of personalities involved in the quest to better understand Hawaiʻi’s birds. The Nature Conservancy (TNC)—now the world’s largest environmental organization—also took a great interest in the survey, ultimately using its hard-won data to establish 3,800 hectares of forest bird preserves on Molokaʻi and Maui, and supporting U.S. Fish and Wildlife efforts to secure the Hakalau National Wildlife Refuge. From TNC’s ranks a pair of other conservation heroes emerged: Henry Little and Kelvin Taketa. Because the area on the high slopes of Hamakua was particularly rich in species diversity, with high densities of ʻAkiapo¯la¯ʻau, Hawaiʻi Creeper, and ¯ ʻu¯ on adjacent lands, it was designated ʻA¯kepa, and with records of the ʻO

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and established as Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge on October 28, 1985. Mike Scott described both Henry and Kelvin to me as “the deal makers regarding land conservation in Hawaii.” He noted that the two men helped immensely with the transfer of information across the science policy interface.125 TNC had a winning strategy as it began to establish state offices across the country in the early 1970s. “Put the brave and bold gun-slinging dealmakers in the states,” noted TNC chronicler Bill Birchard, “and let them run their own shows, devising daring deals and raising big money.” Henry helped me to understand the role of TNC in the islands. When he was first hired by the national organization in 1972, he noted, the entire organization consisted of just twenty-five to thirty people. There were only three people assigned to the western states. The Institute of Biodiversity Conservation had labeled Kilauea Forest on the Big Island as one of the most important endangered species habitats in the world; Henry was one of the first TNC people on the ground in Hawaiʻi and gave the group’s conservation work an essential jump start. He moved to the islands from the mainland and played a central role in acquiring the land for TNC, busying himself in various spheres. TNC wanted to institute programs at the state level because they could staff them with boards and supporters with particular passions for, and expertise in, local matters. Politics, law, and science all intersected in the organization’s efforts to preserve land and, by extension, to preserve species. Sam Cooke, a senior executive with Dean Witter, was a deeply respected philanthropist and businessman in Hawaiʻi, and in 1980 was recruited by TNC leadership on the mainland to serve as the chair of its Hawaiʻi trustees. By the time Cooke stepped down in 1991, TNC had placed 50,000 acres of land under protection.126 Mike Scott and Henry Little quickly found each other to be likeminded spirits, and they began to put together proposals to preserve acreage. “We put together perhaps ten priorities for pieces of property we wanted to see privately acquired, in order to safeguard what were, at the time, public lands,” Henry told me. “I didn’t do this all by myself. Nothing gets done by one individual. But I was on the hook for it. So we raised money. My job was to start a local program, with people on the ground—so

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we set up a very good local board. Sam Cooke was the chairman.” He told me that there were many dead ends, and leads that didn’t pan out—but with persistence and education he and, by extension, TNC, accomplished an enormous amount on behalf of conservation in the islands. “Mike was a huge part of this because he provided the scientific underpinning,” Henry explained. “Mike and his cadre of scientists—Jim Jacobi, Cam Kepler, and others—did huge things.” Part of TNC’s goal, and among its successes, was raising conservation awareness among powerful people in the islands. Another essential person working with Hawaiian conservation was Kelvin Taketa. Everyone I spoke with described him as a deeply accomplished and sophisticated person, and perhaps the single most effective environmental player in Hawaiʻi in the 1980s. He grew up on a ranch on Oʻahu, tending cattle, surfing, camping, fishing, and generally living a life out in nature. But he wasn’t a scientist, nor bent like one—like most civilians, he couldn’t tell a native plant from an introduced one, and in school he learned his biology from a textbook focusing on the continental United States—“all the pictures showed trees that had lost their leaves in winter,” noted Birchard. Kelvin told me that he spent a lot of time outdoors but knew virtually nothing about the native ecology and the birds. However, by the time he was with TNC in the islands in the early 1980s, he was director of the state’s program and had learned a great deal—right smack in the midst of the efforts of the HFBS. He would often walk barefoot around the office, in true island style, but Taketa—with an undergraduate degree in English and a law degree from the University of California, was charming and highly skilled in argumentation—characteristics that made him extremely persuasive. Taketa also understood the power of local support and engagement. He made a promise to “dissident members of the Hawaiian community: ‘If you’re upset about something, you call me and within twenty-four hours I’ll be here.’ ” He was true to his word, and was no doubt soon on a firstname basis with the airline staff flying from his home base in Hana to other islands. Among other successes he launched, and fully funded, a capital campaign to raise $10 million for conservation projects. Not all were geared toward buying land; sometimes TNC could use the money to settle lawsuits

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Kelvin Taketa of the Nature Conservancy, ca. 1982 (Nature Conservancy, Honolulu)

that would then open the way toward acquisition. That capital campaign was the second largest in Hawaiʻi at the time, bested only in size by one launched by Punahou School, Kelvin’s boyhood alma mater in Honolulu. But beyond the administration, he told me, working for TNC not only changed his lack of knowledge of natural Hawaiʻi—it also led to another understanding: “It made me realize that we were in a race against time, to save what remained that was uniquely ours and a gift to the world. They [the birds] were beautiful but what I remember most is hearing their beautiful songs in the morning in the koa ohia mist and feeling transported in time.”127 Technical tools also helped. One of Scott’s most important contributions to biology, emerging from the HFBS work, was the creation of gap analysis—a tool now used worldwide to assess the conservation status of

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species, ecosystems, and other conservation targets. Mike developed the gap analysis process in the 1980s while at the University of Idaho. In the summer of 1979 a geographer named Jack Estes, a college friend of Scott’s, had visited Mike and his wife, Sharon, on the Big Island. “One evening we were chatting over a glass of wine, when I told him about the challenges I was facing in analyzing forest bird survey data to inform decision makers about the needs for habitat protection,” Mike recalled to me. The discussion led to the application of GIS (geographic information systems), at the time a relatively new geospatial tool for intelligent mapping, to conservation purposes. What gap analysis specifically did was to scrutinize an area containing endangered birds with the habitats proposed as worthy of protecting. “We found that there was an almost total lack of overlap between the reserve areas and the location of the endangered species,” Mike Scott has noted. “The lack of overlap identified the gaps in management protection for the endangered forest birds of Hawaiʻi. A photo of these non-overlapping maps became one of the most powerful tools we had when it came to sharing information from the Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey with the public and especially with the governmental and private organizations that could put the information to use to establish more and better reserves.”128 After his Hawaiʻi work, Mike also became extensively involved in the effort to save condors. From 1984 to 1986 he was the director of the Condor Research Station in Ventura, California. At one point, he told me, he had more people working for him than there were surviving California condors. Nevertheless, that’s the extent of labor necessary to get the hard work of conservation done.129 In 1939 there was an antecedent, or at least a proposal, for an extensive survey of Hawaiian forest birds across all major islands, although it was never done because of a lack of funding from the Territorial Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry (BCAF). A young University of Hawaiʻi graduate student, Paul H. Baldwin, who was working as a park ranger in Hawaiʻi National Park, wrote a long letter to Frank Locey, the BCAF president, in the summer of 1939 to propose such a survey. “I am writing to find out whether you would be interested in having a survey made

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of the forest birds of the Hawaiian Islands,” the twenty-six-year-old wrote. “I feel that a systematic check on the wild birds with attention paid to their economic importance would be highly desirable. The change in the forest bird population which has been in progress for many years with the manwrought changes in the forests and with the introduction of alien species is certain to have an effect upon the forests themselves.” Many of his questions were exactly the kinds of questions conservation biologists of later decades would ask. “What are the roles played by the introduced birds which have increased to large numbers, such as the Mejiro on Oahu and the Pekin Nightingale on Hawaii? . . . Other problems of equal interest are those of the competition with and displacement of native species of similar habits.” Locey answered his note very briefly, noting that the commissioners “would like very much to consider proposition,” but noted that “it would be utterly impossible to do such . . . as there are not funds available.”130 Baldwin had previous experience doing the same work on a smaller scale, having been employed the previous two summers by Haleakala¯ National Park to survey the park’s bird life. His letter mentioned the issue of epizootics among birds, competition for food sources, and the need to better understand breeding and nesting behavior. He had just finished his master’s degree in zoology at UH Ma¯noa and would continue his studies at Harvard. He later completed his PhD at the University of California and wrote authoritatively on the Hawaiian honeycreepers, as well as on the mongoose populations in the park, and ended up on the mainland at Colorado A&M University. But as an energized young man working in the islands he had a great idea, and while the effects of the Depression on Hawaiʻi’s economy were severe, it’s a shame Baldwin’s survey never materialized; it would have added immeasurably to our current understandings of population threats, changes over time, and other factors among Hawaiian forest birds. The short-term outcomes of the HFBS and its enormous labors were unambiguous. The survey clearly identified the threats having the greatest potential negative impact on Hawaiian species, giving land managers, biologists, conservation groups, and others critical information necessary to make decisions involving protection, restoration, and habitat management. It was

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the foundation upon which all subsequent Hawaiian bird conservation efforts have been built.

Biologists of John Sincock’s determination and constant field presence don’t come along every day. But they do come along every few decades, and Sincock—and Mike Scott, and Gene Kridler, and the numerous participants and supporters of the Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey—are each part of a blazing trail set by Perkins, Munro, Palmer, Wilson, and Henshaw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their collecting and observational efforts laid essential groundwork for a different conservation imperative that continues today and that is laid out in the next chapter. It involves actively modifying habitat to preserve endemic species, taking legal action on behalf of endangered species, and widely publicizing the plight of species decline and extinction. ¯ ʻo¯ now, after its extinction, is a kind of zombie The study of the ʻO zoology, to co-opt a term used by historian Sandra Swart. While we can’t exactly bring the birds back to life, their mortal remains are essentially useful. Among other things (and depending on how carefully records were kept by collectors), they can provide information on elevation, reproductive condition, subcutaneous fat levels, body mass, degree of skull ossification as an index of age, internal and external indications of molt, stomach and crop contents, and presence of parasites, along with habitat, micro-habitat, and behavioral data. Additionally, DNA evidence can be taken from specimens more than a century old to better understand evolutionary lineages and many other aspects of a bird’s biology, heritage, and history.131 ¯ ʻo¯ʻa¯ʻa¯ have survived in museum collecAbout 101 specimens of the ʻO tions; they are distributed among seventeen different institutions worldwide. In the Bishop Museum the average weight of the specimens, comprising three males and three females but not counting their leg tags, is around ten grams. Assuming these are typical weights, it means that the total surviving biomass of these birds in museums around the

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globe—including the not-trivial amount of cotton batting stuffed into their body cavities to make them take a shape approaching their living form—is about one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds. That’s the weight of a pineapple. Or a rack of baby back ribs. It’s less than the weight of one adult human brain. Extinction seemed like an abstraction in the nineteenth century. Writing to Perkins in 1892, Newton reported that “the prevalent belief among the London people is that none of the S.I. [Sandwich Island] birds is extinct, but that all will be got.” Perhaps this misunderstanding of extinction’s reality meant that collecting could continue unhindered among even the rarest birds. Sometimes an authority in the late nineteenth century would show a glimmer of restraint in collecting rare species of Hawaiian birds— but only a glimmer. “Would rather the poor birds were let alone,” Alfred Newton wrote to Perkins in 1896, noting that he didn’t want any more examples of the Black Mamo (Drepanis funerea, a bird first discovered by Perkins in 1893)—and then gleefully accepted three more specimens. The bird’s name itself was also evocative of extinction. “Its sombre plumage and the sad fate that too probably awaits the species induce me to propose for it the name of Drepanis funerea,” wrote Newton, noting its “almost lustreless black plumage.” It’s pretty discouraging when a bird’s scientific name reflects something not about its life or characteristics, but about its impending doom.132 After Darwin’s time, collectors had sophisticated understandings of speciation, and knew the value of long series of birds—numerous examples of the same species in museum collections—to understand specific and interspecific changes. At the same time, they prized rare birds for their scientific value: “Probably the most valuable birds from a strictly scientific point of view are the common species of to day since they can be studied in series,” wrote Henshaw to Brewster in 1899, “but the birds that are fast becoming extinct have a priceless value of their own.” This became a key means of rationalizing the killing of nearly extinct birds; they were considered to have tremendous scientific value because they would soon be gone and unavailable for systematic study within bird skin collections. Their very rarity was the rationale for collecting. Sending a list of birds collected by George Munro, the Bishop Museum’s director, Herbert Gregory, wrote

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in 1920 to the Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry, “You will note that nearly all of these birds are very rare, some of them probably extinct and that none are likely ever to be of economic importance. It is highly desirable from the standpoint of scientific work that a duplicate set of these birds should be in the Bishop Museum available for study by all who are interested in the ornithology of the Islands.”133 Naturalists in the early twentieth century were quite concerned about extinction, as it became increasingly apparent with every passing year that a number of species were going out of existence. Sometimes they proclaimed to want to work explicitly to avoid it, but their language was hardly inspirational. “I fully agree that the extermination of species is not a legitimate end in systematic study—and it will ever be the aim of this new Institution [the Pacific Scientific Institution in Honolulu] to gard [sic] against that sort of work,” W. A. Bryan wrote to Richard Sharpe of the British Museum. He observed that the difficulty had always been that every institution wanted complete sets of everything there was in the world, which seemed to mean that they would kill off every bird on the planet if it meant completing their collection. Promising to “guard against extinction” by not killing off every example of a particular species was a very different worldview than actively working to keep a bird population alive.134 Dramatic habitat reduction such as that recounted by Henshaw would have played a key role as well—perhaps the most significant role of all. Collectors adding to museum collections did cut into a bird’s ranks, although their collectings probably took a very minor toll on the birds. Sometimes collectors did take the last remaining birds in existence. Those birds whose numbers were down to, say, a few hundred or less, though, had in all likelihood tipped past the point of survival and were essentially perching and flying ghosts. Still, it’s difficult not to wince at the thought of someone killing a bird that was already so close to extinction. But the losses to bird populations because of collectors’ labors absolutely paled next to the damage caused by cats, rats, mongooses, and habitat loss. Naturalists rarely threw birds out once they were shot and skinned, and the hundred or ¯ ʻo¯ are testament to the drop-in-theso surviving specimens of the Kauaʻi ʻO bucket nature of collecting for scientific purposes.

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While early naturalists could only watch and document, we now have new understandings and tools at our disposal. Still, active conservation work in the twenty-first century is highly challenging, as we’ll see in the case of the Palila in the next chapter. Complicating factors on small Hawaiian islands like Kauaʻi are many. For instance, scientific studies often proscribe solutions such as fencing or weed abatement. “Botanists, ecologists and researchers propose these things,” noted Kauaʻi state wildlife biologist Tom Telfer in 1997, “but they don’t know the cost of maintaining them.” We do now. But the challenges remain. Small local forestry offices are often left to manage the burdens such suggestions involve, which include saddling the landowner with the expenses of long-term maintenance to solve a particular problem such as weeds, or ungulates, or other depredations of endemic bird populations. Public involvement, along with the labors of individuals, have been one key solution to the ongoing work involved in helping endangered species survive.135 Decision makers during Sincock’s time were also confronted regularly with broader questions about the “why” of conservation. For government scientists, the sheer fact of endangerment of these birds was enough to cause them to reflect, often somewhat philosophically, on the rationales for protection. In early 1967, a National Geographic journalist landed on the doorstep of Joseph Linduska, a vertebrate zoologist with the U.S. Department of the Interior. Linduska was responsible for endangered species legislation and was confronted by the reporter with some pressing questions about just why endangered species were worth saving. Linduska found himself hard-pressed to give a coherent answer, and reflected on the experience in a speech reprinted in the July 1968 Elepaio. “We were being baited, of course,” Linduska wrote. “This writer shared our own sense of urgency . . . [but] he was honestly searching for some hard-hitting rationale that would give logic to the mission.” He spent some time reflecting on the matter, and noted that “if you strip away sentiment, morality, conscience, ethics and possibly some religious involvement, I must admit there is little left to convince a big-city baseball fan or a harassed tenement dweller sitting beneath a leaky roof.” Then, though, he got to the heart of the matter: “By now I’m content to abide by the unexplainable sympathy that a great mass

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of people feel for their animal associates on the brink—and let it go at that. Maybe—just maybe—world turmoil and the stresses of modern-day living have engendered an insecurity in ourselves. Maybe, apprehension of our own future has installed a simpatico for the future of others. Or maybe humans, of whom there are too many, have come to identify with those species of which there are too few.”136 And what of the bird itself ? It was the last species of its entire tribe of ʻo¯ʻo¯, which had been found on Oʻahu, the Big Island, Kauaʻi, and Molokaʻi. ¯ ʻo¯ was thought to be extinct for extended periods of time. The Kauaʻi ʻO The last specimen collected in the nineteenth century was taken in 1897, and no more specimens were obtained until Frank Richardson and John Bowles collected one on July 21, 1960. It had been probably seen or heard by others during the twentieth century up until Sincock’s numerous sightings in the 1970s. Given these long gaps, it does seem possible that the bird does survive in a patch of suitable (or, more likely, not ideal but tolerable) habitat somewhere on the island. It prefers high forested canyons— extraordinarily difficult to get to in many cases—rather than forested ridges. Dissections have shown its stomachs to contain insects of various kinds, including snails, as well as lapalapa berries. So it’s conceivable that even without stands of ʻo¯hiʻa trees, some individuals may yet survive in tiny relict populations. As my ecologist friend Julianne Lutz Warren notes, hope is a ¯ ʻo¯ still survive on rascally thing. Or, perhaps, a tiny handful of Bishop’s ʻO Maui. As Sheila Conant noted, “Even when you want to give up, if you just wait a while, you get some good news.” And sometimes, you do.137 Perhaps we can find a shiver of optimism in misplaced expressions of doom from the past. For instance, Henry Henshaw, in writing to Robert Ridgway about native Hawaiian birds he’d seen, noted that “the Buteo [the Hawaiian Hawk, or ʻIo] is doomed to sure and early extinction. Already it is uncommon and rare in localities where numerous a few years ago. Every planter shoots them.” More than a century later that bird’s population is reasonably stable, and widely distributed on the Big Island.138 By extension, Sincock’s observations, and those of his cohort on other islands during this era, also resurrected biologists’ understanding of ¯ ʻo¯’s extinct brethren. There has been a fair amount of talk the dwarf ʻO

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about “resurrection” and “de-extinction” of extinct birds. But I find a different kind of resurrection at play with this work—it’s a beneficial harvest of things: information in the historical record that can help conservation biologists understand an organism’s life histories to in turn help other endangered species; and, on the slim chance that a supposedly extinct species is found, to work out conservation solutions for that species based on details of its life history.

thr ee

Overcoming Extinction Collectors, Stewardship, and the Palila

“When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” —Aldo Leopold

s c i e n t i s t s k n o w m o r e a b o u t the Palila—Loxioides bailleui— than they do about all but a handful of other critically endangered birds in the world. Never abundant, the little yellow, white, and gray finch-billed honeycreeper has been the focus of intense study since its placement on the federal endangered species list in 1967 following the passage of the Endangered Species Preservation Act in 1966. Efforts to conserve the Palila have been both ambitious and contentious, to say the least. Helping keep a critically endangered bird from disappearing forever is usually a highly confounding task, and it can involve action, reaction, finesse, biological excellence, unstinting labor, and, sometimes, creative legal action. It’s a set of activities based on, and sometimes a continuation of, the observational and data-collecting efforts of the naturalists and scientists of the previous two chapters.1 The bird historically inhabited Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, and the Big Island, but now is found only on the latter. A larger-billed extinct species—Pila’s Palila, discovered by Storrs Olson and Helen James and described in 2006—emerged from the fossil record on Kauaʻi. A nexus of collectors and publications swirled around the first descriptions of the Palila’s life history and, simultaneously, around the discovery of other new Hawaiian birds in

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the last decade of the nineteenth century. The Palila was first named as such in an 1890 publication, but it did not live in a vacuum—rather, it was part of an ecosystem of discoveries, birds, plants, and naturalists, whose work in the last decade of the nineteenth century created a constant buzz of interest and discovery for Western science. One of the best descriptions of the Palila was carefully done by George Munro in 1891. Writing in his unpublished journal, Munro noted the male bird as follows: “Entire head and neck deep gamboge yellow, the remainder of the upper surface ashy grey, slightly inclining to whitish on the rump; wing coverts, wing quills, and tail feathers dusky black, edged externally with olive yellow; throat and upper part of breast gamboge yellow, the rest of the undersurface dusky white; irises dark hazel; bill and feet, slaty-purple.” The bird now occupies just 10 percent of its nineteenth century range on the Big Island. It clings precariously to survival, and is found exclusively on the western and southwestern slopes of Mauna Kea on the Big Island, at elevations between 6,500 and 10,000 feet. It now numbers less than 2,000 individuals—a quantity that has fluctuated in the twenty-first century but which has trended precariously downward over the past several years. As Palila expert Paul Banko, a USGS research wildlife biologist at the Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center, told me, “The population estimates have declined 58 percent in the eighteen years since 1998, when annual surveys were standardized to the process we follow today.” It has been at great risk from a variety of depredations, but the most serious of these are the grazing activities of the introduced goats, feral sheep, and especially mouflon sheep. The Palila doesn’t seem to fear people watching from below, as its primary predators have been birds like hawks and owls, which fly at it from above. Consequently, it’s easy to observe. It is a fairly social bird, and it happens to occupy dry forest land that also makes it relatively easy to spot, and to reach, for study. It was docile in earlier decades; Henshaw described it as being “extraordinarily tame so as to be studied without difficulty.”2 Over the centuries the Palila evolved into a seedeater, as witnessed by its thick beak. Despite its classification as a honeycreeper, the Palila is really a seed specialist—the last one in the main Hawaiian Islands. One key reason for its low numbers is this specialized diet and the threats to the habitat that

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supports its key plant: it feeds almost exclusively on the immature seeds inside the durable, fibrous outer pods of the ma¯mane plant (Sophora chrysophylla). These seeds are a concentrated source of protein for the bird, and they include lipids as well. They are also full of something not so delicious: alkaloids, which are toxic to most animals. The extent of the ma¯mane forests and the overall quantity of seedpods on the Palila’s side of the island seem quite substantial when you’re walking through the landscape, but the birds need to range widely across the ma¯mane trees, and to move upslope and downslope—trees at higher elevation flower first, and the birds sample a wide variety of pods. “The habit of endlessly sampling pods, although still not completely understood, indicates more than any other behavior that Palila require more trees in

Palila (from Aves Hawaiienses), December 1890 (Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Cullman Library)

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their home range than would seem needed based just on the quantity of the pods available,” noted a recent volume on Hawaiian forest birds. But ma¯mane offer more than just seeds, as the bird efficiently eats the flower parts, whole immature pods, and developing leaves. Drought has also made life difficult for the Palila—as a seed specialist, it’s unusually vulnerable to disturbances in habitat due to climate change. As Banko told me, “Increasingly, severe and prolonged drought has emerged as the greatest threat to Palila and their habitat.”3 There is also an insect component to their diet, as caterpillars are found on the foliage—but more significantly, the birds eat Cydia plicata, an endemic moth found inside the ma¯mane pods during its caterpillar stage. The caterpillars feed exclusively on the ma¯mane seeds but don’t store the toxic alkaloids, making them a viable food source for Palila nestlings. Palila need both ma¯mane seedpods and caterpillars for their food sources. Alas, there is also a suite of parasitic wasps—some of which have been present for more than a century in the islands—that preys on these caterpillars, affecting up to about 40 percent of the caterpillar population.4 The bird has a low chirp and whistle-like voice. Doug Pratt describes it in his field guide as having a call that’s a “distinctive, rather bell-like chee-clee-o or tee-cleet,” and a song that is a “pleasing, canary-like, but quiet series of whistles, warbles and trills.” When it was heard repeatedly, it was believed to be a sign of coming rain. Its call was often described in 1960s news reports as sounding like a wolf whistle, the stereotypical catcall.5 The ma¯mane tree is perhaps the most critical element in the Palila’s chances for survival—plant and bird are bonded to each other “closer than mother to child.” The ma¯mane tree grows slowly, and it takes twenty-five years for seedlings to mature into a food source for the bird. Some trees may live as long as 500 years. By contrast, the oldest known Palila made it to seventeen years, but the birds tend to live for considerably shorter periods of time—on the order of three to four years. So the trees take a long time to bear food, and the birds have a relatively brief life span and thus have less time to create young—both risk factors for the birds, which generally produce a maximum of two chicks a year, and which produce no young at all when the availability of ma¯mane seeds is low.6

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The first specimen of the Palila known to nonnative peoples was collected in 1876 by Théodore Ballieu (1829–1885)—more properly known as Pierre-Étienne-Théodore Ballieu—the French consul to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi between 1869 and 1878. Arriving in Honolulu in 1869 at the end of June with his wife, Marie, and their two children, Ballieu replaced P. Berenger, who had served a two-year stint as consul. Committed to helping ease poverty in France, Marie Ballieu made an appeal to Honolulu citizens in 1871 to raise money to benefit orphans and widows in Paris. France was also in the throes of war in the early 1870s. News accounts of the Ballieu family noted that the children donated all of their toys to the Paris Fair “among which were some new and rare kinds of German manufacture. There is something suggestive in these little French children in Hawaii,

Pierre-Étienne-Théodore Ballieu, French consul to Hawaiʻi, Honolulu, 1877 (Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Direction des Archives, Paris)

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thus giving their cherished playthings—their wealth it may be said—to feed and clothe their compatriots in far-off France.” Ballieu—an introduced if not invasive species himself—had an obvious and intense fondness for his homeland, and wanted a sense of being connected. In early 1878 Ballieu sold most of his belongings, including all of his household furniture, along with a rosewood piano, mosquito netting, various decanters, a sewing machine, and some rare books, and in April left Honolulu and hopped aboard a steamer to Australia, where he served as the consul to Melbourne in South Australia. Ballieu (whose birth year is often incorrectly noted as 1828 and whose name was misspelled by his colleague Oustalet, who first described the Palila as “Psittirostra bailleui”) was keenly interested in natural history, although he was apparently more focused on fishes and plants than on birds. He secured a total of seven specimens of the Palila, on what is now Puʻu Lehua Ranch on the Kona side of the Big Island.7 Ballieu lived on Nuʻuanu Valley Road in Honolulu for part of his stay—approximately the same location where several key officers of the bird-importing acclimatization society Hui Manu would live in the 1930s. He apparently visited Kona on the Big Island at some point in 1876, where he collected the Palila. He also collected a number of other bird and plant species on the Big Island, and these now reside (as does the co-type for the Palila) in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The National Archives outside of Paris also contains some of his correspondence, as does the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives in Paris.8 Ballieu also discovered a number of fishes new to science, including the Blacktail Wrasse (Thalassoma ballieui), the Sand Wrasse (Coris ballieui), and a small scorpionfish (Scorpaena ballieui). He sent some thirty new species back to Paris in 1877. “The fish skins prepared by him with varnish for the purpose of exhibiting the natural colors, arrived at Paris in perfect order with their original brilliancy undiminished,” reported the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Ballieu also collected several specimens of ¯ ʻo¯, on the Big Island in 1872, and many other Moho nobilis, the Hawaiʻi ʻO plants and animals. He had great ambitions for collecting, writing back to Paris to get permission to purchase the carcass of a “big whale,” and also sending back seashells, the lower jaw of a sperm whale, two boxes of lava

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rocks, and fourteen jars consisting of a hodgepodge of items, including two human skulls of natives.9 Émile Oustalet, a renowned French systematist, noted the following in his May 1877 article about the little honeycreeper (translated here into English for the first time): “I recently had the honor to signal to the Société Philomathique that the Museum has received from its travelers and correspondents in the diverse continents some species of small size which are not without interest. Undoubtedly, the most remarkable one is a Passerine sent from the Sandwich Islands by M. Bailleu [sic] in 1876. In its coloring this bird so closely resembles the Psittirostra that it would be tempting to confuse it with them, if we did not consider the shape of the beak, which is totally different. . . . [T]his species . . . seems to me to constitute a new kind for Science. As for the unique species which forms this genus, and which I shall suggest naming Loxioïdes bailleui, we can give the following diagnosis,” which he then described in French and Latin with the type specimen’s particular measurements and characteristics. The name “bailleui” was then incorrectly carried forward in almost every subsequent use up to the present day.10 The accession logs for the specimens at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris note the name incorrectly assigned the bird at first: Psittirostra psittacea, which is the name of a different bird, the ¯ ʻu¯, which had been first collected in the 1780s and given its current name ʻO in 1820. Either the person responsible for the original log entry misidentified it, or perhaps Ballieu himself misidentified it before realizing his error. In any case, after Oustalet wrote his article on the discovery several months later, he assigned its current scientific name. The type specimen, a male with the accession number 7544A noted in the museum’s records and on the bird’s leg tag, was also accompanied by two other Palila specimens, another male and a female, killed shortly thereafter by Ballieu. In assigning the bird’s scientific name, Oustalet created the genus Loxioides, noting that “while classifying this particular kind of bird among the Loxians, near the Grosbeaks, the Bullfinches, and the Paradoxornis, I consider myself sufficiently authorized, by the physical characteristics I have indicated, to create in its favor a particular genus, the genus Loxioïdes.”

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In 1878 the British ornithological journal Ibis published the first report in English on the discovery, noting the name as Oustalet had published it. The following year Philip L. Sclater of the British Museum reported in more detail on Ballieu’s discovery. In doing so, he further garbled the French consul’s name, noting in the Ibis that “M. Oustalet has described a new genus and species belonging to the Hawaiian avifauna under the name Loxioides bailleni” [sic!]. (This later error-upon-an-error—which appears several times in the article—was clearly just a misunderstanding, as the name on the accompanying plate describes the image as being “Loxioides bailleui.”) The name was thus cemented in the literature with Ballieu’s name misspelled in both the original French publication and both instances of the Ibis’s mention of the discovery.11 No one today seems likely to confuse the bird’s name with another (although there is a speech disorder known as “palilalia,” characterized by the involuntary repetition of syllables, words, or phrases, first described by French neurologist Alexandre Achille-Souques, a contemporary of Ballieu’s in the late nineteenth century). But the Hawaiian name “Palila” is not without controversy—or at least it was critiqued in 1893 in a Bishop Museum report on the institution’s natural history collections. A description of the museum’s specimen of the bird noted that “Mr. Wilson [author of Aves Hawaiienses, where the bird’s Hawaiian name was first noted in print, in Part I in December 1890] gives Palila as the native name, but I know of no authority for it,” remarked the author dryly. “Mr. Wilson’s native names are often wrong, as he accepted names from natives who no longer retain the careful nomenclature of the ancients.”12 The Palila was also written up in Part 3 of Rothschild’s Avifauna of Laysan, issued in December 1900. This volume implies that Henry Palmer, Rothschild’s collector, may have been the source for the name: “The ‘Palila,’ as Palmer heard this called, was discovered by Bailleu [sic] in the Kona district of Hawaii.” In fact, the bird may well have had the native name ¯ ʻu¯ poʻopapale (“Capped ʻO ¯ ʻu¯”), another nod toward the similar ʻO ¯ ʻu¯ (Psittirostra psittacea)—and just similar enough to “Palila” to possiʻO bly cause Wilson to misrender the bird’s Hawaiian name. For his part, Wilson described the term “Palila” as its “liquid and euphonic native

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name.” George Munro, who wrote Birds of Hawaii in 1944 after a halfcentury working with Hawaiian birds, noted that “the name refers perhaps to the gray color of the bird.” Indeed, “puahia” and “po¯hina” both are synonyms for “gray” in Hawaiian.13 Trying to accurately render Hawaiian names from the spoken to the written was nothing new, though. John Cassin, one of the earliest describers ¯ ʻo¯, noted, “Though we are not disposed to regard the of the Hawaiʻi ʻO native names of animals as entitled to much consideration, we may be allowed to observe that the name of this bird must sound quite differently to different persons.” He then rendered several people’s interpretations of the ¯ ʻo¯,” and noted, “These names are of no zoological or Hawaiian word “ʻO other importance whatever, and are not worth mentioning, except to show that there is no reliance whatever to be placed in them.”14 The earliest unpublished use of the name that I’ve been able to locate was in May 1891, in Munro’s diary, in which he notes he had been working through some of Wilson’s papers on Hawaiian birds, although the name must have appeared in previous writings.15 It’s also possible that Munro provided the first description of a Palila nest and egg, as he noted in his journal entry for October 16, 1891: “We went down to the nest that I had found some time ago, but the egg was still there and the nest evidently deserted, the egg is very like a sparrows with a ring of spots round the thick end, the bottom part of the nest was of small twigs the top of leaves and lined with roots, it was in a mamani tree, and we think it is probably a palilas.” This conforms pretty closely with a 1970 article describing the eggs in detail: “Reddish-brown markings formed a dense cap around the larger end of each egg.”16 It’s also important to keep in mind that Wilson’s book, despite its long gestation and useful details of life history and other descriptions of Hawaiian birds, was at best an incomplete snapshot. Many of the descriptions were based on his own limited time in the islands, and while he took in information from others working there as best as he could, he missed a great deal. “Wilson certainly did not do them [the forest birds of Oʻahu, which proved depressingly depleted by the end of the nineteenth century] as much as he might,” noted Newton to Perkins in 1892.17

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There’s another aspect of the history of the bird’s name in print. It’s long bothered me that the scientific name for the Palila contains an obvious transcription error, with two vowels in his name switched (“bailleui” instead of “ballieui,” as it is for the aforementioned fish species that bear his name). There are many reasons scientific names have changed over the centuries, ranging from rules for priority to shifts in taxonomic philosophy to an increased understanding of the interrelationships of animals and plants. But sometimes it’s possible to fix a name because an obvious error resulted in its creation. I tried to get the Palila’s scientific name rectified in 2014 by submitting a formal paper to Zootaxa, the international journal that presents taxonomic matters in zoology, proposing an official name change. As it turns out, the Palila was shortchanged by the Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which had been established at the start of the twentieth century. Terry Chesser, the editor who handles bird name matters for Zootaxa, was very helpful, but thought the name had little chance of being changed. Article 32.5.1 of the code reads, “If there is in the original publication itself, without recourse to any external source of information, clear evidence of an inadvertent error, such as a lapsus calami or a copyist’s or printer’s error, it must be corrected.” This would seem like a clear rationale for changing the name. But as Terry pointed out to me, “In this case the name was misspelled consistently both in the general text of Oustalet’s paper (as Bailleu) and in the description of the new scientific name (as bailleui), so that the error is not discernible from the publication itself, but instead relies on external knowledge of the correct spelling of the name.” I think it’s likely that Oustalet misunderstood Ballieu’s name from the start, and thus thought he was writing the name correctly. So it probably wasn’t a printer’s error but, rather, Oustalet’s. But enough about the bird on paper, and onto the bird in the bush. Paul Banko has extensively studied the Palila in the field for decades. Paul and his father, Win, who had arrived on O‘ahu in 1965 as part of the federal Endangered Wildlife Research Program before moving to the Big Island the next year, have both had extensive involvement with the Palila, and Paul has dedicated his career to studying the bird. Coming with his father to the islands as a teenager, Paul worked odd jobs at the Volcanoes National Park on

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the Big Island before heading to the mainland and receiving his PhD in wildlife science from the University of Washington at Seattle. He then returned to Hawaiʻi. In 1988 Banko would join the Palila Restoration Project, ultimately becoming its head. Paul—like Storrs Olson—had science on the brain at an early age and, like Storrs’s father, was drawn to oceanography. However, Paul remarked, “After a year or so of college I came to the conclusion that it was biology I was interested in, so I became more and more of a biologist academically. When I graduated, my dad at that point still didn’t have any staff, or an official vehicle.” So Paul returned to help his father, who had become very interested in parasitoid wasps and other potential food competitors, and their effects on avian communities in Hawaiʻi. “At that point we were working very closely together; the Park Service gave me odd jobs; I took care of the dogs they used for pig control, and then took on work doing goat control myself.” He also went out in the summer to look for and survey ʻAlala¯. “We worked very incrementally, taking it as it came,” he told me.18

Paul Banko at Kı¯puka Puaulu, Big Island, 2016 (Photo courtesy of Paul Banko)

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During the 1890s and early 1900s Palila could be found in the North and South Kona districts and in a much wider area on Mauna Kea. The Palila’s prehistoric range also included at least the islands of Hawaiʻi, O‘ahu, and Kauaʻi. Bones of the Palila have been found at elevations as low as sea level on Oʻahu and Kauaʻi—evidence of a dramatically greater elevation range and distribution for the bird. The Palila is now the last native species on the main islands to be found exclusively in dry forest, or in shrub habitats. (The closely related Nihoa Finch and Laysan Finch are found considerably farther to the west, in the leeward islands in the archipelago.)19 Early naturalists on the Big Island found the bird to be pretty common. Because they were located on the Big Island for months, Palmer and Munro collected a substantial number of Palila. The two men often went in separate directions on any given day, presumably to double their collecting successes, but they also often worked a few hundred yards apart. In September 1891, Munro noted he had seen “a good number of Palila and shot 7, they seemed to be in company and very tame, they had a low chirp, our specimens do not agree with Mr. Wilson’s description in the colour of the legs and bills ours being brownish.” They found the birds mostly on exposed ʻaʻa¯ (rubbly basaltic lava) fields with scattered koa and other smaller trees. Henshaw also described the Palila as “extraordinarily tame” in 1903 when he collected a number of specimens at around 8,000 feet.20 There were other birds in similar circumstances on the Big Island as well. The dry side of the Big Island was productive for other endangered species during the same time that the Palila was busily being collected. Chloridops kona—the Kona Grosbeak—was, in some ways, a cousin of the Palila—it had a specialized diet, a beak suited to cracking hard things, and a dry habitat on the slopes of Mauna Kea. It was also confused with the Palila in print; Perkins once inadvertently referred to it as the Palila, and Wilson and Evans repeated Perkins’s error in the 1890 printed account of the bird, noting the Hawaiian name of Chloridops kona as “Palila” and reprinting Perkins’s erroneous note in the British journal Ibis: “The Palila (Chloridops kona), though an interesting bird on account of its peculiar structure, is a singularly uninteresting one in its habits.” Although this has been

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described by Peter Pyle as a “printer’s misdirective,” it’s hard to imagine that it was merely a technical error, given Perkins’s specific wording.21 Although Wilson found it “extremely rare” in 1887, it’s clear that Palmer and Munro encountered a concentration of the birds in the fall of 1891—and almost certainly more than any other westerners had seen of the now-extinct Kona Grosbeak, collecting at least thirty-one specimens. They obtained their first bird on September 24, 1891: “I heard some birds on my right front, when P[almer] called out that there were some near him. I looked and saw a bird alight within shot of me, just then I heard a crack like P described he heard the one of yesterday, getting a sight of the bird I recognized him and brought it down, our delight was great; and whilst admiring it heard another crack as of a footstep breaking a branch. P made for the spot and quickly secured another, probably a pair, they are a most peculiar bird. . . . If they crack the aaka [naio] or bastard sandlewood seeds they would require a strong bill as it is as much as I can do to break them with my teeth.” In a three-day period alone, they collected at least nineteen specimens of the bird, which Alfred Newton called “the exaggerated Green Finch.”22 The bird was usually well camouflaged; as Munro noted, “We would hardly find this bird but for the sound it makes in cracking the seeds.” The men also noted behavioral details: “The birds seem to go a good deal in communities,” Munro noted. “These birds are active in their movements hopping about the aaka bushes with alacrity, they do not shew a short neck the head being held away from the shoulders the weight of the bill does not seem to inconvenience them at all, their call is a rather low cheep repeated at intervals and I have an idea that we heard one sing a short song the other day.” Munro also provided some details of food found in the bird’s stomach: “I noticed green leaves cut up small in a konas throat this is the first of anything but aaka nuts I have found in them, have seen the green seeds cut up and swallowed, but as a rule the throat is full of little maggot like kernels of the nuts, they are about 1/8 of an inch long & look very like a small maggot having a dark spot on the end.”23 Munro and Perkins also examined the birds’ stomach contents (“Their stomachs were full of broken pieces and the small kernel of the seeds of the

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aaka”), and Munro noted the difficulty of skinning such a big-headed bird. “The skin is very tender and we had a difficulty in getting it over the head, bursting the skin of both birds, but we got the holes sewed up again after returning the heads, they have very strong muscles round the jaws and a thick tongue like a parrot’s.” They found the birds at higher elevations not far from Kona, and almost always on the lava fields. The bird, though, may have been extinct by the end of 1892, the last year it was sighted.24 The other bird that seemed allied to the Palila, and with which it was ¯ ʻu¯ (Psittirostra psittacea, which had sepafrequently confused, was the ʻO rate Hawaiian names for male and female birds). It had been long known in the islands to westerners, having been described in the scientific literature in 1789. Ballieu initially described his new bird in the 1876 inventory of specimens as Psittirostra psittacea because its thick, seed-cracking, parrotlike bill seemed to put it into the parrot class of birds. Writing about the Palila in a Bishop Museum report sixteen years later, one author noted, “This bird is called ou, as often as anything.” Confusion abounded.25 Oustalet himself noted the possibility for mix-ups between the two birds, saying about the Palila, “Par l’ensemble de ses couleurs cet oiseau rappelle tellement les Psittirostra qu’on serait tenté de le confondre avec eux, si l’on ne tenait compte de la forme du bec qui est totalement différente” (“In its coloring this bird so closely resembles the Psittirostra that it would be tempting to confuse it with them, if we did not take into consideration the shape of the beak, which is totally different”).26 The similarities between the two birds were also detailed by Scott Wilson in 1890 in Aves Hawaiienses: “It will be at once observed that Loxioides in general appearance is closely allied to Psittirostra. The form, size, and distribution of colours are similar. When we come to a closer comparison of the skins, the result arrived at is the same. The wing-formula is nearly the same in each. . . . The structure of the feet in the two forms is also nearly similar.” He noted that the beak really was the differentiating characteristic, but that “there cannot be the slightest doubt that they are very nearly allied, and must be placed next to one another in the system.”27 To observers of the living bird, though, there could be no confusion ¯ ʻu¯’s song was everything the Palila’s was not. between the two, for the ʻO

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Henshaw, writing to Brewster in 1899, sang its praises: “There is one singer here that will rank as high, I think higher, than any of our birds of its class. I refer to the Ou (Psitt. psittacaea). The song is the canarys song with an infusion of the Purple Finch, rich varied and loud. This bird is easily first in the H. birds and it would prove an ornament to any avian company. It is very numerous; its habits are interesting; it is beautiful and it sings well. What more can a bird lover ask?” He elaborated further in print in his 1902 book on Hawaiian birds. Referring to its canary-like song, he noted, “In Olaa it is the general belief that the woods are full of escaped cage birds.”28 And finally, the Palila also looks quite a lot like the Nihoa Finch, Telespiza ultima, whose Spanish name, in fact, is “Palila de Nihoa.” The genus is sometimes subsumed into Loxioides and has been included in ¯ ʻu¯, and the Nihoa Finch, there’s Psittirostra. So among the Palila, the ʻO been ample room for confusion. As with other Hawaiian birds, the Palila also had relatives long gone. The little honeycreeper we know today wasn’t alone on the islands in prehistoric times; in 2006, a new and hitherto unsuspected ancestor of the Palila emerged from the subfossil record when James and Olson discovered it. They named it after a collaborator, Bill (Pila) Kikuchi, who died of prostate cancer, in honor of both his work and teaching and his family’s hospitality. Helen James placed the new species in the same genus—Loxioides—as the Palila, in 2004.29 Pila’s Palila is known only from two examples of one maxilla—one half of a beak. In the case of Pila’s Palila, Helen James and Storrs Olson examined twenty other species of birds—almost all from the Hawaiian archipelago—that had beaks most closely related to the beak part they had found: three Palilas, three Laysan Finches, two Nihoa Finches, a Greater Koa Finch, a Lesser Koa Finch, a Kona Grosbeak; and three birds known only from the fossil record: a Wahi Grosbeak, the wonderfully named King Kong Grosbeak, a Highland Finch and, for good measure, a pair of Eurasian birds: a Eurasian Bullfinch and a Grey-headed Bullfinch. Big-beaked birds all, and none of them the same as Pila’s Palila.30 In considering the issues facing the critically endangered Palila, it’s useful to understand the endemic species at the other end of the spectrum

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of scarcity and abundance among endemic Hawaiian birds: the ʻApapane (Himatione sanguinea). If you’ve gone looking for any endemic birds during a visit to the islands, chances are you’ve seen Hawaiʻi’s most abundant honeycreeper: the ʻApapane—readily seen and well distributed on every major island. The gorgeous, blood-red quality of this bird is apparent in its name—the sanguinea in its scientific name. But also implied is the quality of sanguinity—that of being wise. Like the Palila, the ʻApapane is a member of the Hawaiian honeycreeper subfamily Drepanidinae. But the similarities stop there, in both their physical appearance and their odds of survival. Unlike the Palila, the male ʻApapane was blessed—or perhaps cursed—with bright crimson feathers that cover its entire body. These feathers, along with those of the ʻIʻiwi, were once used to adorn many of the ʻahuʻula (capes), mahiole (helmets), and na¯ lei hulu (feather leis) of aliʻi (Hawaiian nobility). These objects had enormous cultural resonance: they signified rank, class, and financial success, and the battle cloaks—huge swaths of fabric and feather— had a mana, or supernatural power, of their own. Since its first Western description near the end of the eighteenth century by Cook and other contemporaries, the ʻApapane has floated around in different genera, and has been placed in various speculative taxonomies. English naturalist John Latham, the person to first describe this bird, gave it the common name of “Crimson Creeper.” He described it as “the body in general crimson, the upper parts deepest,” noticing the same things the earliest Hawaiians engaged in featherwork would have noticed. It was also known as “Le Soui-manga sanguinolent,” or the Bloody Sunbird, by the prolific French naturalist Buffon, whose work on birds provides some of the earliest descriptions.31 As a generalist among native Hawaiian birds the ʻApapane’s story is one of survival, and its persistence in the face of threats from habitat loss, mosquito-borne diseases, and heavy use of its bright red feathers by native Hawaiians and others for decorative and ceremonial uses. It also is no doubt a help to its survival that the ʻApapane is just one of four species of native birds that travel seasonally to other islands, probably fairly commonly, or is readily pushed from island to island during

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storms. Along with a large population and a variety of suitable habitats and elevations, this range gives the bird access to deep genetic diversity. The ʻApapane’s varied diet has also helped it survive. While it greatly prefers the nectar of the ʻo¯hiʻa lehua blossom, and has evolved a bill optimized for extraction of nectar, it supplements that diet considerably—primarily with a wide range of insects: butterflies and moths, spiders, bees, wasps, ants, bark lice, flies, beetles, and mites, among others. A true generalist and opportunist, it has even been documented feeding on the flowers of the ubiquitous coconut palms in the islands.32 The current genus for the ʻApapane, Himatione, is a lovely conflation of European and Hawaiian military notions. It was coined by a German ornithologist, Jean Louis Cabanis, in the middle of the nineteenth century. The word stems from the Greek himation, the Spartan military cloak, always blood-red to hide injuries that might encourage the enemy. The same coloration strategy would have applied to the Hawaiian war cloaks, which could include vast numbers of red feathers—up to a half-million per cloak. So in a key way, the generic and specific names of the ʻApapane are a multicultural bundle of linguistics—a reflection of its color, its cultural significance, and its role in battle. The bird itself, after all, is draped in a red cloak of its own making.33 Like many Hawaiian forest birds, the ʻApapane form small flocks and get their nectar from the flowers of the ʻo¯hiʻa lehua trees, where they sip nectar and pollinate the flowers simultaneously. The bird sings actively and with complexity; Doug Pratt’s field guide describes the voice as having “incredibly varied calls and songs, including squeaks, whistles, rasping notes, clicking sounds and melodic trills.” Sometimes the calls are “pleasant and rather canary-like,” and sometimes “harsh and mechanical-sounding.” The songs also apparently vary from location to location. The Handbook of Birds of the World describes the song as “usually long and resembling that of a canary . . . but with mechanical-sounding, reedy and dissonant notes,” which makes it sound a bit like a wine review. The birds sing at all times of the day, and their diverse vocal repertoire means that ʻApapane have six different calls and approximately ten different recorded patterns of singing. Both males and females build the nests, but the male is especially

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loudmouthed—he sits on a branch adjacent to the nest and sings continuously during incubation of the eggs, while the female doesn’t sing at all. This active whistling and chirping apparently serves the function of keeping potential interlopers at bay.34 On a spring day in 1898, Henshaw noted that he saw thousands of both ʻIʻiwi and ʻApapane. “I was up on the Volcano road the other day,” he wrote to Robert Ridgway at the Smithsonian, “and collected 50 specs. mostly Iiwis & Apapanis . . . had a fine chance to study habits.” Unlike the Palila, there are a lot of ʻApapane—a comforting thought, at least, to understand that a bird which spent more than a million years evolving in isolation is still going strong. From island to island they exhibit no geographic variation—pretty clear evidence that they have been able to move across ocean boundaries between islands regularly for a long time. They are the most abundant native bird in Hawaiʻi, and in some places, especially during spring and early summer, their density exceeds 600 birds per square kilometer, and perhaps as high as 3,000 birds per square kilometer when ʻo¯hiʻa are flowering. On the Big Island, their numbers are estimated at more than 1 million. The second-largest population, on Maui, tops 100,000 individuals, and Molokaʻi has a healthy population of about 40,000 birds. All six forested islands have populations of the birds, which can sometimes drop down to lower elevations near sea level. Naturalists have weighed in for a long time about their subsequent chances of success. “Some species like the Elepaio, the Iiwi and the Apapane will always remain,” noted Henry Henshaw to his friend William Brewster in 1899. No one ever said that kind of thing about the Palila, despite its being fairly widespread on the Big Island at the same time, and the two birds live at opposite ends of the extinction spectrum.35 A bird’s ability to survive, however, isn’t based just on its generalist abilities. More often, geography is destiny. A version of the ʻApapane evolved in isolation farther northwest up the island chain, on the little island of Kauo¯, also known as Laysan Island, nearly a thousand miles northwest of the main islands. Kauo¯ is about 1,000 acres, quite flat, and with a large hypersaline lake in its center. The bird was first discovered in 1828 by C. Isenbeck, a Russian ship’s doctor on the Moller, but not named until 1891, by Walter Rothschild. It evolved distinctly different habits, such as

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feeding on the ground, given the relative lack of trees. Its color was lighter but still brilliant, with a shorter and stouter bill. It thus had relatively little access to nectar-producing plants. Unlike its relatives, it was also a weak, low flier. Its song was also considerably different. In 1894 a well-meaning sea captain named Max Schlemmer released domesticated rabbits on Laysan, with the goal of providing food for shipwrecked sailors as well as a source for a proposed meat-canning business. The rabbits could reproduce much faster than the ʻApapane, which wasn’t so good for the bird’s habitat, which the rabbits ate with gusto. Rothschild offered up the subspecific name “freethii” in honor of Englishman George D. Freeth, a middling guano magnate who’d gotten the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi to grant him twenty-year rights to mine phosphate deposits on Laysan Island and neighboring Lisianski Island, with the kingdom getting fifty cents per ton of the harvest. He moved to Hawaiʻi and married a local girl. Freeth was very interested in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. As Storrs Olson and others have argued, though, the subspecific name “fraithii” should be used, because that was how Rothschild had named it in The Avifauna of Laysan in 1892. And indeed, in 2015 the American Ornithologists’ Union promoted the bird to status as a full species—Himatione fraithii—well after its extinction, rather than as a subspecies of the ʻApapane found on the main islands, based on its song, feeding habits, nest placement, and structure, habitat, and morphology.36 The honeycreeper’s demise can be dated to within a single week—a rare circumstance. Scientists on the Tanager Expedition, a series of biological surveys of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 1923 and 1924, witnessed the extinction of this bird after a bad series of sandstorms between April 23 and 27, 1923, killed the last three Laysan Honeycreepers. The expedition, which was tasked to study the islands’ natural history, had many rough days. The imminence of extinction seemed to have taken a toll on the men, although mostly the hardships were the worst of it. “To Hell with it [the sea] and its islands, is the way I feel tonight,” expedition photographer Donald Dickey wrote in his diary. The storm was certainly worse for the birds—the world lost a species, after all—but the humans had a rough time of it too. “Hell of a day,” wrote Dickey on the second day. “The gale

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and blinding sandstorm continues unabated and life in the open or in the tents or tumble-down shacks is equally unbearable. . . . Life is plain hell, with grit in food, eyes and everything.” Humans suffer, but we remain centered on ourselves, and the temporary privations of island life diminish the fact of other species’ extinction to a footnote. The Laysan Honeycreeper is also a good exemplar of the complications of extinction. Storrs Olson has pointed out that the island also contained egg predators such as the Bristle-Thighed Curlew—another risk factor. Although the birds could survive, they couldn’t reproduce very well. “So what’s the cause of extinction?” Storrs asked rhetorically. “The sandstorm? A Bristle-Thighed Curlew? The rabbits? Or Max Schlemmer, who put the rabbits on the island?” Rarely does extinction come from a single deadly cause, but rather it is the result of a cascade of events.37

Mosquitoes, Pox, and Malaria Like most other honeycreepers, the Palila has also suffered from avian diseases, typically transmitted by mosquitoes beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing to the present. Luckily, though, it has not been as susceptible to those diseases as many of its brethren. Avian diseases have been probably one of the two greatest threats to species survival of Hawaiian birds—the other being habitat loss. All endemic Hawaiian birds lost their immunity to continental diseases through long isolation and the process of evolution. Bird pox—a viral infection—is also known as “bumblefoot” because of the lumpy lesions it creates, often on feet as well as on other areas of exposed skin. It exists around the world in species ranging from Galapágos finches to wild turkeys, and has been known since the late nineteenth century in Hawaiian birds. Avian malaria, a disease caused by parasites in the genus Plasmodium, has been known in the islands since the early twentieth century. It produces only slight effects in birds on continents, but readily kills birds that have evolved in isolation. The key culprit in transmission of these woes is the mosquito. There are currently seven species of mosquitoes present in Hawaiʻi. All are imports. The standard narrative, which has come down from the

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Reverend William Richards, noted that the mosquito arrived in Lahaina sometime in 1826. As D. L. Van Dine, an entomologist with the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station, noted in his 1904 pamphlet Mosquitos in Hawaii, Rev. Richards was returning to Lahaina one evening and met a native who informed him there was a new “fly” in the place. “The native described the insect as being a very peculiar ‘fly’ that made its presence known by a ‘singing in the ear,’ ” Van Dine related. (The story had also been relayed earlier, briefly, by William Alexander in his 1891 book A Brief History of the Hawaiian People. It is Alexander who seems to have first described the mosquito’s arrival in 1826—a date that has since been taken as gospel.) As Van Dine reported, “Some time after its arrival, the natives complained of an insect that sung in their ears at night. [Richards’] investigations verified the presence of quantities of a night-flying mosquito. The natives had no previous name for such an insect, which suggested that it was new to the country. From then on the natives called it ‘Makika.’ ” They were purportedly in a cask of water from a ship named the Wellington, which had called at San Blas in Mexico en route and taken on water. The Reverend Richards had been in charge of the mission station at Lahaina, on Maui.38 But deep investigations in the archival record undermine this account. I was unable to find any record of a ship named Wellington arriving on Maui, or anywhere else, in the islands in 1826. If Alexander’s account was at least partially correct, though, it would’ve been a British naval ship, and a ship by that name was described as being “English” in at least one missionary’s journal account. Given the lack of archival evidence of the arrival of an American ship by that name, this makes sense. The route from Mexico to Hawaiʻi was sparsely traveled until the early 1840s, primarily because of the unsettled political situation in Mexico at the time. In June 1822, however, an English ship by that name came up to Honolulu from San Blas, originating in Lima. This Wellington must’ve been in bad shape, because within several months it was sold for scrap in Honolulu, its wood purchased by the Hawaiʻi Mission Society for $600 and used for “plank and timber for building,” and its bell presented for use by the church.39 The earliest account of mosquitoes in Hawaiʻi that I’ve been able to locate in primary source documents is a journal entry by missionary Levi

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Chamberlain, who noted in his journal on August 16, 1826, writing in Honolulu, that he was “not a little annoied by the musquetoes.” An account from 1827 also notes that a doctor in Lahaina reported a “strange new itch” caused by an insect whose sound was characterized as “singing in the ear.” The insect—Culex quinquefasciatus—has a flight range of at least fourteen miles, and could have readily spread to other islands if borne part or all of the way by wind or boat. But I think the mosquito arrived a few years earlier—perhaps on the Wellington, or perhaps on another vessel calling on O‘ahu. I speculate that the insect first arrived on O‘ahu in 1822, or earlier, perhaps in some isolation, and then made its way to the Lahaina area to be recorded by Reverend Richards. I ran this idea by Neal Evenhuis, senior entomologist at the Bishop Museum, and he noted that it would make sense for several years to pass before more than one person, and from different islands, would have “heard” the mosquito. “It also fits the normal curve for introduced species here,” Neal observed, “a slow increase at first, then after a few years, a huge spike, then numbers slowly dying down as natural predators and parasites start to control the increase.”40 A different boat named Wellington, a British brig, arrived at Honolulu on July 27, 1828, ninety-eight days after leaving Sydney, Australia. “Given the prevailing winds and currents, it is possible she stopped along the Mexican coast before sailing west into the Pacific,” postal historian Fred Gregory told me, “but I cannot document that it did. There is no other ship named Wellington in the time frame.” But the mosquitoes clearly arrived before this Wellington.41 Certainly, the insects were a decided pest within a few years. Writing from Wailuku in 1835, missionary wife Clarissa Armstrong complained that “the musquetoes (!) have got here and are increasing fast.” Missionary Amos Starr Cooke wrote in his journal in 1837 that “sleep was somewhat taken from me on account of being annoyed more or less with na Makika (Musquitoes),” and that in Kaneohe, he was “very much fatigued and annoyed with musquitoes.”42 The little beasts soon worked their way up to higher elevations, and a report in 1847 from the Big Island by James Jarves, the editor of the Honolulu newspaper The Polynesian, who was taking a trek up to Kilauea

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and the volcanic caldera there, noted that mosquito netting was recommended for the trip, “for we had some trouble from the bilious wretches before we got through” the days-long hike up to the crater. The expedition also encountered the creatures at the Volcano House (known then as the Pitman House, the building was originally a one-room structure built on the Kilauea caldera a couple of years earlier by American businessman Benjamin Pitman), situated at an elevation of 4,000 feet. “In favor of the house, though we cannot vouch for its continuance,” continued Jarves, “we found no fleas; a mosquito now and then signified he was in attendance with his bill.” By the late 1850s the Polynesian would report that “mosquitos are rather sharp at nights now in Honolulu,” and they seem to have spread to every island in the lower elevations by then.43 The influx of mosquitoes has meant that endemic forest birds, which lacked protections against pox and malaria, have been pushed up to higher elevations that are colder and thus free of mosquitoes, leaving the lowlands even more denuded of forest birds. However, birds that normally lived only in the mountains would sometimes show up at lower elevations when conditions were right. Writing in a Hawaiian-language newspaper in 1871, one author noted that “they [the native birds] are tiny birds with beautiful voices, and their feathers as well, and they were an enjoyment in our childhood; when times of strong winds arrived, all the birds of the mountains would alight and show up at the doors of the houses which was entertaining for us to watch them flitting amongst the leaves of the ilima [a native shrub] in our childhood and they were a playmate in our youth.” Others wrote of this phenomenon as well, especially on Maui, where birds were frequently blown down from the mountains to settlements along the coast.44 There was a substantial lag—apparently more than a half-century— between the arrival of the first mosquitoes sometime in the 1820s and the first anecdotal reports of birds with lumps or sores on their bodies. Munro noted in his diary in May 1891 that some ʻApapane “shot at Makawili had sores on their feet like the other birds in that locality at that time.”45 He then copied the text out and mailed it to Wilson, who published the description of the lesions in Aves Hawaiienses, and that appears to be their first mention in print. Later in the year he wrote in his journal from the Kona area on the

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Big Island, “A young drepanis has a lump in the skin on the back of its head as big as the head itself.”46 Avian malaria, a much less visible disease, first appeared in Hawaiian birds early in the twentieth century. It has proven to be one of the greatest threats of all. The arrival of mosquitoes seems to have been the decisive event that led to spread of the disease in native birds. The consensus is that it arrived in the early 1900s—well before the mid-1930s, when its presence was confirmed by blood smears made in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. “The most likely avenue was in the many nonnative birds that were released to replace declining native species,” research microbiologist Carter Atkinson of the USGS’s Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center told me, “but the origins are still under debate.” Although the lineage of the parasite Plasmodium relictum in the islands is primarily traced to an Old World parasite, a recent study based on molecular data suggests that it might have come in with an introduced passerine from North America—possibly implicating the Hui Manu, an acclimatization society, or else the Hawaiʻi Board of Agriculture and Forestry, both of which introduced many thousands of individual passerines starting around 1910.47 The writings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about avian pox were purely observational, and only rarely even speculative. These perspectives then gave way to systematic investigation and execution of a plan to actually combat pox and malaria, including the introduction of sterilized or genetically modified mosquitoes. There is, however, some good news concerning the Palila and both avian pox and malaria: it seems that the high-elevation dry ma¯mane forest where the birds live is poor habitat for mosquitoes. Paul Banko has seen what appear to be pox lesions in Palila at lower elevations, and birds are probably also infected with malaria, but as Paul told me, “It is likely that malaria and pox have little or no impact on them.” Atkinson, an expert on disease issues with Hawaiian birds, concurred, noting that, in effect, the Palila’s relatively high-elevation habitat helps them. This could change in the next half-century as both disease transmission and mosquitoes move to higher elevations. But for the moment the Palila seems relatively safe from both diseases.48

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Legal Matters Many things beyond biology have influenced the density and survival of Hawaiian birds. Because much of the Palila’s story relates to its legal status and the various legal actions taken on its behalf, it’s useful to recount some of the judicial history of protection of birds in the islands. Both abundance and scarcity of endemic species, as well as of introduced species, were relevant for lawmakers. Surprisingly, the 1859 Penal Code of the Hawaiian Kingdom provided protection of, and support for, introduced species as much as for endemic ones. Birds (along with many other animals) were allowed into the kingdom duty-free if they were “imported for the purpose of improving or extending the breeds of these animals within this kingdom.” King Kamehameha also passed an act for the protection of “useful birds,” which explicitly included migrating birds such as the Ko¯lea, but also encompassed nonnative species. “The law has taken plover and other insectivorous birds under its wing,” trumpeted The Polynesian after passage of the code. “Imported birds are protected by heavier penalties. Here then is a pleasing little tribute to the agricultural interests. We are beginning to keep a more steady eye on our internal resources.”49 The penalties could be stiff. Kill or sell any insectivorous bird that had been brought from another country specifically for propagating its species within the kingdom, and the fine was $10. Presumably the fine was much heavier for introduced birds because their presence wasn’t as seemingly guaranteed as that of the reliably migrating birds that had come and gone from the islands for centuries, as well as because of their apparent use in aiding agriculture and eliminating pest insects. These fines, though, paled compared to others in the code. Got caught distilling your own liquor? Up to $1,000! Refuse to have your ship searched? The same. (By point of comparison, the police justice of Hilo earned an annual salary of $1,000, as specified in the same code under the appropriately numbered Section 911.) Half of any fines collected for bird-related offenses were to go to the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society, and half to the Royal Hawaiian Native Agricultural Society.50 An 1870 law also reinforced protection of introduced birds, insectloving or not. “Any person who shall shoot, snare or otherwise destroy any

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bird, brought from a foreign country for the purpose of propagating its species within this Kingdom, or any of the progeny of such imported bird,” would be fined $10 or imprisoned.51 This law was still on the books in 1915, except that the fine had gone up, and the protected birds were all those “beneficial to forests.” These protections were defined to include the Ne¯ne¯ and all perching birds, with a few new specific exceptions: the House Sparrow, the House Finch, the Rice Bird, the Myna, and—astonishingly—the ʻAlala¯, or Hawaiian Crow, currently extinct in the wild. Apparently once a crow, always a crow, and its congeners on the mainland had pretty bad reputations as pests. Also exempted from protection was a broad class of birds described simply as “injurious to forestry or agriculture”—unhelpfully vague wording, as one person’s injurious bird was another’s beneficial helpmate. As is made clear in Chapter 4, some birds could both help and hinder agriculture.52 There were flashes of attempts to better protect native birds, too. “Hon. S. K. Kaai gave notice of a bill to forbid the killing of the forest birds, Oo, Iiwi and Apapane,” noted a Honolulu paper in 1876, although the status of this proposal seemed murky after that date. A 1905 bill put forth to protect wild forest birds—presumably endemic species—was controversial because some felt that in the face of predators like the mongoose, an act to protect birds from humans would not do much to actually help them.53 Passage of the federal Lacey Act in 1900, shortly after Hawaiʻi became a U.S. territory, meant that the introduction of “injurious wildlife” into places in the United States where they hadn’t existed previously was largely illegal—a major departure from the past. The law thus attempted to resolve potential problems caused by the arrival of nonnative species of birds and animals into native ecosystems like that in Hawaiʻi. Collectors in the early twentieth century in Hawaiʻi would certainly have been familiar with the Lacey Act, and would have had their own views about the sorts of laws that could protect birds in the islands, and local laws were also introduced. Henshaw wrote to his colleague William Brewster in 1901 that “I have draughted a bird law for the islands, and it is now in the hands of the Kanaka legislature. I hope they will pass it as it is.” Perkins didn’t like Henshaw’s proposed version, which apparently was never passed, because he considered

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it too lenient in terms of protections for Hawaiian birds. Perkins’s preference was to have an open season on all Hawaiian birds between October and February, but to prohibit any bird hunting, even for scientific collecting purposes, during the other months. Illegal hunting—sans permit—had been a key part of the problem of controlling the density of hunters, and continues to be so today. “No law can be made the priviledges [sic] of which cannot be abused; If there are to be priviledges you have to trust to a sense of honor, useing [sic] of course due care in the manner of granting the privilege,” Henshaw explained to Brewster. In other words, trust but verify.54 Humans’ sense of honor, of position, and of privilege have all intersected with the Palila’s survival needs. Aldo Leopold noted the importance of cultivating inclusion: “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” The Palila’s struggle to survive has been largely based on having appropriate habitat, enough food, and sufficient room to roam—both in overall area and in differential elevation—and its difficulties have all stemmed from humans who haven’t considered the Palila or its habitat to be an important part of the community. Predation by cats and rats, the risk of fire, and negative effects from invasive plant and insect-borne species are major factors. Ecological management of these issues is relatively straightforward, although virtually all of the aspects involved in protecting and enlarging the Palila population will continue to require a tremendous amount of work by hundreds of people.55 Most confounding, though, are the land use conflicts that impact the bird and its territory. Put into the simplest and starkest terms, it’s been a matter of hunters’ (and landowners’) interests versus those of preservationists working on behalf of the Palila—and it’s been a pitched battle for at least fifty years. Rural Hawaiʻi, like many places in the United States, has had a history of hunting that goes back for centuries, and it’s a tradition that has been passed down through the generations, typically from father to son. For those who hunt, it’s an activity suffused with solidarity, outdoorsmanship, and a relationship with the land and at least some of its inhabitants. Although the Palila’s biology and ecology are as well known as those of any other Hawaiian bird, its continued survival and increase in numbers have been confounded by intermittent inaction by the state of Hawaiʻi in the face

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of federal attempts to remove sheep—an animal that represents a major obstacle for the Palila’s recovery—entirely from protected lands, and of related intense pressure applied by hunters who want more sheep rather than less in order to maintain what one blogger in Hawaiʻi recently described as “a way of life, and bond we as hunters get with [our] children, family and friends that are unequal in any sport.”56 Several species of sheep—some domesticated, some wild—have been introduced into the islands, beginning in 1793, when Captain George Vancouver liberated a domestic ram, two ewes, and a lamb at Kawaihae on the Big Island. These animals were introduced as a source of protein and, later, for game purposes. By 1825 their descendants had spread and begun converting forests to pasturelands. Some of these hooved animals have died out, but others have thrived. They’ve included Axis deer, pronghorn, feral sheep, goats, mouflon sheep, and a variety of hybrids, and all have been culprits in the depredations of Palila habitat in the past century. The negative impacts of sheep were noted frequently in the press and in private correspondence. “If the sheep are allowed to stay for long, as they presently do, all the grass and forest of the place shall be consumed,” wrote Isaac Y. Davis in 1856 to Keoni Ana, the kingdom’s Minister of the Interior. “It will be an evil thing, for these sheep have exceedingly poisonous teeth.” Eradication efforts have ebbed and flowed. But unlike domesticated sheep, the mouflon, which were introduced in 1954, first arriving on Kauaʻi as game animals, were never domesticated, and they have posed exceptional challenges to attempts to eradicate them. They are the primary threat to Palila habitat, and thus to the bird’s survival.57 Cattle had also been a staple in the islands since George Vancouver gifted a handful—or, rather, a boatload—of them to Kamehameha I in 1793, introducing a destructive animal that would nevertheless become enmeshed in Hawaiian culture. An editorial in an 1872 issue of the Hawaiian Gazette noted that the loss of trees due to “great herds of cattle” was “truly appalling.” The existing large forests, noted the author, would cease to be, “and their places marked by perhaps dusty slopes or arid plains. . . . Already we hear of some of the most valuable variety of trees being almost extinct on the islands, and others are fast disappearing.”58

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In the koa forests, seldom was a young, vigorous tree to be found. This threat, though, was not enough to stop the activities. Other hooved animals began to play a role by the middle of the nineteenth century, and had (as today) their advocates as well as detractors. “The business of raising sheep has taken a start this year almost equal in importance to that of wheat growing,” noted a squib in the Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society in 1854. “[It] is fast acquiring an importance second to no other.” The first concerted conservation measures in postcontact Hawaiʻi were primarily about responding to the threat of erosion to irrigation systems and water supply in the islands. As the sheep population increased, herds denuded landscapes at a shockingly rapid pace. Because of the lack of natural predators and ample habitat, by the early 1930s they had reached a population of around 40,000 on the Big Island. They extensively suppressed ma¯mane and other tree production, stripped bark from tree stems, and consumed herbaceous vegetation, which in turn left the soil exposed and at risk from accelerated erosion from rain and wind. In 1937 Hawaiian Territory foresters launched a sheep-killing drive that eradicated more than 3,000 sheep over a two-day period. The domesticated sheep—unlike the mouflon—tended to travel in flocks of over a hundred sheep, so they were easy pickings. The years immediately following World War II saw low numbers of sheep and other ungulates (hooved animals) in the territory. After a series of actions, including hunting, fencing, and stock drives, feral cattle were removed from the mountain, and the feral sheep population was reduced to a mere 200 by 1950, and public hunting was entirely prohibited between 1950 and 1955.59 But then everything went wrong, at least for the Palila’s habitat. The first mouflon—Ovis orientalis orientalis—arrived on the Big Island in December 1957. These sheep had been imported from Europe by none other than territorial wildlife biologists, who imported them and started to hybridize them with feral sheep to make better game animals. The resulting sheep were extremely popular with hunters for their “excellent sporting, meat and trophy qualities,” as one of the lawsuits later noted. Rangers began hybridizing them with feral sheep to further improve the animals’

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game qualities. It’s possible that tourist hunting and related revenues were on the minds of the fish and game staff, because it was increasingly clear that Hawaiʻi would soon become the fiftieth state. The mouflon’s negative impact on Palila habitat quickly became apparent to many. The ma¯mane has been likened to ice cream for the mouflon—irresistibly delicious. “With victory in its grasp and the forests and native wildlife rebounding,” noted an environmental lawyer in 2004, “Hawaii experienced an ‘ironic reversal’ of its extermination program.” The years following World War II brought more leisure time and a larger population of humans, and hunters were able to persuade the territorial government to switch from total eradication to management for sustained hunting. The feral sheep population increased to about 4,000 by the dawn of statehood in 1959, and for the next two decades the state’s management policies focused on feral game for hunters rather than on protection of the ma¯mane-naio forests in the area.60 Alas, alack. The hybridized mouflon proved to be much craftier than their sheepish predecessors in the islands—another sporty quality prized by hunters, who like to earn what they kill. The mouflon disperse widely when under threat, and retreat into the closest cover. They also breed very successfully in the wild. This is the crux of the issue: hunters need sufficient quantities of animals to hunt so they can actually find and kill them somewhat reliably, but there can’t be too many (clearly bad for habitat by almost anyone’s measure, and too much like shooting fish in a barrel) or too few (not enough to satisfy sportsmen). The mouflon have posed considerable problems for the state. Managing them for sustained-yield public hunting is problematic because they are evasive and extremely difficult to census, hunt, contain, and control in the remote and rugged terrain of Hawaiʻi. The characteristics that make them appealing to hunters as trophies make them problematic to eliminate. To add to environmental woes, the animal threatens the ʻahinahina, or Mauna Kea Silversword, which also occurs in Palila habitat as well as at higher elevations. Further, the mouflon are able to jump over most fences designed as barriers for feral animals. Mouflon also segregate by sexes and form large groups only when breeding, limiting efficient hunting periods. They also have large horns of excellent trophy quality, and are said to be very tasty.

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The problem continues today. As Sheila Conant noted, “Hawaiʻi is feeding its native forests to escaped barnyard animals, mouflon sheep and axis deer. These species are treated as ‘game’ animals. They are protected by bag limits and hunting seasons—[on land] managed to provide recreational and very limited subsistence hunting to less than 2% of the state’s population.” The rules for hunters are inadequate, she observed. “Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources [DLNR] hunting rules must be revised to reflect science-based adaptive management, including the protection of our watersheds, agricultural industries and native ecosystems for the good of all of the people of Hawaiʻi.” She pointed to outdated and inappropriate administrative rules and a lack of political will as a key part of the problem. “ ‘Game’ mammals in Hawaii should be classified as pests by both DOA [Hawaiʻi Department of Agriculture] and DLNR, as they were prior to World War II,” she said. “Hunting seasons should be abolished and bag limits, if there are any, should be restricted to males.” Fully 85 percent of the land managed by the state Department of Forest and Wildlife—land open to public game mammal hunting—is unfenced in areas, and she feels hunters’ objections to restrictions are unjustified. “Are hunters ‘entitled’ to hunt on vast acreages of public lands?” she asked rhetorically. “Is the Palila ʻentitled’ to survive? We are all entitled to clean, fresh water to drink, to irrigate our crops and to clean ourselves. There are more of the ‘rest’ of us than there are hunters—a lot more!” Indeed, hunting compromises the islands’ watersheds—which provide, as Conant pointed out, residents’ only source of drinking water and crop irrigation, as well as the last remaining habitats for some of Hawaiʻi’s rarest animals and plants. Despite the successes of legal actions taken to protect the Palila, a great deal remains to be done in terms of dampening the negative effects of hunting in the islands. “We need to join forces with ranchers and farmers to lobby for rule changes that protect agriculture, ranching, watershed and native ecosystems,” Conant concluded. “Research, management [and] monitoring without political action will not change the downward spiral of watershed and native ecosystem loss.”61 To say that the mouflon are not popular with conservationists is an understatement. But one locale’s royal pain is another’s treasured cultural icon. Ironically, the mouflon sheep in its native range of Sardinia is extremely endan-

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gered—so much so that genetic cloning efforts—some quite controversial— have been undertaken to preserve the species there. In Sardinia, where the population declined as a result of hunting, habitat loss, and competition from domestic sheep, the animal is deeply embedded in a cultural context. A mouflon was cloned in 2001, marking the first time cloning had been used with an endangered species. The international organizations involved have gone to extraordinary lengths to manage and preserve the sheep’s genetic heritage, including the establishment of a DNA resource bank with cryopreserved sperm, embryos, and somatic cells, as well as the development of methods of in vitro embryo production and the induction of cross-species pregnancies by implanting embryos in common domestic ewes. As one writer on the topic noted about the Sardinian case, “The mouflon is now . . . an emblem of distinctive national heritage and identity.” Ironic, then, that in Hawaiʻi, government and conservation groups are working with great gusto to reduce the mouflon sheep population, largely as a result of the risks to one of their own emblems of island identity and nativeness, the Palila.62

Palila, western slope of Mauna Kea, above Puʻu Laʻau Cabin, marking Paul Banko’s first encounter with the bird, 1973 (Photo courtesy of Paul Banko)

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Endangered Species Act of 1973 Passage of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1973 was a key component of the bird’s future survival. An Exxon Valdez’s worth of ink has been spilled on the history of the law and its changes and impacts over time. It has had consequences, many of them still highly uncertain, and its execution has tumbled forward, with many new species now under its protections. Environmental lawyer Oliver Houck crystallized the ESA’s mandate as well as its uncertainty at the outset: “In 1973, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act with a breathtaking banner command: Section 7 of the Act prohibited the federal government from jeopardizing the future of all threatened and endangered species.” But, he noted, we also know that the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency charged with enforcing the ESA, is not a powerful agency, especially compared to many other federal agencies. “The ESA was about to confront every major development interest in the country from coal mining to highway projects to western timber and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. You couldn’t pick a tougher bunch of enemies.” The ESA was thus fragile from its earliest days. But the ways it would be interpreted and implemented would have a direct bearing on the Palila, and vice versa, all ultimately for the bird’s good.63 Section 7 dictated that federal agencies must ensure that any action authorized, funded, or carried out by such agencies would not jeopardize the continued existence of endangered or threatened species, or result in the destruction or adverse modification of designated critical habitat. But here’s the rub: Section 7 did not apply to state agencies, private citizens, or organizations unless federal permits or funds were involved. The ESA’s protections were also vague and problematic, especially in the case of the Palila, because most of the Palila’s habitat lies within the state’s Mauna Kea Game Management Area. Because no federal activity was involved, Section 7 could not be invoked to address the destructive and adverse activity in the bird’s habitat. To save the Palila, environmental lawyer Michael Sherwood therefore took the unprecedented move of turning to Section 9 of the law (see below). There was, however, one particular instance where Section 7 could be invoked: the Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island, comprising

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133,000 acres, was a military operation under the control of the U.S. Army since the mid-1950s. As a result, Section 7 was relevant here and was important in defining “critical habitat” for the Palila, especially in the northeastern portion of the site near Mauna Kea.64 The ESA emerged out of a time of new enthusiasms and new awareness of the planet’s finite resources. The Republican government was generally supportive of environmental legislation; during Richard Nixon’s presidency the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Environmental Protection Act (1970), the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), the Safe Water Drinking Act (1974), and, of course, the Endangered Species Act (1973) were all enacted. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was run by Republican appointees who seemed to care about enacting environmental protections.65

Legal Aspects of the Palila Case The effort to protect the Palila and its habitat has been a lively and important struggle and has involved five legal cases that were tried between 1978 and 1999. Two legal terms—“standing” and “taking”—that are relevant to those cases sound like the behavior of an unruly toddler. In fact, some of the defendants in the drama did indeed act like petulant children. The Palila was the first animal to have a case cited in its own name in the 1980s in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit—Palila v. Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources—a fact that some have argued implies that the bird was given specific standing and rights as a result; others have correctly noted that this was not the intention of the legislation. “Standing” as a legal concept simply means that a plaintiff, or defendant, has a personal stake in a particular legal matter and has sustained direct injury, and that the injury can be addressed and, presumably, repaired. In the blizzard of verbs in Section 9 of the Endangered Species Act, “taking” means “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect,” or to attempt to do any of those things. At great issue in legal circles has been the meaning of “harm,” and federal courts disagreed on its meaning with regard to the Endangered Species Act. Was “harm”

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active, like shooting a Bald Eagle, or was it more diffused, like modifying habitat that could lead to the death of individual birds or entire species? The Department of the Interior had issued regulations that included habitat modification several years after the 1973 law was passed, but they had not been tested in court. In 1981, the ruling in the case of Palila v. Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources confirmed that habitat modification itself constituted a “take.” At their heart, all five rulings focused on the meaning of Section 9 and whether the state program had violated it. The answer? “Yes,” Houck told me. “About five times.”66 Several years later the U.S. Supreme Court approved the Interior regulations in a case involving the Northern Spotted Owl, making it serious business to destroy endangered species habitat anywhere in the United States—“a big geographic leap,” as Houck noted. Congress then weighed in with new language that permitted habitat takes under limited circumstances, and planning to offset the harm. Beginning with Palila, all of these affirmations of the habitat-modification-as-take principle have helped the plight of species across the country, none the least of which has been the Palila itself.67 The 1966 passage of the Endangered Species Preservation Act (ESPA) was not a bright line marking a transition from nonchalance to action for the Palila. Efforts to publicize the bird’s plight to a wider audience began to take root much earlier. Richard Warner, a state biologist, published an article in 1960 that brought closer attention to the problem. Alan Ziegler, head of the Vertebrate Zoology Division at the Bishop Museum and subsequently one of the plaintiffs in the Palila lawsuits, saw Warner’s article, and in 1976 took it upon himself to call Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund attorney Michael Sherwood to ask about legal action that might save the Palila from extinction as a result of the introduced nonnative sheep and goats that were destroying the bird’s critical habitat on the Big Island. At the time, the ESA was a scant three years old, with little case law to help interpret it. After studying the law and its legislative history, Sherwood advised Ziegler that they could bring a case under Section 9 of the law, which prohibits “any person” from “taking” an endangered species. “We would have to argue that the Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources was a ‘person’ within the meaning of

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the law,” Sherwood wrote in an unpublished memoir, “and that its action in maintaining the sheep and goats in the Palila’s habitat was a ‘taking’ of the Palila. The argument would be unprecedented, but I thought that if we were assigned a courageous and open-minded judge we had a chance.”68 The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, under the guidance of recovery team chair Andrew Berger, developed a recovery plan, which called for complete removal of feral sheep and goats, and for further study of the mouflon’s impact. But the DLNR balked, claiming that as feral ungulate populations fell, the Palila population would stabilize, and that mixed use of the land for both hunting and Palila habitat would work.69 Modern environmental conservation was founded on the concept of multiple uses for land. This cornerstone idea says that interested parties with a range of agendas can make use of the same land, and that activities of various kinds can take place on the land while still maintaining reasonable ecological protection for the land and its nonhuman occupants. The concept has been codified into various multiple-use laws (swimming and boating in the same region as wind turbine use to generate electricity, say, or the presence of coal mining and wildlife management on the same land). This would seem to have an appealing equity—mutual benefits rather than exclusive use, and a democratic shepherding of the environment that at least implies something for everyone. But this approach—much better suited to areas the size of continents—doesn’t work very well in a small and insular ecosystem like Hawaiʻi. Everything is closer together, and islands’ boundaries are fixed by a surrounding ocean. Multiple uses quickly become conflicting uses.70 In filing suit, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund asked the U.S. District Court for Hawaiʻi to officially remove feral sheep and goats from Palila habitat on Mauna Kea, once and for all. The court case that followed was lively. Sherwood brought a stuffed Palila to the courtroom every day and displayed it prominently at the counsel table where his client would normally be situated. Trial Judge Sam King got a kick out of the stuffed bird, which Sherwood borrowed from the Bishop Museum, and at one point asked Sherwood to bring it up to the bench so he could take a closer look at it.71 As the Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey got under way, no one could have predicted the five legal decisions regarding the Palila over the coming two

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Palila, Ibis, January 1879 (Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Cullman Library)

decades, resulting in three court orders to protect Palila habitat. All five cases raised the same issue: the rights of the Palila versus the rights of landowners and hunters. The first suit was filed in early 1978. The plaintiffs—the Palila itself, the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, the Hawaiʻi Audubon Society, and Ziegler—claimed that the Palila’s only habitat—ma¯mane-naio forest—was at risk from feral sheep and goats, and without the forest the bird would disappear. The lead attorney for the plaintiffs was Mike Sherwood, who worked for the environmental law firm Earthjustice. The defendant was the DLNR, including Susumu Ono, the department’s chair. Ono claimed that the DLNR’s hunting program was reducing browsing pressure on the forest by ungulates, and that maintaining a small population of target animals for hunters was a win-win for birds, landowners, and hunters. The

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next year, in mid-1979, the U.S. District Court for Hawaiʻi ruled that the DLNR was violating the law because its management of feral sheep and goats on Mauna Kea constituted an unlawful “taking,” or harming, of the Palila itself. Feral sheep and goats—the targets of hunters’ affections—were modifying habitat and disrupting the Palila’s feeding behavior. It seemed like a no-brainer, because the ecological effect of Palila habitat destruction was unequivocal. That year, the Department of the Interior redefined “harm” to clearly include detrimental actions to species’ habitats in addition to the standard meaning of directly killing individuals. Even small numbers of feral sheep and goats can denude a large area and eliminate forest regeneration. Unless stopped, feral goats and sheep would eventually eliminate Palila habitat, and Palila numbers would decline accordingly. By allowing goats and sheep to browse, the state of Hawaiʻi was effectively “taking” Palila. As a result of these legal actions and rulings, destruction of habitat, and not just of the animals themselves, was added to the list of legally prosecutable insults to endangered species. In its ruling the trial court held that even in reduced numbers the feral sheep and goats were still destroying Palila habitat, and that therefore the DLNR, which purposefully maintained the sheep and goats in the habitat for sport hunters, was “taking” the Palila in violation of Section 9 of the ESA. The ruling was challenged by the DLNR, and in 1981 the Ninth Circuit court upheld the lower court ruling. These two decisions are sometimes referred to as Palila I, and they decreed removal of sheep and goat from the Palila’s habitat.72 But enforcement was erratic, and difficult. Sherwood recounted to me that “the state took the position that the federal court had no authority to order it how to manage ‘its’ wildlife and game animals. I had to drag the head of the DLNR and then the governor personally into court to show cause why they should not be held in contempt of court for refusing to comply with a valid federal court order. When Judge King threatened to jail the state officials and/or take over the administration of the DLNR, the state finally got the message and agreed to the eradication order.”73 But the state still lagged in taking decisive action. To make matters worse, the DLNR apparently lacked even one conservation biologist or

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ecologist on its staff, and the strong traditions of supporting hunting as a part of land use on the Island continued. The Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, and others pressed for a legal solution to reaffirm the previous decisions, which was their only recourse short of some sort of vigilante action. In November 1986 the U.S. District Court for Hawaiʻi issued a third ruling in the same case—this time specifically involving the mouflon. Expert witnesses at trial agreed that the mouflon sheep were currently degrading the ma¯mane forest, and that this degradation was irreversible because it was suppressing the forest’s ability to regenerate. The judge in this case refused to accept the defendants’ claim that any effect the mouflon had on ma¯mane and indirectly on Palila was only a potential injury and did not fall within the Department of the Interior’s revised definition of harm. One of the most important aspects of the 1986 decision was its assertion that a “showing of harm does not require a decline in population numbers.” This was fortunate for the Palila, because its numbers were already dangerously low. That same year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that the Palila could be considered recovered and removed from the endangered species list only when the population had achieved a density of 25 birds per square kilometer—5,000 birds total throughout the 200 square kilometers of critical habitat—continuously for five years.74 Legal precedent for the Palila decisions, incidentally, was found in the famous snail darter (Percina tanasi) case (Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, 437 U.S. 153 [1978]). Aside from noting violations to Section 7 of the ESA, the U.S. Supreme Court also indicated that the environmental effects (loss of spawning habitat and siltation, and the low oxygen content of the reservoir) of a completed Tellico Dam might amount to a “taking” of snail darters under Section 9. Snail darters floating belly up were not required. But enforcement is everything. “From the State’s Status Report,” wrote Sherwood, “it appears that the State is waiting until the last few months of the year, after the sport hunters have had their fun, before acting decisively to remove the last of the sheep.” Prosecution wasn’t a simple matter. Individuals who violated the ESA would be subject to fines and other punishment, but enforcement of individual acts of shooting was difficult, given the large acreage involved and the state’s inherent reluctance to punish

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its sport hunters. The Department of Land and Natural Resources could be fined, but all that would do would be to slow down and hamstring the agency responsible for getting rid of the sheep.75 For some time various DLNR land managers had argued that ungulates were necessary to remove brush and grass that elevated the risk of fire to Palila critical habitat. Fire has indeed been a major threat to the habitat; since 1971 at least thirty-five fires have occurred within or near it; the largest fire, which was caused by a vehicle igniting dry grass in the habitat area, burned more than 3,000 acres. Contrary to those who contended that sheep could ward off fire by eating grasses in the Palila’s habitat, the only study of sheep diet on Mauna Kea found that sheep had a strong preference for ma¯mane over grasses. And in his 1986 decision Judge King observed that claiming ungulates were the best defense against fire “suggests that in order to save the Palila from extinction by fire, we should increase the number of sheep so they can share in the destruction of the Palila.” In fact, ungulate studies found that grazing on some of the same genera of grasses in Yellowstone actually promoted the growth of more grass, primarily roots, through accelerated nutrient cycling.76 Some aspects improved modestly after the 1986 ruling. For one thing, the state allowed hunting only with bow and arrow. Several hundred ma¯mane trees were also planted on two acres within the Mauna Kea Game Management Area. But the state continued to have a vested interest in supporting hunters and faced intense pressure from them. Some of the department’s revenues came from hunting licenses, while many of the employees were hunters themselves; perhaps as a consequence, the state again dropped the ball for enforcement. Legal action thus arose yet again in 1987. On the plaintiff ’s side were the same five entities: the bird itself; the Sierra Club; the National Audubon Society; the Hawaiʻi Audubon Society; and Ziegler. The number of defendants expanded to include not only the DLNR but also the Hawaiʻi Island Archery Club; the Hawaiʻi Rifle Association; and a number of individuals. In 1988, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the 1986 decision. These two cases together are sometimes known as Palila II. Defendants in these two cases sought a multiple-use approach to accommodate both

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their sport hunting and endangered species protection responsibilities. However, the ruling stated that the ESA “does not allow a ‘balancing’ approach for multiple use considerations.” All the mouflon sheep in the Palila’s range had to go. Besides, there were other areas in Hawaiʻi where they could be hunted. During these long years of legal action, others in the conservation sphere took action. The U.S. Geological Survey began the Palila Restoration Project in 1996 when funding became available to mitigate the potential effects of routing the Saddle Road through a portion of Palila critical habitat. Others in the botanical realm suggested an alternative conservation tack, one akin to that of people collecting endangered Hawaiian birds in the late nineteenth century: collect endangered plant specimens while they still existed, so they could at least be studied in museums by appreciative future generations. Legal action, wrote island botanist Otto Degener, would be useless: “Just as drunken orgies during Prohibition Days were not ended by the Volstead Act, so am I convinced conservation laws and regulations will not prevent the imminent extermination of most Hawaiian endemics by exotic weeds and misplaced industries. This annihilation being inevitable by illicit or legal means, botanists—and zoologists should emulate them—of the World should at least preserve Hawaiian specimens NOW to add to museum collections.”77 In 1998 Hawaiʻi Governor Benjamin Cayetano wrote to DLNR Director Michel Wilson, “It has been brought to my attention that many people on the Big Island, particularly in Hamakua, feel their concerns regarding subsistence hunting and land use decisions have been ignored by our administration.” Hunters also felt—without any apparent scientific support—that at least some mouflon were necessary to control gorse seed pods. They thus sought a legal halt to the eradication of sheep. So in 1999, for the fifth time, the court ruled in favor of the little bird. Paul Achitoff of the Honolulu office of Earthjustice (formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund) handled this last case in 1999, while Mike Sherwood tried the previous four.78 Susumu Ono, who as head of the DLNR was the key defendant in these cases, may have had other motivations unrelated to natural resources. A real estate developer, a trusted aide to three governors of Hawaiʻi, and an apparently well-regarded state government employee, he was no tree

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hugger. Ono would later work as a lobbyist for the Aloha Tower Development Corporation. Among their accomplishments, the five legal decisions provided deep support for the Palila, and the ESA, across different political climates. But despite these rulings it took the threat of contempt of court before the state began complying with the court’s eradication orders. The state has since increased its enforcement efforts, and it has begun substantial work to fulfill the courts’ orders. “The Palila case has been a favorite of law professors and students over the years,” noted Sherwood, and it’s a standard component in environmental law casebooks.79 The effects on the Palila’s food sources and habitat are noticeable. Photographs taken in 1998 show extensive recovery of native vegetation compared with ones taken prior to 1979, before the court ordered the total eradication of the sheep. Because the ma¯mane grow very slowly, their recovery on the northern side of Mauna Kea was relatively negligible. However, on the warmer western slope of the mountain, trees had recovered their full foliage, with many young ma¯mane trees evident. At least one site showed “tremendous recovery” of the ma¯mane. Houck told me that “it is fair to say that formal recognition of the Palila was important because it framed the environment of the case, its real principles. This was not simply about bird watchers. It was about the survival of a life form that had existed eons before bird watchers or any other humans first appeared.”80 The mouflon still exist. Efforts to eliminate them have continued, but controversy has again dogged the process. Between 1998 and 2010, nearly 11,000 sheep were removed from designated critical habitat of the Palila by shooting from the air and by unrestricted public hunting. In 2010 the state’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife recruited marksmen to fly over Mauna Kea via helicopter, and they killed some 300 wild sheep. Both hunters and animal rights activists expressed outrage. Yet despite a tripling of the eradication of the sheep from 2005 to 2010, browsing damage persists and seems to suggest that reducing the numbers of these ungulates to levels where they will not damage habitat is extremely difficult. The mouflon, after all, have their own drive to inhabit and to succeed.81

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There’s still another aspect to this story: any continued hunting could make things worse if it doesn’t involve total eradication of ungulates, especially the mouflon. Evolution is wily, and hunting can introduce some intensely selective pressures. Sheep that survive do so because they have some kind of advantage, and hunting could lead to genetic selection for cryptic colors that are harder to spot and that blend with the environment. Meanwhile, the hybrid mouflons’ range has expanded and is pushing into Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park despite fencing around the park. Perhaps worst of all, trophy hunting tends to shift the sex ratio of populations and increase the size of populations; the males with their big horns are the most desirable trophies, and a lesser number of males results in more efficient and increased reproduction—more females, which make the babies, while there are fewer males, which can still impregnate multiple females.82 The legal role of the Palila—indeed, of nature itself having legal standing—has a cognate in other parts of the world, including several countries in Latin America, most notably in Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The legal battles convey at least a sense of the truly tangled nature of species’ legal protection and habitat degradation by parties with conflicting agendas.83 So what about the Palila? The struggle to protect it exists in an era designed not just for observation, but for direct action. Things have changed, and now that we have amassed considerable data between the late nineteenth century and today, we can act. We’ve pressed the law into service to both acquire and protect habitat; entered into active management of that habitat through activities that include fencing, firebreak creation, ungulate removal, and control or eradication of invasive plants; undertaken intensive management of individual species by control of predators; and engaged in nest site manipulation and captive propagation. Other activities have also helped: public education and importation control both have been essential. Along with land that needs conserving have also come new policy tools, which have in turn accompanied the surge of scientific knowledge, and clever management strategies have come into play—for instance, Structured Decision Making (SDM), which is a set of techniques used to identify and prioritize conservation actions to address the threat of climate change

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to Hawaiʻi’s native forest bird community. People’s passions run high when it comes to conservation matters, and some relatively bloodless management approaches help. SDM provides a formal method for analyzing and making decisions by breaking the problems and solutions into components that are weighed in a transparent, replicable, and systematic manner. We now understand much better that conservation challenges include legal, regulatory, and political context, as well as an ecological context. These policy techniques were used to identify and prioritize management solutions for the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, and consisted of very specific objectives: first, maintain populations of the eight forest bird species native to Hakalau above a certain number, and for the next 200 years; second, minimize the cost of management; third, maximize the probability of acceptance by the public; and fourth, abide by all relevant legal statutes. This matrix provided a very useful framework with which to clarify both the conservation goals and the approach.84 But even with all that we know about the Palila, and with the leverage of legal decisions that favor its survival, expert habitat management, and a great body of concerned citizenry, there is still nothing guaranteed about its continued presence on the planet. Keeping it alive at the species level requires great vigilance and further study for proper recovery and management—not to mention a tremendous amount of plain hard work—and at scales that are conservation-relevant, and across 100 percent of the Palila’s range. As of this writing, efforts fall short of this standard. Captive breeding programs for the bird exist, and these help increase their numbers—but they run the risk of creating a highly managed and domesticated species, with modified behaviors not found in the wild. And as always, the bird is susceptible to events beyond human control: drought; fire; various kinds of predation; mosquito-borne diseases; and other elements that affect the habitat and the bird. Despite a legal mandate for the state of Hawaiʻi to take action to eradicate them, it seems the mouflon will remain in some numbers. Beyond issues of willpower, manpower, and budgetary support, the animals seem to be too difficult to eliminate entirely, at least not without a truly concerted will on the parts of all parties.

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“Folks seem to want to make a case that dealing with these difficulties is beyond our capabilities,” Mike Scott told me. “Not so! Why then, is there no resolution of the problem, and will this paralysis of the conservation system lead to future missed opportunities?” I think that part of the issue with Hawaiʻi’s reluctance to act is the state’s—and before that, the territory’s— long-standing interest in promoting sport hunting of game birds, as we will see in Chapter 4. The monies for many of the introductions of game birds in the 1920s was entirely sponsored by the Territory of Hawaiʻi, and the county treasurer held funds specifically for these possible importations.85 The power of both the state and the federal government to provide a protective cloak for endangered Hawaiian forest birds is an essential piece of the preservation puzzle. Governmental actions and support provide legal protections as well as the ability to conceive and execute coherent, widescale, conservation-effective management plans. Private landholders also are highly relevant helpmates, because they can create conservation easements which prohibit future subdivision of land. Conservation easements allow conservation-minded citizens to transfer some, but not all, property rights to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, such as Ku¯kaʻiau Ranch, comprising about 4,500 acres, which falls within the boundaries of the Kona Forest Unit of the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge. It’s easy to be distracted from the place by dry science, and sometimes the beauty of the place is the distraction from the problem at hand. Magical Hakalau Forest, which emerged out of the Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey work, was established in 1985 and consists of nearly 34,000 acres on the wetter windward side of Mauna Kea on the Big Island. The bedrock under the forest is old lava—probably about 4,000 years old. Large parts of the forest are relatively warm, green, and breezy much of the time. Koa-ʻo¯hiʻa lehua trees form a closed canopy in much of the forest, along with native shrubs. The forest is composed of trees of many different ages, and much of the reserve is above the mosquito vector. However, longterm cattle grazing—what one botanist called “biologic vandalism”—has changed the character of the forest, and in parts of the upper forest introduced grasses cover a good deal of the ground. Some of the upper habitat is drier. In any case, the upper forest has supported a superb avifauna, dense

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in species and high in variety. Hakalau is a remarkable example of survival, and intensive efforts have been undertaken to preserve and restore it.86 The problem is that, even with deep, careful science, structured approaches, and a desire to improve the world’s chances, there’s much more at work here than science or policy, because the messiness that consists of human culture has colored our perceptions, and our desires. Social and political obstacles abound. There’s never enough money to control predators, plants, and ungulates. What monies the state of Hawaiʻi devotes to conservation pales in comparison to what other states spend. Endemic birds are isolated enough from where humans live that making their acquaintance is relatively rare, so public demand to increase funding is slack.87 In the last quarter of the twentieth century, issues of belonging arise in this context: earlier collectors and naturalists seemed to make some kind of claim of ownership of these birds. But those birds don’t belong to us now. In the late nineteenth century there was no hunting population that pursued a resource that was bad for the Palila. At that time naturalists were simply spectators—sophisticated ones, but not participants in the birds’ survival. That has changed, and now, in a sense, we belong to them. We need the birds at least as much as they need us—if not for our direct survival, then for other reasons, including our need to understand our own mortality and to assuage our sense of guilt for what we’ve done to the planet, and as an ethical obligation to other species. What other reason would we have for going to all of this trouble, if we didn’t feel some deep-seated desire to keep them from fading out of view? It’s not an easy slog. As David Flaspohler, an avian ecologist and conservation biologist, notes about the problem of conserving Hawaiʻi’s forest birds, “Endangered species conservation at times resembles a protracted chronic disease, like a malarial fever that haunts the infected patient with cyclic bouts of acute symptoms that can never be fully cured. Hawaiian forest bird conservation sometimes feels this way.” In a sense, all of Hawaiʻi’s ecosystems suffer from this malaise—what was once “pristine” is now something different.88 Perhaps our sense of belonging is not geographical but rather tied to a place of emotional and spiritual belonging. “Longing” is part of

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“belonging.” The Palila are as opportunistic as the mouflon or any other animal. They take action, as animals do to survive, and it’s not colored by an ethical stance. For instance, the Palila uses sheep wool in its nest construction—wool that couldn’t come from anywhere else other than, well, sheep. “Birds apparently use wool because of its ready availability and its binding quality,” writes Charles van Riper III, one of the leading experts on the Palila who testified in favor of the bird at the trial. Through the sheerest of coincidences, Charlie was my dorm master in the seventh grade in boarding school on the Big Island—harassed and bothered at every turn by shrill kids living down the hall from his apartment while he was trying to get through graduate school—and he’s done groundbreaking, backbreaking work on the Palila. Being an opportunist isn’t a crime; it’s a way of life. It’s the thousand nearly microscopic actions—and sometimes macroscopic

Charles van Riper III, Kaʻu Forest, ca. 1976. Van Riper, shown here as a grad student during the Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey work, would go on to be a leading authority both on the Palila and on avian diseases. (Photo courtesy of Tonnie Casey)

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ones—taken by humans in Hawaiʻi over the past millennium that put species like the Palila at risk, through accident, ignorance, incompetence, or intention.89

I tell this story in the present tense, as it lives on in me as if it was happening now. During one of my trips to the Bishop Museum, I mention to Molly Hagemann, the vertebrate collections manager, that I’ve had experience creating museum study skins of birds based on volunteer work I did years ago with the collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History over a span of some months. She very generously offers me the chance to create a study skin of an ʻAlala¯—the Hawaiian Crow, now extinct in the wild—and I am giddy with excitement. However, when I show up the next day in the Prep Lab, there’s been a change of plan, as she offers me the choice of two other birds to prepare instead: a Maui Parrotbill or a Palila. I jump at the chance to do the Palila. The one that Molly removes from the freezer came from the Keahou Bird Conservation Center on the Big Island; it was sent to San Diego for necropsy before shipping to the Bishop for prep and final storage. It’s very touching to hold a bird that probably evolved into its current physical form over hundreds of thousands of years and that is now down to perhaps 2,000 or fewer individuals. There’s no better way to get a close look at a bird than by preparing a study skin. The insides of the wings have a gray, iridescent sheen, and the outsides are tinged with yellow. The bird is also incredibly soft to the touch. Its delicate feet appear unaffected by avian pox, lesions, or other diseases found in Hawaiian forest birds. Unfortunately, the person who did the necropsy in San Diego—looking at organs, stomach contents, parasites, and a dozen other elements—damaged the skin beyond recovery. I put in an hour’s exacting work with scalpel, tweezers, and other tools, but the bird had been cut open quite roughly, and Molly decides we’ll have to make a complete skeleton of the bird instead of saving its skin and its feathers, which are coming off in tufts.

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I handle it like a bird that has died on my watch. In a sense, it has. Before removing everything down to the skeleton, we bag a number of loose feathers, as well as place several samples of muscle in a solution of 95 percent ethanol—standard procedure for critically endangered birds, and the implications are sobering: if the species goes extinct, scientists will still have a relative abundance of material to study through DNA analysis. The finished skeleton is shockingly small and weighs just 6.1 grams, including the little paper leg tag I fill out and attach, as well as small bits of muscle I am unable to remove. The specimen is labeled as BPBM 185667, and after another hour’s labor my work is done. I want to cry, and also simultaneously laugh deliriously for having had the opportunity. We then walk the skeleton next door to a room where dermestid beetles are kept, and although they are standard practice in natural history museums around the world for de-fleshing animals, they look positively fourteenth century—a glance into their home reveals a writhing mound of thousands of insects. They’ll eat any remaining flesh from the bones. “It’s medieval, but it’s really the best way to clean the bones,” Molly explains to me. “We could boil them, or use some kind of chemical maceration, but the bugs make the most sense.” The skeletons are tied together to temporarily stabilize them, and literally hung up to dry— sometimes for days—and then are moved into the bug box with the beetles. “You want the meat to be dry, like jerky,” Molly tells me. The larvae do most of the eating, and the bugs will eventually eat absolutely everything, including the skeleton, so it’s a bit of an art as well as a science to work out the right combination of beetle density, time in the box, and specimen size. Terry Lopez, the collections tech who runs the Prep Lab, tells me that it takes one to four days for a skeleton to be eaten clean, depending on the size of the specimen and the size and state of the colony. The beetles can strip a small bird in twenty-four hours. The beetles themselves—mostly Dermestes maculates—live for only four to five months. Despite their great utility in producing clean skeletons, dermestids are very dangerous to prepared animal specimens and would eat feathers or fur if given the chance. Finally, the animal’s remains are soaked in water to remove any final membraneous bits, dried, and frozen for three weeks to kill any insects or larvae, and then

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it’s officially added to the collection in an archival box and stored in a sealed cabinet with its comrades. Let us hope that the fates of the Palila’s living kin—and those of their offspring—are not equally sealed. My daughter’s middle name is Palila, and I would rather it be an exultation and a sign of survival in her lifetime, rather than something elegiac. When I pressed him for a prediction about the bird’s future, Palila expert Paul Banko told me that because its reproductive rate is relatively low, the population is expected to respond only slowly to positive changes in habitat. But like many other Hawaiian forest bird species, Palila may persist in very low numbers for many years.90 As W. S. Merwin wrote in The Folding Cliffs, his epic poem about Hawaiʻi, “When we hold a bird what is in our hands is not the bird any more and that when we look at birds we see only a little of them.” The ghostly remnants of the living bird are only remnants, but they are tangible things nonetheless: here with us, among us, and complemented, in the case of the Palila, by the living bird, which sings on.

f o ur

Becoming Endemic The White-eye, the Territorial Government, the Hui Manu, and Introduced Species

“Even if we could get it, which past would we really want, and why?” —Peter Whiteley, “Prolegomenon for a New Totemism,” The Anthropology of Extinction

t h e j a p a n e s e w h i t e - e y e i s a n enthusiastic little bird that acts as though it has perpetually just finished enjoying a cappuccino. It flits with boundless energy, and is a common sight virtually everywhere in Hawaiʻi. The White-eye, also known by its Japanese name Mejiro, has been a fixture in the islands since it was introduced on Oʻahu by the Hawaiʻi Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry (BCAF) in 1929. By the late 1950s it had spread to all of the islands, at almost all elevations and in wildly different habitats. It’s a tiny critter, averaging just ten grams. A bucket full of them would be easy to hoist. Beyond its ubiquitous presence in Hawaiʻi, it sprawls across most of its original range of Asia, including all of Japan, much of the Korean peninsula, and most of southern China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar. The bird was introduced into the islands over a period of years, beginning with the BCAF, which was interested in birds primarily as a form of insect control. Bugs were responsible for the loss of tens of millions of dollars of sugar and other crops by the dawn of the twentieth century. The White-eye’s introduction was then continued by the Hui Manu, a private

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group founded in 1930 as an acclimatization society that introduced birds from around the world for aesthetic reasons. The White-eye, so named for the prominent ring of white surrounding its eyes, is in the constant and messy process of evolution. There are at least eight subspecies of the bird, which is larger and longer-billed on the small islands around Japan; others are smaller and brighter in their coloration. Some scientists consider the White-eye a threat to endemic Hawaiian wildlife because they see it as a competitor for resources; others have argued that the bird is not a particularly damaging import. In Hawaiʻi, it has also played a special role by acting as a pollinator for at least two native flowers, replacing now-extinct endemic birds without which the flowers would not likely survive. Strange bedfellows, so to speak: an introduced species playing a role in the survival of endemic plants as pollination replacements. While some introduced species suppress the populations of endemic species, and are widely vilified, it’s not a simple matter of black or white, good or evil, belt or suspenders. Such is the confounding nature of introduced species in Hawaiʻi, and a reflection of the tumbling, opportunistic nature of evolution and the natural world.1 The White-eye is a generalist, and a survivor. Even in Kauaʻi’s Alakaʻi Swamp, it has thrived. In a July 1968 survey in the swamp, John Sincock counted up to 300 White-eyes per half-hour—this in the midst of some of the wettest country in the world. Sincock described the “superabundance” of the bird during this trip, and noted its high density during other surveys in the 1960s and 1970s. “There can be no question that the white-eye is by far the most abundant bird, native or introduced, on Kauai,” wrote mainland biologists Richardson and Bowles in 1964. “Considering the commonness of the species in almost all habitats, native or introduced, there must be hundreds of thousands.” Only at higher elevations were they outnumbered by some of the native species.2 The omnivorous White-eye eats both insects and fruits, visiting more than thirty species of plants for those fruits, including introduced species such as lantana, banana poka, and firetree, as well as extracting nectar from some native plants. Given its saturation of the landscape, it seems inconceivable that it could ever go extinct. People said that about the Passenger

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Pigeon too, which went from migrating populations big enough to darken the sky down to zero; it was probably extinct in the wild very early in the twentieth century, and the last living specimen died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. In the nation’s heartland, the pigeon was the cheapest land-based protein, and this led to an organized industry that encouraged and expedited the systematic exploitation of the bird year-round. Fishes such as the Atlantic Halibut have suffered nearly the same fate; the halibut’s current populations, now classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, are but a shadow of their historic population as a result of overfishing.3 But it’s not just tasty animals that have gone from billions to very few. Some of the 4,000 extant bee species, once common garden residents, are now at risk of extinction due to numerous factors. Nearly a billion monarch butterflies have vanished since 1990, once farmers and homeowners began spraying herbicides on the butterflies’ main food, the milkweed plant. Both of these insects are considered keystone species: whether predator, prey, or pollinator, a keystone species’ presence or absence can dramatically affect an ecosystem. Just as adding a new species to an existing mix of life (or turning an endangered species into a common one) can lead to unexpected consequences, the same is true for a species’ departure. The disappearance of the White-eye, with its diverse food supply, its presence in all environments in the islands, and its huge numbers, would certainly have a variety of consequences we cannot anticipate. The biological record abounds with examples of unexpected consequences of trying to unmix the introduced from the native. When the saltmarsh cordgrass Spartina alterniflora was introduced in the 1970s to reclaim lost marshland on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America, it seemed like a sound conservation maneuver. But it quickly hybridized with native Spartina grass and began to spread, displacing the native Spartina. That caused problems for the endangered Clapper rail, which relied on the native Spartina for habitat. Efforts began in 2005 to remove the invasive Spartina hybrid, resulting in the ultimate removal of more than 90 percent of the grass. But the Clapper rail had begun to rely on the invasive grass for habitat, just as it had with the native grass. So the U.S. Fish and Wildlife

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Service decided to prohibit removal of any more of the invasive Spartina. It’s very difficult to anticipate these consequences, both “good” and “bad.” Collateral damage often occurs, and thinking about single-species salvation solutions doesn’t work as well as ecosystem-wide management plans.4 As with virtually every bird species in the islands, both native and introduced, there have been contrary opinions about the White-eye regarding its utility to humans, its aesthetics, its ecological impacts, and much else. By at least 1938, the bird was not popular in some quarters, especially among fruit growers. Albert F. Judd, a Honolulu attorney who grew fruits commercially, wrote to the commissioners of the BCAF about what a pest the White-eye had become. The bird was a delight to watch, he noted, as it sucked honey from the blossoms in his garden, “but the miserable creature has learned to eat papaias, ohias, star apples, rose apples and figs. This artistic contribution to our gardens is a commercial menace to those who do not sport gardens but do raise soft fruits for the market. . . . Have a heart for the raisers of soft fruits, and keep out these avian pests.” But at the same time, many others loved the bird for its plumage, behaviors, and song.

Japanese White-eye in bougainvillea (Image by David Tomb)

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“He helps very much,” noted a 1940 book. Others described the bird as “useful” for its insect-eating ways. John D’Arcy Northwood, founder of the Hawaiʻi Audubon Society, thought that “there is little doubt that the great deal of good it does more than compensates” for its habit of eating fruit.5 How did the White-eye come to inhabit every corner of the Hawaiian Islands? The first mention I’ve been able to find of it as a potential import to Hawaiʻi, specifically to eat bugs harmful to agriculture, was in a letter in late 1926 from Dr. Nagamichi Kuroda, a prominent Japanese ornithologist and secretary of the Japan Ornithological Society, who was writing to David Fullaway, a Hawaiʻi Territory entomologist. “This is the best for import,” urged Kuroda, noting that the bird was common in Japan, and that he had several living specimens he could send to Honolulu. Officers of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association were also enthusiasts. Everyone seemed to concur. “We believe this bird to be unhesitatingly recommended,” wrote Secretary Joseph Dwight to Paul Redington in September of 1928, reporting on Fullaway’s 1926 recommendations. Redington was no less than the Chief of the Bureau of Biological Survey in Washington, D.C., and the putative boss of the Board of Commissioners.6 But Redington didn’t think this was a good idea and responded, “At least one species of Zosterops is known to have been destructive to mulberries and grapes in Australia. Introduction not recommended.” Redington knew whereof he spoke. Aldo Leopold, the legendary ecologist and forester, had been one of his employees when he was the assistant chief of the Forest Service, and as a scientist Redington was a tempering influence against the often-impatient pro-importation views held by commission members and others in the islands. Because of the Bureau of Biological Survey’s placement within the Department of Agriculture, it—and Redington—had ultimate policy oversight of the work of all the states and U.S. territories. But Fullaway managed to ignore Redington’s advice and reported to the Board of Commissioners in 1929 that the little bird had been vetted by Dr. Kuroda “as being suitable for our conditions and needs.” Furthermore, noted Fullaway, Kuroda believed that it would have no harmful effect on endemic species. Fullaway reported in October 1929 that the first shipment

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of the birds had been put together by a Japanese bird collector named Onno in Kobe, and had been personally brought from the Orient by Fullaway. “This shipment contained the White eye,” he noted, “previously approved for introduction by the Board.” Upon arrival, they were promptly introduced at the planters’ association arboretum in Ma¯noa sometime late in 1929.7 Nothing succeeds like success, and the BCAF introduced new clusters of the little bird, island by island, in the months and years that followed. In August 1930 the Hui Manu bought twenty birds (paying $1.50 each). Unlike the BCAF, the Hui Manu officers were interested in the little bird’s looks, chirpy song, and lively ways. Another batch of 139 birds was released on Kauai in 1931. By February 1934 the Hui Manu could announce that the “Japanese White Eye introduced three years ago in Upper Manoa are now seen in vast numbers.” In 1930 Mrs. Campbell of the Hui reported the birds as being “so happy to have their freedom.”8 The efforts of both the BCAF and the Hui Manu to bring in birds from other parts of the world were nothing new. Humans around the globe have a long history of translocating birds—to use the technical term— moving them from one region to another where they haven’t historically existed. The reasons for these labors of love, for that’s usually what they were, fell into two categories: first, to combat undesirables—some local pest or nuisance, a practice known today as biocontrol; and second, to provide an aesthetic that the new region lacked. (A third reason—to promote survival of an endangered species that faces extinction in its usual habitat— is a relatively modern conservation technique.) Most typically, these acclimatization societies, also known as “comfort societies,” were started by recently arrived residents who wanted something of the comforts of home. The acclimatization societies founded on the European continent included the French Société Zoologique d’Acclimatation, founded in 1854; the Berlin-based Akklimatisations-verein in 1858; the long-winded Society for the Acclimatization of Animals, Birds, Fishes, Insects, and Vegetables, formed in the United Kingdom in 1860; and in Italy in 1861, La Società di Acclimazione. Other parts of the world had many more. Australia had at least seven of its own groups, including the Ballarat Fish Acclimatisation Society. America, God Bless It, had six of its own, including the New York–based

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American Acclimatization Society, which counted among its members the infamous Eugene Schieffelin, who was responsible for the release of a hundred starlings from England into Central Park in 1890 and 1891. Accounts dating to the first two decades of the twentieth century also claim he was part of an attempt to introduce into North America all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s works, but I, and others, have not been able to find a shred of evidence in the historical record to support this claim, despite its wide distribution as an appealing story. In any case, those hundred starlings now number more than 200 million individuals across the United States. (One author who bought into the Shakespeare myth has suggested that Schieffelin should have pondered the Bard’s character Hotspur, who considered using the call of the starling to drive the king mad.) Thirty years earlier, Schieffelin also helped to introduce the House Sparrow to America. The full list of groups making these introductions is very long; for instance, there were thirty or so such entities in New Zealand, mostly founded in the 1860s. They had different flavors to their motivations, but the results were perhaps predictable, given imperfect understandings of ecological systems. One Australian group famously introduced rabbits, with disastrous results. The suggestion was then made that weasels or stoats could control the rabbits, which British ornithologist Alfred Newton called “an attempt to correct a blunder by a crime.” But despite these setbacks, introduction activities were widespread across the globe. Russia had the Imperial Russian Society for the Acclimatization of Animals and Plants; and many others, both ephemeral and long-lived, worked tirelessly to relocate species from other parts of the world. Beyond their cultural, economic, and social roles, these acclimatization groups in total have had an immense impact on the biota of our planet, and they warrant a new synthetic and comparative book of their own.9 In Hawaiʻi, the calls for animals and plants from off-island started in around the 1850s and continued unabated for a hundred years. The Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society’s enthusiasms for fighting pest insects with introduced birds led to a number of attempted introductions, as local farmers and civilians took up the call. But aesthetics played a key role. As it

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would be in the twentieth century, the combination of insect-loving birds, coloration, and beautiful singing was a powerful attractant. Noted the Commercial Advertiser in 1860, “Owners of vessels leaving foreign ports for Honolulu, will confer a great favor by sending out birds, when it can be done without great expense. We need more songsters here.” Even a century later, the song was the thing. With the support of Raymond J. Kramer, the wildlife biologist for the Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources in 1963, the Hui Manu tried to introduce birds whose greatest feature was their beautiful song. Quoting from George Sutton’s midcentury book on Mexican birds, Kramer emphasized the auditory in describing the song of the Slate-Colored Solitaire, or Clarino—a bird the Hui Manu strongly desired for the islands: “It was so brilliant, so amazingly complex, that I could scarcely believe my ears . . . it was so beautiful, so wonderously [sic] like musical fireworks, that I opened my mouth and gasped. Never in all my journeyings had bird music wrung from me such ineffable applause, or filled me with such wild, half-furious exaltation.”10 So much in Hawaiʻi has arrived relatively recently, yet many living things there mesh so readily with stereotypical notions of paradise, and of the tropics, that the environment can be quite deceptive. A visitor from the mainland landing in Honolulu, Hilo, or Kona, is immediately greeted not just by warm, humid air and the beautiful scents of Hawaiʻi, but by a sonic bird landscape as well—chattering mynas, twittering White-eyes, and whistling Red-Crested Cardinals. Until diverse bird species were introduced after the start of the twentieth century, mostly silence—other than the omnipresent mynas from the mid-1860s onward—greeted travelers as they stepped off the boat. Native lowland birds had been almost entirely eradicated by the destruction of forests in earlier centuries, as well as by the numerous depredations to birds that Europeans and Americans had wrought through various actions. “A traveler is more impressed with what there is not, than what he sees . . . the almost universal absence of singingbirds,” noted a visitor in his 1854 account of the islands. In 1891 another tourist observed, “I have seen few varieties of birds. You can hear the babble of brooks, the rustle of leaves, the patter of rain, the thunder of the surf, but no thrushes sing in the thicket, and no lark notes sound in the air.”11

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Introduced bird species have a long history in Hawaiʻi. The first exotic bird introduced was the Red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus), which came with the Polynesians from southeastern Asia to the Hawaiian Islands. A number of aspects of Hawaiian life conditioned attitudes about introduced species. Writing in 1848, Hawaiian missionary Edwin O. Hall noted that to aid “a degraded nation and its attempts to rise” requires certain pressures. “The influences required to produce the result,” he writes, “are manifold; and few, very few of them are indigenous. Almost all of them must be introduced as exotics,—and undergo the slow acclimating process.” He was talking about humans, but his argument is clear: to modify “degraded” life—i.e., life in its un-Christian, uncivilized form—meant that a series of outside influences were needed. In the view of those like Hall, change was essential to lift the islands to some new state of grace. Much was done in the name of these civilizing desires. In 1858, Charles Bishop of Honolulu wrote to a colleague in California, Rev. Edward Walsworth, asking him to send some birds to the islands. “Our birds, as you know, are very wild and uncivilized, and the kinds we want are those that will come about our fields and gardens where we can see and hear them, and that will destroy some of our insect pests.” In response, Walsworth sent eight sparrows and two linnets to Honolulu, “of which four arrived safe,” noted a Honolulu newspaper.12 But locals had other views. As early as 1871, Hawaiians were bemoaning the decline of native birds and attributed the cause to specific introduced evils. Writing from Ma¯noa on Oʻahu in 1871, T. N. Penukahi wrote to the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ke Au Okoa to mourn the loss of native birds from the uplands of the island: “the kamaaina birds of our uplands: the Iwi, the O-u, the Akakane, the Amakihi, the Oolomao, the Elepaio; these are the native birds of these uplands who have disappeared.” He pointed directly to imported birds. “What is the reason for this disappearance? I tell you, it is because of the spread of the evil birds from foreign lands, in our plains, mountains, ridges, valleys, cliffs, forests, terraced taro patches, seashores, and rivers; that is why these kamaaina have gone, because of the spreading of these evil birds among us, and they are damaging the crops, and the food from the forests; rice planted by some are being eaten by these evil birds; and the bananas of the forests are all eaten up by these birds.”

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He also equated the evils of these introduced birds with the arrival of the white man: “And I say without any hypocrisy, the decrease of this people was because the arrival of the evil haole to Hawaii nei; it was they who spread the evil sicknesses: pala [gonorrhea] and kaokao [syphilis]. Hepera [smallpox] and mai pake [leprosy] are the reasons that our lahui [species] was decimated, because of the arrival of the evil haole; if all the people who came to Hawaii were like the people who brought the light people [missionaries], then this lahui would not have decreased in number; so too with the arrival of the evil birds to Hawaii nei, which hurt our native birds and plants; this is like the decrease of our lahui with the arrival of the evil haole who spread gonorrhea and syphilis and similar diseases.”13 Foreigners in the islands were also aware of the dangers of introduced species as early as 1900, when Henry Henshaw, working in the islands for a decade on Hawaiian birds, wrote to his Harvard friend and colleague William Brewster about an article he’d written for publication. “It is only a few pages long and will not amount to much save to call attention to the dangers of unrestricted freedom in the matter of Introduction. I am in hopes too that it will set some one else to work observing.” Others did observe, but suggested no action. “Sad, sad, sad, indeed, is what you write of Minas, Mongeese and other introduced curses,” Newton wrote to his collector British naturalist R. C. L. Perkins in 1896; “even the Californian Linnet [House Finch] can’t be much of a blessing.”14 Generally, though, the overwhelming trend in the twentieth century was toward importation. Typical was this commentary in the Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser in 1904: “There is no reason why our gardens and fields and mountains should not be peopled with the songsters of other lands. These little fellows may be introduced, but in order to keep them we shall have to let our guns give way to field glasses and to cameras. By proper care we can have not only such birds as we possess now, but birds with sweeter and sweeter song and more and more beautiful plumage.”15 Introduced birds weren’t the only species that had advocates in the islands; others were admired as well, such as a species of frog found in Hilo: “There is special reason why Hilo frogs should be promoted,” editorialized L. W. Haworth of the Hilo Tribune in 1902, apparently without irony.

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“Epicures dote on the frog leg and weep because there are not six to one frog instead of two. Music lovers find much that is satisfying in the basso profundo from the Hilo frog throat, as it mingles with the baritone roar of the surf in the night time. The frog has come to stay and must not suffer extinction like the American buffalo or the bright plumed oo of the Hawaiian forests. We can get along without feather legs or bison steak, but we will not be deprived of our frog leg fricassee.” Somehow, the introduced frog seemed to have higher standing than other endangered species endemic to their respective lands.16 Residents quickly realized that the best way to get new bird species imported was to band together, and the first organized group in Hawaiʻi interested in importing animals and plants from overseas was the Honolulu-based Outdoor Circle, which was initially part of something called the Kilohana Art League. The Hawaiian Star noted the Circle’s mission as follows: “Its purpose will be to interest the community in beautifying the city along practical lines, making use of plants indigenous to the islands, improving these plants and using practical methods towards beautyfying [sic] Honolulu.” Maud Gregory Lowrey, who was married to Frederick Lowrey, president of lumber dealers Lewers and Cooke as well as president of the Oʻahu Sugar Company, was one of the founders of the Outdoor Circle, and in April of 1912 the group held one of its first meetings at the Lowrey residence. The Hawaiian Star noted that “the object of this circle . . . is to hasten the appearance of the City Beautiful. Much time, yesterday afternoon, was given over to the discussion of the removal of broken down fences and other unsightly disfigurements in the city.” Some of the other women in attendance would also be officers in the Hui Manu eight years later, including Louise Dillingham, wife of the extremely influential Walter Dillingham.17 By 1916 the Outdoor Circle had 370 members and was busy with matters related to establishing a tropical garden at ʻIolani Palace, as well as eliminating billboards in residential areas in Honolulu. But it soon turned toward other concerns, and by 1920 the group was actively pressing for importation of birds. Ellen Fullard-Leo, the president of the Circle that year, and an import herself from South Africa, wrote to the BCAF, asking

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for an update on the status of importing birds, and whether the board felt that “harmless songbirds” would be imported along with insectivorous birds.18 Alatau Atkinson, the commission president, replied courteously, saying that he had no doubt that the commissioners, as well as most of the residents of the islands, would like to see the islands populated with birds that would “reduce the insects, please the eye and charm the ear, but the difficulty comes in trying to satisfy oneself as to the harmless nature of any particular bird.” This tension between the enthusiastic and emotional acceptance of birds that looked and sounded beautiful, and the risks they might pose to the environment, was a constant theme for both groups, but especially for the BCAF commissioners. But they didn’t respond consistently, often reacting to third-hand information or, worse, data culled from inappropriate sources, but at other times taking a cautious approach.19 The Outdoor Circle survives today, more than a century after its founding, as a betterment society, and now works as a statewide environmental nonprofit group. Other groups around the globe likewise underwent similar evolutions; the French Société Zoologique d’Acclimatation eventually morphed into a more general nature protection society, and exists today as a modern conservation group, although the word acclimatization continued to remain in its title until at least 1945. Its slogan today is Riche de nature, riche d’émotions (Rich in nature, rich in emotions)—a motto certainly applicable to Hawaiʻi and its relationship with introduced species. Organized bird people in Hawaiʻi between 1910 and the start of World War II were very powerful, highly placed politically and socially, and determined to remake the agricultural, sonic, and aesthetic landscape of Hawaiʻi. Native birds had disappeared from urban settings, and, at the same time, insects were causing proportionally greater difficulties and damage. During this time agricultural profits and acreage were increasing, and any threat to those profits was met with intense scrutiny. Insects, which were wreaking havoc with crops, were a major threat. First seen in 1900 by Perkins, whose name the genus bears, was the sugarcane leafhopper (Perkinsiella saccharicida), which had come from Australia, had spread very rapidly within a few years to neighboring islands, and had been responsible for the loss of some

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70,516 tons of sugar. At $350 a ton, the damage cost sugar planters $24.5 million in the first decade of the twentieth century.20 In the 1920s and 1930s, the BCAF members responsible for approving or denying the importation of birds, and who themselves were doing a great deal of importation work, had strong connections to local politics and business. The tremendously influential George Iʻi Brown, a Honolulu native and BCAF president during a key decade, was a golf buddy of the governor and would later be involved with the Hui Manu. In a corresponding vein, the women who founded the Hui Manu were married to some of Hawaiʻi’s most important and powerful businessmen and politicians.21 The BCAF had been founded in 1903, shortly after the Hawaiian kingdom became a U.S. territory, and was authorized to encourage and protect agriculture, horticulture, and forestry. The group owed its existence largely to an agricultural crisis in the summer of 1901, when a series of fires destroyed some 30,000 acres of forests in the Hamakua District on the Big Island. Upon realizing that no systematic fire prevention mechanisms were in place to protect forests, Governor Sanford Dole appointed five members to a new commission, the BCAF. The group was responsible for the compilation and publication of information and statistics on forestry, entomology, and general agriculture, and for the promulgation of related laws. Included in the new organization’s rules and regulations was a 1904 prohibition against importation of any animal, bird, reptile, or insect injurious to forests, trees, plants, or other vegetation of value. In 1925, the Board proposed modifying the regulations to say “no birds of any family, the members of which are in the judgment of the Board injurious or destructive to vegetation of value, shall be admitted into the Territory of Hawaii.” This rule change allowed the BCAF to apply more subjectivity, or at least to have more latitude in judgment, about just what constituted “injurious or destructive.”22 Changes to the commission’s mission and structure took place in 1905, 1907, 1915, 1917, and 1921, with each step regularizing and clarifying the roles of the board members, and modifying and generally expanding their authority into new spheres. The group soon oversaw water resources for the territory, and absorbed the existing Fish and Game Commission. Figuratively, the commission had been born from fire, and by 1927 it had

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expanded its oversight to include animal industry, as well as—perhaps most impactful on future relations with hunters and conservationists—its fish and game activities.23 As a result of the commission’s concerns and interests—primarily agricultural but also driven at times by members’ own strong sense of aesthetics—an invasion narrative saturates late nineteenth and early twentieth century agricultural life in the islands. While some of the pernicious invaders affecting sugarcane and other commercial crops in the early twentieth century were bacterial, fungal, or viral, in the narrative of agriculturalists defending against threats the invaders of the greatest concern by far were insects. The most ready solution seemed to be something we consider invaders themselves today—birds from other lands that could eat the insects. Generally these birds would need to be able to survive in lowland areas that were otherwise bird-free, and they would come to seem like almost miraculous saviors to the territory’s agricultural woes. The powerful commission is virtually never mentioned in published sources as an importer of birds into Hawaiʻi between 1910 and the start of World War II, but they were in fact responsible for some of the most common introduced birds in Hawaiʻi today, including the White-eye and the Red-Billed Leiothrix, both of which the group worked energetically in the 1920s to introduce, as well as numerous game birds and various passerines. Another important occurrence was passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), which became law in 1918. A number of Hawaiian birds were named in the list of protected species, including some that were distinctly not migratory, such as the newly protected Hawaiian Crow, the Hawaiian Coot, the Hawaiian Hawk, the Ka¯maʻo, the Olomaʻo, and the ¯ maʻo. The net effect was that birds had official federal protection. But the ʻO MTBA also inadvertently aided (and continues to aid) introduced species in the islands, because many of these are considered “native” on the mainland United States—a key part of the definition of birds deemed worthy of protection under the federal act. These include the Northern Mockingbird, the Northern Cardinal, the House Finch, and a number of others. The BCAF also had great influence on the importation of game birds, and these sanctioned introductions strongly colored attitudes about

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hunting. By the first decade of the twentieth century some people were already concerned about whether game birds would actually disappear, and they agitated for their protection; a squib in the Honolulu Evening Bulletin in 1910 noted that “there is talk of an ordinance being passed to protect game birds on Oahu for two or three years. It is felt that if this is not done the total extinction of game birds will result.” The BCAF’s introductions were carried out under the eye of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, which oversaw the commission’s work in the 1910s. Although Edward W. Nelson, the head of the Survey until 1927, had strong and specific views about importation of some passerine species, as did his successor, he didn’t appear to much care about which game birds were introduced, noting that “pheasants, doves, quail and other game birds may be admitted.”24 The powerful commission also oversaw a game farm on Oʻahu, where large quantities of imported fowl were held, acclimatized, occasionally bred, and liberated. The numbers of birds released were substantial; in 1928, the game farm sent out 1,191 Chinese Pheasants, all about ten weeks old, distributing them to Oʻahu, Kauaʻi, Maui, and the Big Island. Each county (i.e., each island) contributed financially toward the operation of the game farm. The County of Hawaiʻi (the Big Island) paid $500 in 1929 and was given a total of 380 pheasants as its share of birds; the fee went up to $750 per county the following year. Many birds were too young for sportsmen’s tastes, so they often spent several months at the farm before being released into the wild. As Chief Territorial Warden Hercules Kelly wrote to the commissioners, “The goal we’ve been working towards since the inception of the work has been to turn out the greatest number of birds possible and trying to improve conditions so that the increase of hunters would make it possible to establish game farms in each county.”25 Hunting organizations were popular in the islands in the 1930s, and regulation of their activities fell under the commission’s jurisdiction. These included the Maui Rod and Gun Club, the Hilo Gun Club, the Hawaiʻi Fish and Game Protective Association, and several others. The commission’s power continued to grow, and they increased their efforts to propagate game birds, pushing in 1930 to be given the power to create bird reserves, game refuges, and public shooting grounds, which took up larger

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and larger tracts of land. The commission’s new hunting-related obligations may have been the key reason the Hui Manu came into existence around the same time. As the scope of the territorial commission expanded, they would have had less time, and fewer resources, to import birds, and they were probably happy to cede the laborious activities involved in bringing in new nongame birds to the Hui Manu.26 National tensions between hunters and conservationists, however, arose, and affected the islands. In the 1930s people became increasingly aware of a conservation imperative—the result of the writings of people like Aldo Leopold, the rise of regional Audubon societies, and the founding of the federal Civilian Conservation Corps. Hunters felt marginalized, and a letter to the commissioners from Lindsley Austin, a Honolulu insurance salesman, reflected the disgruntled tenor among hunters. Austin had no problem with protecting songbirds but was very upset at the closing of the hunting season on endemic shorebirds. He noted that it was one of the “priceless heritages” of the American people to be able to hunt, and even when bird numbers increased, laws prohibiting their killing remained on the books. “Now, more and more pressure is being brought to bear by prejudiced bird groups—none of them giving a thought to the fact that sportsmen should be entitled to some consideration.” This was a typical example of what happened “when bird-lover fanatics, who except [i.e., exclude] no bird of any kind, manage to get such laws passed,” he fumed. “Here in Hawaii, we have little enough hunting for our sportsman.” Austin went on to question the decline of the Golden Plover in Hawaiʻi. He called the Audubon Society members on the mainland “misguided, single-track minded people who have nothing more to do than to take away the one out-in-the-open sport which has been the American sportsmen’s joy for centuries.” He then made a character appeal. “Did you ever know a real sportsman, a hunter or a fisherman, that wasn’t a pretty fine all around person and a good citizen?” He closed, “I warn you again, we sportsmen are too easy going. Don’t let us lose our shore bird shooting in Hawaii for sure as heaven is above, if we lose this then gradually all our hunting will be taken away.” His warning was couched in the same all-ornothing language used by national agricultural magazines’ exhortations that

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insects, if not dealt with, would be the ruin of man. These fixed attitudes about hunting also were no doubt precursors to the later resistance to the total eradication of sheep on the Big Island, as efforts to protect the Palila from the effects of ungulates intensified.27 The Great Ma¯hele, the land reapportionment put forth by Kamehameha III and enacted in 1848, had formed the basis for the sugar plantation economy. Within a relatively short period of time, sugar was an immensely important and influential cog in the wheel of the islands’ economic interests. It involved a complex intersection of land, water, capital, labor, and technology, and the men who profited from the industry were a tight group of five missionary descendants, a number of whose family members would have involvement with both the BCAF and the Hui Manu, including the corporations Castle and Cooke, Alexander and Baldwin, and Theo Davies and Co.28 Insect-borne sugarcane diseases first came to light in Hawaiʻi during the 1890s. In 1900, R. C. L. Perkins identified a new species of insect—the leafhopper. By 1903, the bug had spread to all of the islands and caused so much damage that the entire sugar industry was concerned that sugarcane in the islands could face extinction. The leafhopper constitutes a group of insects, some of which were indeed major threats to the sugar industry in the islands. Sap suckers, to which family leafhoppers belong, carry disease that kills the plants they suck from. As an entomologist, Perkins was focused on one particular approach: bringing in good insects to combat bad ones. This was a common strategy for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it was far from perfect, and often not effective. The territory had an enormous stake in the successes of its agricultural products. They were, after all, the islands’ primary economic driver. Anything that seemed to seriously threaten crops was immediately the target of condemnation and invective. The war on insects was waged at high levels in the territorial government. A memorandum that the commission drafted to Governor Lawrence Judd in 1930 did not include a paragraph from a preliminary draft that perhaps was ultimately deemed too inflammatory. The excised text opined that “scientists have stated that a war to extermination is on between man and insects, and that eventually insects will win if man does

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From article “Birds or Starvation,” Farm Journal, April 1923 (Mann Library, Cornell University)

not get busy by employing every means to combat them.” What, then, was a little slippery subterfuge and rule bending to import birds in the face of such a goal? But this anxiety in the islands wasn’t really the fault of commission members, because the farm industry press also promoted this idea. An April 1923 article in the popular Farm Journal (with a monthly circulation of over a million readers) revved up fears about civilization being overcome by insects. “Birds or Starvation,” it was titled, and it showed an illustration of a man in rags being swarmed by insects, captioned “The Last Man.” The article began, “Make no mistake about it—it is war. The human race is fighting the insect world for control of this earth, and every farmer knows that much of the time mankind has the worst of it.” The article described the conflict as a losing battle, and noted that man was losing for a single reason: “Stupid man, with the unbelievable short-sightedness to which he is so prone, has

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deliberately attacked and destroyed his chief ally, the wild bird.” The piece drew broad strokes: “Bugs Eat Crops—Birds Eat Bugs.”29 Hawaiʻi was also specifically mentioned in the piece. “A recent report is that the importation of birds has been resorted to in Hawaii in an attempt to check the ravages of the horn-fly and the cutworms. Four species have been approved and now the difficult and expensive task of catching the birds in other parts of the world and transporting them to the island is troubling the authorities. Hawaii was disgracefully plundered of once abundant bird life. The feather pirates raided this ‘Paradise of the Pacific’ and left her poor indeed. Present-day Hawaiians know that the absence of birds means an uncontrollable host of insect pests; that a country without birds is unfit for habitation.” Never mind that humans had been culpable in the extinction of dozens of endemic birds in the first place, and not because of feather collecting. This language had been used earlier in the century; Perkins published a piece in 1903 entitled “The War on Pests.” But it was a much more measured article, and in it Perkins noted that “the injurious insects of today are not those of twelve years ago, but more recent importations.” But the news pieces from the 1920s and 1930s were not scientific, and given these strident and polemic articles, local agriculturalists’ sense of impatience and urgency was perhaps more understandable. “Yours for the good of the forests!” proclaimed David T. Fleming, a Maui pineapple farmer, as he closed a letter to George Iʻi Brown in 1926. But he sounded a somber note: “Our forests are all going so fast that something must be done to protect them, and while, undoubtedly, care must be taken in the introduction of birds, we must do something more than sit still and watch them go. We have to get something to preserve what forest is left, and further still, work towards the replacing of the dead forest with another forest, either of native or of exotic trees.”30 Still, the board insisted its work was very careful, and sometimes it was. In a 1930 memo to the governor, the commission noted that “a great many requests have been made by our citizens for permits to introduce and liberate song and insectivorous birds into the islands and in each case the Board has gone into the matter very thoroughly, seeking advice from competent ornithologists and considering the question from all angles before permits have been allowed or refused.” No sane ornithologist, the memo noted, would

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have ever recommended the importation of rabbits into Australia, the English Sparrow into America, or the mongoose into Hawaiʻi, “or anywhere else for that matter, had they been asked beforehand as to the probable results from such introductions.” But the report also noted that its parent agency, the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, had “exercised almost excessive caution in its recommendations.” The report concluded that without “the aid of our feathered friends successful agriculture would be impossible.”31 Because many people introduced birds into the islands over decades without recording details, or often did so ad hoc, the historic record lacks precise dates and details for many introductions. The archival records of both the BCAF and the Hui Manu, though, help to clarify a number of introduction dates. Many authors in the past half-century, looking for introduction details, have relied on the writings of Edward L. Caum, a botanist and sugar researcher with the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA) who came to Hawaiʻi in 1916. With a graduate education in botany, Caum understood plants but had no formal understanding of birds. Much of Caum’s work in his extensive 1933 article “The Exotic Birds of Hawaii,” which attempts to itemize as many introductions as possible, is very helpful, but he makes numerous errors of date and distribution, with dates of introduction often being off by one or two or more years. Caum and his wife, Mary, lived under the same roof on Ma¯noa Road with Hamilton Agee, the director of the HSPA from 1913 to 1935. The two men no doubt drank— perhaps literally—from the same cup, reinforcing each other’s attitudes about the value of introduced species to fight bugs that threatened sugarcane, and the annoyances of feet-dragging investigations; their respective correspondence is brimming with these frustrations. At least some of the five commissioners understood that they had insufficient scientific background to evaluate introduced bird species, and this lack was compounded by vagaries in the laws. “Our laws touching on this subject are rather vague and unless the experts can agree on the question of any one bird becoming injurious to Agriculture, it will always be doubtful just how far anyone can go in recommending the introduction of birds,” noted Edward Ehrhorn. But his tune would later change. Ehrhorn, an older entomologist who was sixty-five in 1927, was a bundle of

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contradictions. He had considerable experience with bugs, having served as entomologist for Santa Clara County in southern California, and he was the first deputy state commissioner of horticulture and the quarantine officer. Of German and Peruvian descent, he had taken office in Hawaiʻi in 1909 with the BCAF. At times he seemed extremely wary of introducing birds, and at others breezily eager to do so—and, in many cases, seemingly without a sound basis for evaluation.32 Another person who seemed to swing somewhat wildly on his axis was Dr. David Fullaway. Of the various staff employed by the BCAF, Fullaway, an entomologist, was most frequently chosen as the person to handle matters related to bird introductions. Fullaway often called for “extreme caution and deliberation” in introducing birds, since the effects could be totally unknown. But often in the same breath he and others tried to introduce numerous species of birds, hoping that a smaller subset would become established. Fullaway had been the entomologist for the famous Tanager Expedition to the Laysan Islands—the voyage that had witnessed the extinction of the Laysan Honeycreeper. Shortly after that trip, and just back to Hawaiʻi from a visit to the Panama Canal zone in 1924, Fullaway wrote to the commissioners that “they had two curassows, several chachalacas, a toucan, fancy wild ducks, doves, etc. . . . I asked . . . if they would undertake to procure these birds and ship them to us when a sufficiently large lot was obtained and they promised to do so.” Others were more explicit about this batch-o’-birds approach to introducing species helpful in their quest. “I hope the Commissioners will act favorably as I think the thing to do is to import a variety of birds, so that in that way we may obtain at least one bird that will live in the forests here and do the needful,” wrote Maui resident Harry Baldwin to Charles Judd in 1926. Judd, the head of the BCAF, is a useful exemplar of the internecine politics of the era. His brother Lawrence would go on to be the governor of Hawaiʻi in 1929, and his other brother, Albert—the one who complained about the White-eye eating fruit—was a prominent Honolulu attorney.33 Despite claims that care was needed, a large international group of helpmates—most with no particular training, sensitivity, or indoctrination to the dangers of introducing species—worked to acquire birds for Hawaiʻi,

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apparently working on the assurances of only the scientists or politicians who claimed that the birds in question would be good for eradicating harmful insects. After the government of New South Wales rejected the Hawaiian government’s request for fifty pairs of an Australian bird, the Shepherd’s Companion (Rhipidura tricolor), so-named because of its habit of following livestock—and also known as Willie’s Wagtail—to be exported to Hawaiʻi, the superintendent of the Zoological Gardens in Sydney offered his cooperation in acquiring the bird through other means—including offering the fulltime help of one of his attendants at the facility in “capturing and taming” the birds. Fullaway also presented a backup plan: to have one J. E. Ward collect the birds himself, and then accompany them by boat to Hawaiʻi, perhaps in the course of two separate trips. “If it should frequent our cane fields at times and take a few Tachinid flies it would also take leafhoppers and moths, thereby squaring accounts,” noted one island entomologist in 1921.34 Birds’ ability to spread introduced plant species far and wide is recognized as greatly harmful to Hawaiʻi’s environment. But if this fact was discussed at all in the 1920s, it was in the context of being an advantage, as large areas could be forested without laborious artificial means. “As anyone may observe, the Java Plum has been spread considerably in our mountains through the agency of the mynah bird and many hundreds of acres have been thus reforested without cost and without the efforts of artificial planting,” wrote Charles Judd to the BCAF. “In the same manner the Fire Tree . . . is being spread in Hamakua in Hawaii and in Kula on Maui and will soon prove to be an addition to our native flora in the form of extensive forests established without cost.” This was definitely not a good maneuver, as the Fire Tree (Myrica faya) has been bad for native trees such as the ʻo¯hiʻa lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha), which had been the ʻo¯ʻo¯’s primary food, as well as that of other honeycreepers, including the Palila and the ʻIʻiwi. The Fire Tree has displaced the ʻo¯hiʻa in some areas, resulting in profound impacts on nitrogen cycling.35 At the same time that the war between bugs and humans was unfolding, another skirmish was taking place: bug experts versus bird experts—or, rather, bug experts versus the members of the commission who wanted off-island bird experts to have the final say about just what birds should be

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Entomologists on the summit of Mt. Kaʻala, Oʻahu, ca. 1930. l–r: Frank Terry, Frederick Muir, Otto Swezey, and Francis X. Williams (Hawaiʻi Biological Survey, Bishop Museum, Honolulu)

allowed into the territory. The situation was especially tense in the late 1920s, as the commission’s role as deciders about birds became more and more consolidated and it gained power. Bug people, opined Commissioner Bruce Cartwright, Jr.—who ironically, perhaps, was not a scientist but an insurance salesman and realtor, albeit one with long family ties to the islands—felt that entomologists’ opinions shouldn’t be given much weight in assessing threats from birds. “I feel that entomologists are not qualified to pass on bird importation any more than ornithologists are qualified to pass on insects,” wrote Cartwright to George Brown. Generally, the entomologists advised against importing birds, and the commissioners were not pleased. “I am afraid that unless we take this stand nothing will be accomplished in bird introduction,” Cartwright wrote. “We are bound to

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do what we can to increase and protect our forests. That is our first objective. There is no question but what certain birds do great work in keeping down forest pests. We need these birds in Hawaii and there seems no good reason why we should not have them, especially when it is acknowledged that forest birds will not go into cane fields and therefore cannot hurt the insects introduced for the benefit of the sugar industry.” Cartwright—who had no ornithologists on BCAF staff—then recommended top bird authorities for help. “Please get Dr. Wetmore [Alexander Wetmore, the Smithsonian ornithologist who had served as the secretary for the Smithsonian] and other ‘world-known’ ornithologists to give you a list of birds we can introduce for the benefit of our forests—give their life habits—and state how they will benefit us. With such letters we will be justified in overriding the entomologists.” One basic fact, from a twenty-first century perspective, is that neither group had sufficient knowledge of ecosystems and the broad effects that could result from introductions—in fact, nobody had enough knowledge to know just how it might go. But that was just the point of a number of entomologists, who sound—from a modern perspective—much more enlightened about these issues.36 It’s important to understand that the entomologists associated with the commission and with the HSPA were also more systematically trained in science, with an understanding of relatively new matters like ecology and epizootics. They were of a younger generation, and by the mid-1920s a tremendous amount had changed. At the turn of the twentieth century, advanced training had emerged for a variety of scientific fields. By 1910, the PhD had become the standard credential for study in a scientific field. By the early 1930s, experimental biology began to emerge from the country’s college laboratories. Graduate education in biology, including entomology and ornithology, provided a new marker for professionalism, regularizing the ways in which people learned authoritatively about not just birds and insects, but ecology and biological systems.37 By contrast, the ornithologists that the territory officials called on for expertise were mostly of an earlier generation—and that made all the difference in their attitudes about introducing species from overseas. Henry Henshaw was eighty years old in 1930 and hadn’t set foot in the islands for

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twenty years. He had no formal training in birds, although he had a keen naturalist’s eye and lots of experience with Hawaiian birds—although the commission was most interested in his opinion about the possible value of mainland birds in Hawaiʻi, rather than the Hawaiian birds about which he was most recently knowledgeable. Perkins—who was indeed sometimes quite cautious in these matters, and who was a bird man as well as an entomologist—was sixty-four. The one exception to this was young Alexander Wetmore, with his formal training as an ornithologist. Although Wetmore sometimes rendered a verdict about what might or might not be appropriate, in the light of history almost all of his suggestions involved actions that could or would damage biodiversity in the islands. Another key player in this mix was entomologist Fred Muir, who worked for the experiment station of the HSPA. Just as Henshaw late in his career had changed his mind about killing birds, so too did Muir have a substantial change of heart about the wisdom of earlier choices. Writing in 1915 to the board of agriculture, Muir urged the importation of the Formosa Crow from Formosa, since it was considered generally beneficial by experts in British India. However, nearly a decade later, he sang a very different tune. “Much as I personally love wild birds I consider that, as a principle, no bird should be introduced for pleasure only, either on account of its pleasing song or ornamental plumage, or if such is done then it should be only such birds as are not likely to have any effect upon the balance of nature in our cultivated districts,” he opined. “All insect eating birds feed on beneficial insects as well as others, and unless there be something in the habits of the bird to indicate that it is likely to do more good than harm it is not safe to introduce it. The statement that it will be ‘of general benefit’ hardly justifies us in allowing a bird to be introduced.”38 Writing to Charles Judd, the commission’s head, in 1924, both Ehrhorn and Caum disagreed sharply with Muir’s letter. “Why should it be accepted as a principle that no bird should be introduced for pleasure alone, other things being equal? It is hard to see the reason behind it. As to any possible effect on the balance of nature, it seems as though this balance could be upset with considerable profit.” The two men attempted to make an argument about the “good” insects that might prevail, while “bad” insects were

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Frederick Muir, entomologist with the Experiment Station of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association, ca. 1925 (Bishop Museum Archives, Honolulu)

reduced. “While it is perfectly true that insectivorous birds feed on beneficial insects as well as on others, it seems that the relative numbers, and relative sizes, of the two groups would make it perfectly obvious that the beneficial insects destroyed would be very decidedly in the minority.” But how could they possibly know this, without knowing what insects might be desirable to introduced birds? Birds’ relationship with their food, like almost every other aspect of their life histories, can change dramatically in new habitats.39 Someone should make a statue in the islands in Frederick Muir’s honor. With a prescience lacking in almost all of his bosses, Muir continued to insist that the introduction of new species was risky business. In a 1926 letter to H. P. Agee, the head of the experiment station of the HSPA, he spoke out strongly against the possible introduction of the Pekin

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Nightingale (the Red-Billed Leiothrix, Leiothrix lutea), which had a large band of supporters around the territory. In an impassioned and lengthy letter, responding to a letter from Ehrhorn to Judd that favored the bird’s introduction, Muir explained, “The addition of every animal to our fauna adds to the complexity of our biological conditions and thereby possibly adds to the increase of difficulties in biological control. For this reason I would take no risks. Unless this is taken into account no just judgment can be passed upon the introduction of any animal into our islands. In introducing insects this has been fully considered and has guided our actions, and if it should ever be ignored we shall be riding for a bad fall.” He then castigated Ehrhorn: “Mr. Ehrhorn has failed to grasp this aspect of the question and so naturally has failed to answer my objection.” He went on to note, “Turning from the purely economic side of the question there is a stronger reason for care in such introduction from the sentimental side. We have, in our islands, the most isolated and endemic fauna and flora in the world. So unique are they that I believe that future naturalists will condemn us if we do not take every care to preserve them intact.”40 But Muir also didn’t want to come off as a bird hater. “As a lover of birds I give way to none,” he concluded his 1926 letter. His views were diametrically opposed to those of Wetmore, who inexplicably argued for the Leiothrix’s introduction. “So far as Mr. Ehrhorn having ‘easily answered’ the arguments against introductions,” Muir concluded, “he has merely quoted two eminent ornithologists and ignored the principles on which the objections were founded.”41 The other cool and dissenting voice in the islands that countered the commission’s importation urgency was Francis X. Williams, a lower-ranked HSPA assistant entomologist who—unlike most of his colleagues in the islands—held a doctorate in science, from Harvard. He served as an entomologist on a seventeen-month trip to the Galápagos, collecting about 4,000 insects and learning a great deal about island endemism. In 1917 he moved to Honolulu and worked for thirty-two years for the HSPA, returning to California in 1949. Williams became deeply expert on the insects of Hawaiʻi, publishing the Handbook of the Insects and Other Invertebrates of Hawaiian Sugar Cane Fields in 1931, as well as a popular book, Mike the

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Mynah, about his own introduced species pet, the Common Myna; he coauthored the book with his wife, Louisa Clark Williams. He named no fewer than 146 new taxa of insects during his career. “I do not believe that either of these birds would prove a valuable addition to our avifauna from an economic point of view,” Williams opined when asked for his thoughts about the possible introductions of the Leiothrix and the Fijian Swallow by his boss, H. P. Agee. Further, he noted, “I do not think anyone here knows enough of the habits of these birds to guarantee them absolutely non-injurious.” He also remarked that he didn’t think an aesthetic point of view should count for much in an agricultural environment like Hawaiʻi.42 The innermost motivations of many of those who seemed wanton in their enthusiasm to introduce birds into the islands will probably never be known. How much of this introductory work was done to soothe lonely hearts and improve aesthetics, how much was done to truly help destroy insect pests—and how much did the two desires intermingle? Despite the incorrect advice of Wetmore, along with missteps by Henshaw, the commissioners did sometimes ask outside experts who were the best of their day. Ornithologist Joseph Grinnell of the University of California at Berkeley was one such forward-thinking voice of reason and caution in the face of others’ enthusiasm for introducing birds. “I would be very loath to introduce any species of birds as an experiment,” he cautioned Fullaway, trying to temper Fullaway’s enthusiasm for importing an Australian bird for control of the hook fly. “There is likelihood of failure in any attempt at introducing a bird species; but if successful, the new comer may prove undesirable in ways never anticipated. . . . I would be very loath to recommend the introduction of any non-native animal.” But like Muir and Williams, Grinnell was steeped in a more complex ecological approach to birds; by 1933, he and colleague Alden Miller could boast a total of thirtynine students writing doctoral dissertations on bird-related subjects. By that year, thirteen major universities in the United States and Canada offered doctoral programs that allowed students to focus on ornithological topics.43 Fullaway ignored Grinnell’s warnings and sent entomologist Cyril Pemberton to Australia to work on the problem, offering him $1,000 in compensation. Fullaway continued his determined efforts, spread out over

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more than a decade, to introduce the Shepherd’s Companion. The bird did finally become established in the 1920s but disappeared after some years; the last one was sighted at Koko Head in 1937.44 Meanwhile, back in Washington, boss Paul Redington consistently pushed back against commissioners’ importation wishes. “The introduction of exotic species into any locality and particularly into a region like the Hawaiian Islands, where the climate is mild, food abundant, and enemies absent, should only be considered under very exceptional circumstances,” Redington warned in a letter to Bruce Cartwright of the BCAF. “There is no list of birds or mammals which can safely be recommended for introduction in any place . . . . very few, if any, insectivorous birds have been successfully introduced. The species which have succeeded in new localities are mainly those that feed on grain seed or fruit, [a handwritten note here, presumably by Cartwright, reads, “does not effect [sic] Hawaii”] and the in-

Bruce Cartwright, president of the Board of Agriculture and Forestry, 1932 (Hawaiian Collection, University of Hawaiʻi at Ma¯noa Library, Honolulu)

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crease of any of these birds is likely to prove injurious to agricultural interests. If any species is recommended for introduction it should be made the subject of careful investigation as to its food habits, natural distribution and rate of increase before the experiment is actually made.”45 Cartwright was a particularly carefree fan of introducing birds he knew little or nothing about. Returning from an investigative trip to Samoa he remarked, “There were quite a few birds, all of them strangers to me. I believe that at least 2 species would be of great benefit to Hawaii.” He also mentioned a wild dove from Samoa that “would be very valuable in spreading tree seeds especially ‘ficus’ besides being an excellent ‘food’ bird.” He also enthusiastically suggested several plants and shellfish for importation, noting the delicious crabs and oysters they could bring in.46 The territorial commissioners and the Hui Manu both received constant proposals from supplicants to import birds from the U.S. mainland, China, Australia, England, Fiji, India, the Philippines, Mexico, and many other places; the proposals poured in over the decades. Aware of the possible injury to be done by some species, these supplicants nevertheless provided their own somewhat casual and nonscientific assurances that the birds were harmless. “As far as [the donor] knows they will not be injurious in any way,” went a typical comment.47 Sometimes the mismatch between potential bird and insect pest was slightly comical. Alfred W. Carter, the head of the Parker Ranch on the Big Island, was especially interested in introducing the Straw-necked Ibis from Australia to combat the cutworm (Peridroma saucia). Carter noted to Fullaway that cutworms caused more than $50,000 in damage every spring at the Parker Ranch. Cutworms are caterpillars of the noctuid moth and are nocturnal, coming out only at night to eat plants, but the ibis is fast asleep at night. Had the bird been successfully introduced, it would have been akin to the introduction of the mongoose to combat the rising rat populations— another night and day mismatch, for the rats were mostly nocturnal, and the mongooses diurnal.48 Other birds were strictly prohibited. Of the European Blackbird Caum wrote that “not under any circumstances would I permit its introduction.” Other species seemed benign based on their food habits elsewhere.

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Commission members regularly made assumptions that a bird’s habits on the mainland would make its presence acceptable, but outsider opinions often differed. Albert K. Fisher of the Biological Survey wrote to Ehrhorn, warning against importation: “The fact that finches and other cage birds are imported at San Francisco has nothing to do with the importation of such birds in Hawaii. At San Francisco continental conditions prevail with the presence of numerous natural enemies, whereas in Hawaii insular conditions exist with absence of natural enemies, and consequently the importation of foreign species must, therefore, be much more stringent.”49 When the commission received conflicting opinions about what birds were beneficial, it virtually always went with the ones that favored introducing certain birds to the islands. Edward Caum was a persistent and vocal proponent of the importation of Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, which he thought would be extremely beneficial. He had the backing of Alexander Wetmore, who had suggested the idea. Henry Henshaw also suggested Gairdner’s Woodpecker and Nuttall’s Woodpecker. Perkins, however, felt differently, urging great caution with such birds, pointing out that although they might eat insect pests, “they would be sure to destroy a lot of beneficial ones.” Perkins’s objections were brushed aside by other Commission allies, including David Fleming, who, besides his pineapple farming, served as a member of the Maui County Board of Supervisors, and seemed to lack entirely any experience in zoological matters. Fleming noted to George Brown that “it is my opinion that the Golden-Winged Woodpecker, the Red-Headed Woodpecker, the Ant-Eating Woodpecker, the Downy Woodpecker, and the Hairy Woodpecker are all species which would do inestimable good to our forests.” The commissioners took expert advice when it agreed with their often foregone conclusions, and rejected it soundly when they disagreed.50 The BCAF made various false starts. A commissioner ordered ten pairs of chachalacas from a dealer in Texas known as the Snake King, but before the birds were shipped the member visited the San Diego Zoo to learn more about them—somewhat after the fact. “Their appearance was against them as a game bird, and learning they only laid two or three eggs in the wild state and that the fertilization was only about 50%; also they are bad about fighting other birds—destroying nests and young, I promptly

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cancelled the order and recommended against this class of bird being brought to the islands.” He then noted he’d heard that the County of Hawaiʻi (i.e., the island of Hawaiʻi) had ordered the same bird, and that he thought it would be wise if the board would place a “tabu” against introducing them to any of the other islands “until after these have demonstrated whether they are a desirable game bird or not.”51 And although each island in the archipelago has a distinctly different biota, the commissioners thought of them all in the same breath. “It was the understanding of the Commissioners that whatever beneficial birds now existing on certain of the islands may with safety be allowed to go to other islands in this group,” Charles Judd noted to Baldwin in 1926. A decade later, largely due to BCAF efforts to translocate birds to other islands in the 1920s, the beautiful little Leiothrix was solidly established on Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Molokaʻi, Maui, and Hawaiʻi, and populations quickly expanded on all islands. (It has since virtually disappeared from Kauaʻi, though, and its populations increase and decline dramatically elsewhere in the islands, for unknown reasons.) So although the birds don’t seem to have any adverse impact on native Hawaiian bird populations, their densities in nonforested areas mean that they readily carry seeds and diseases (specifically, avian malaria) to other parts of their island. In this way, the bird stands in for all introduced species, or at least the widely distributed ones: they have the capacity to spread things far and wide—although to be fair, this isn’t a characteristic limited to introduced species.52 The White-eye also doesn’t seem to be very susceptible to avian diseases. Microbiologist Carter Atkinson told me that in his own experimental work on malaria in the bird, he’s discovered that White-eyes are not good reservoir hosts for infecting mosquitoes and maintaining transmission of malaria. “I’ve had similar results with limited attempts to infect them with pox virus in the lab,” he added. “They are what I would consider ‘resistant’ to infection, and it is likely that malaria and pox have little or no impact on them.” The White-eye might thus buffer malaria epidemics by blunting transmission of the parasites to endemic forest birds.53 The push for introduced species came from every quarter. Even Boy Scouts were to be pressed into service to capture the Western Meadowlark

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on the mainland, since large numbers of breeding pairs were desired. Other ideas included capturing a brood of birds at a time, before the chicks were able to fly, and feeding them in captivity until they were strong enough to be shipped from the mainland. And at the other end of the spectrum of participants, no less an expert on birds than Wetmore opined about the Hawaiian importation options: “If you expect to bring in birds I may suggest that you consider the mocking bird and the meadow lark.” This must’ve been mightily confusing to the territorial commissioners, who had worked up detailed information as to why the introduction of the mockingbird might be a very bad idea indeed.54 Other twists and turns occurred as supporters doubled back, often contradicting their earlier notions about what to import or not. Wetmore sent a telegram walking back his initially enthusiastic support of introducing some birds, including the mockingbird and meadowlark. “Modify my letter December seven. Introduction any birds an experiment uncertain in result and possibly dangerous,” he cabled. “The introduction of birds of any kind into a new environment is one that may lead to uncertain result, since no one can prophesy how any animal will react to a strange environment.” It turns out that Wetmore had had a little chat with Redington. “My statement that you might consider the mocking bird and the meadow lark were . . . made merely as suggestions, and in confirmation with the statements that I made before your Board in person in 1923, that on the whole I believe such introductions as strictly a gamble.”55 In the face of their numerous introductions, all of uncertain impact, it’s inaccurate to paint the BCAF as uncaring about the effects of introduced species in the islands. They had impossibly conflicting responsibilities. They were beholden to game and hunting interests, which had deep roots in the islands. They were also victims of their own era’s lack of understanding of complex ecological matters. And to their credit, they also tried to maintain some form of conservation imperative. For instance, the territorial commission, like the Hui Manu in subsequent years, was concerned about the low numbers of Ne¯ne¯ (Branta sandwichensis) in Hawaiʻi, and worked to get breeding pairs from other islands. Only a few small flocks remained. The bird, which had numbered about 25,000 upon the arrival of westerners in

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the eighteenth century, was down to less than 50 by the 1940s. “We are anxious to reestablish this rare and almost extinct Hawaiian bird,” noted George Brown, writing from Oʻahu. “We believe that we can raise some here at the Farm and later when they increase here we intend to ship them to Hawaii [Island] and when Hawaii is supplied we intend to do the same with the other Islands.” The game farm held its own small captive population of just three birds. Throughout the 1930s, the commissioners kept active track of existing populations, arranged to have birds moved to different islands to freshen up the gene pool, and issued permits to select individuals around the territory to raise and distribute the bird. On rare occasions people were also allowed to ship the birds to the mainland. More successfully, though, Ne¯ne¯ were raised in Europe—hardly a locale that would seem conducive to a bird from a tropical climate. Nevertheless, between 1952 and 1973, at least 734 Ne¯ne¯ fledged in Europe, and substantial populations now exist there.56

The Hui Manu The work of the territorial government intersected neatly with a different set of interests in the islands—private rather than governmental ones. In March 1930 the Hui Manu, which means “bird group” in Hawaiian, finally emerged as an extension of the Outdoor Circle. As with the Outdoor Circle members, all of the Hui’s officers were haole women. Their stated intention was to import birds from around the world, in the face of a lack of colorful bird life in urban areas. Their plan was to “revivify our forests here with the bright plumage and mellifluent songs of these little people of the forest.”57 The group immediately got onto a sound financial footing, and never really lacked for funds. Josephine Campbell, the vice president of the Hui in 1930, noted the group hoped for a large membership. “The funds provided in this way will help towards enabling us to import birds from the mainland U.S., from Japan and other countries,” she wrote in a draft statement of purpose for the group, “and the love awakened by participation in the work will insure active cooperation in the protection of the birds when we get them here.”58 The territorial commissioners in charge of approving or denying permits for bird introductions were immediately supportive of the new Hui

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Manu. They considered the group’s members as allies rather than competition, and an early Outdoor Circle annual report noted that the Hui Manu was formed “with encouragement and help of the Board of Agriculture and Forestry.” The two groups had been connected since the work of the Outdoor Circle in the early twenties to import birds, when the Circle wrote the commissioners for advice. Key supporters of the Hui Manu were also officers of the commission, including George Iʻi Brown. Louise Judd (née Luquiens), the wife of Charles Judd, the territorial forester, was also active in the Hui Manu, serving as president in the several years before World War II. But beyond the personal relations between the two groups and their various entanglements, their interests were also complementary. Although their attitudes and desires overlapped somewhat, as a rule the territorial commission was focused on the possibilities of using birds to manage insect pests that threatened agriculture, while the Hui was motivated by aesthetics, wanting to bring birds of beauty and abundant song into the islands.59 The Hui had gotten its start—at least in intent, if not yet as a separate organization—as a result of a suggestion by Elinor Langton-Boyle, editor and publisher of the popular magazine Paradise of the Pacific, who proposed that the Outdoor Circle establish an aviary in Kapiolani Park and begin to import desirable birds. The group agreed the idea would be worthwhile, and soon considered protection and importation of birds its twopronged mission. The first goal was a socially conscionable set of actions that helped the Circle feel good about preserving Hawaiʻi’s bird life, both endemic and introduced. These activities involved working with school groups and doing bird-related educational work in the community. But this was somewhat at odds with the second aspect—their importation desires— because of the risks to which they unwittingly exposed native plants and animals. Their work included virtually no investigations into the impact of the birds they wished to import. However, they had their hands in all aspects of both preservation and importation. They leaned on the territorial legislature for funding, asking for and receiving thousands of dollars annually. The Hui Manu—like the commission—went to great and costly lengths to import birds.60

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The Hui’s first meeting took place at 11 a.m. on Monday, March 10, 1930. The day and time are notable because it was on a day, and at an hour, when most of the Honolulu workforce was otherwise occupied. The founders and officers were almost exclusively wives of men who had full-time jobs outside the home. The women in the group were extremely well connected, which was a key reason for their ability to be heard in wider spheres for their bird interests, and to be able to garner maximum political attention and support. There’s also no doubt that the power wielded by the women officers of the Hui Manu, and the professional status of their husbands, was a key factor in their various successes. Louise Olga Gaylord, who was the group’s first vice president and who was referred to in the minutes as Mrs. Walter Dillingham, was married to Walter F. Dillingham, one of Hawaiʻi’s most powerful businessmen. An industrialist, Dillingham was responsible for much of the urban development of Honolulu in the first third of the twentieth century. The first president, Maud Lowrey, was married to Frederick J. Lowrey, the president of Lewers and Dickson, with tight connections to Castle and Cooke. The Lowreys had two houses, one of which, known as “Niniko,” was in the upper Nuʻuanu Valley. This property was the site of many of the Hui’s bird releases in the 1930s. As a result of the officers’ social, familial, and political influence, the people who addressed the group (and, regularly, others outside the group on its behalf), were also prominent. The first meeting’s minutes noted the forthcoming appearance of the governor of Hawaiʻi, Lawrence M. Judd, as well as his predecessor, ex-Governor Wallace R. Farrington, whom the group desired for “inspiration,” and Charles Hogue, a writer for the Honolulu Advertiser, for “organization.” The group had it all lined up: political power, reportage, and the will to move its ideas forward. The Hui Manu’s second meeting, held in newly opened Dillingham Hall on the Punahou campus, ten days after the inaugural gathering, featured all three men. Judd read a paper about bird life and its enemies in Hawaiʻi, and promised government support. All the speakers offered enthusiasm for the group and its mission. David Johnson, the former assistant curator of birds at the San Diego Zoo, also made an appearance. Farrington warned the group against slackening its efforts, “for there is bound to come

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a period of dull hard work, where the first blush of enthusiasm pales”; it is at that point, he noted, efforts must be redoubled, likening the work to that of a New England farmer needing to push on in his labors.61 The group reiterated its mission in simple language at its April 8 meeting: “The idea of the Hui is to repopulate the islands with bright plumages of birds and song birds.” The Hui Manu understood that native songbirds once inhabited the islands from the mountains to the beaches but now were mostly gone. The surviving birds, now relocated to considerably higher locations and mostly out of urban settings, were invisible. However, the group felt that forests were a desired locale for imported birds. In a onepage document from 1930 titled “Objectives,” Josephine Campbell, one of the vice presidents, wrote, “Picture our forests, in the not too distant future, alive with the song of birds adding to the joy of our Hawaiian landscape as only bird life can, and you will become an enthusiastic member of the Hui Manu Society.”62 In the course of thirty years of minutes, though, there was not a single suggestion or discussion of trying to relocate existing endemic species from higher elevations to lower ones. Birds such as the ʻIʻiwi and ʻApapane were also virtually never mentioned by name, despite being the most common and most colorful natives. For the Hui, “protection” seemed to apply only to introduced birds that could sing and were showy. At the start of its second year, the Hui Manu held a “meeting” at the Lowreys’ palatial home in Honolulu. Six hundred people attended, and guests paid membership dues as the admission price to the gathering, which resembled a party much more than it did a meeting. The event included a tea service, a pageant of Hawaiian music, singing, and dancing, “in which much of the bird lore of early Hawaii was incorporated.” The occasion ended with a play (Chanticleer, the popular French production), and people left very satisfied.63 The officers also gave lip service to the idea that at least some aspects of bringing new birds into the islands needed to be done carefully. “The handling of the birds is a highly technical proposition and great care must be exercised in the care of birds coming here where all conditions would be new and strange,” the secretary reported in the minutes for April 8, 1930.

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They had no scientists in their ranks, however, and most of the time would prove quite reckless in their approach to introductions. There’s also scant evidence that they actually followed up on any related concerns raised either inside or outside the organization. Children were a specific focus of the group, and for particular reasons. “It was decided to have a Junior Hui Manu,” the minutes of the first meeting read. “It is earnestly hoped that this will be a splendid educational feature.” Inculcation of children to the benefits of birds was a specific desired element. The group wanted adults who would be “eager to take part in the awakening in the hearts of the children of today, who are to be the grown ups of tomorrow, that love of birds and the desire to protect them that is in every soul.” Teachers were also specifically called out to help the Hui by “telling the doctorine [sic] of bird protection,” the secretary wrote in the minutes from one early meeting.64 The task would not be trivial, the minutes noted. “It is going to be a stupendous task and will require untold patience and effort, children do not realize nor have they been taught in their homes that shooting and maiming defenseless creatures is cruelty. An alive and enthusiastic school committee must be appointed to talk to the children in each and every school, making each child feel it is their responsibility to protect bird life.” The Hui also had a popular program by which children—almost invariably boys—could trade in their guns for cameras. Even the Eastman Kodak Company got into the spirit, processing the first roll of film for free. As one writer reported, “A local radio station broadcast the sound of ninety-six guns being destroyed as they were handed in—an effect somewhat spoiled by the voice of a small boy announcing over the air ‘I don’t care—I’m getting a new one for Christmas.’ ” The Hui introduced many thousands of youngsters to bird protection, although its goal for kids was specifically to protect introduced species, not endemic ones. But the long-term detriments of introducing species from afar, with no understanding of the impacts, would prove to be considerably more pernicious than youngsters who wanted to hunt introduced birds in urban areas.65 In the years between 1930 and 1960, the Hui Manu imported dozens of different species, comprising tens of thousands of individual birds, from

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all over the world. By World War II, through persistent effort, the Hui Manu had successfully introduced several species now ubiquitous in the islands, including the Brazilian Cardinal, the Shama Thrush, and more of the Japanese White-eye. These importations consisted mostly of songbirds, although birds with bright plumage were another desired category. Sometimes the Hui Manu’s methods were not particularly formal, skirting completely the mechanisms in place to get official territorial government approval of new species. “The suggestion was brought forward that the newspapers be asked to kokua [help] by soliciting through the piers for a pair of cardinals[.] In this way many people could be interested and many birds brought into the territory,” noted an early entry in the group’s minutes. The group’s enthusiasms were spread in print and through word of mouth, and within a month of the first meeting the group had 175 paid members.66 Individuals and groups on neighbor islands also wrote to the Hui Manu to ask about getting birds for release. “If the Hui Manu succeeds in obtaining a shipment of 55 more pairs of Mexican Rainbow Buntings, would it be permissable [sic] for me to obtain six pairs for release here on Molokai? Of course I would be glad to purchase them from the Hui Manu,” wrote Sophie Cooke to Hui President Ethelinda Castle during World War II.67 Thanks to its well-organized efforts, the group received press across the nation. In 1936 the Salt Lake Tribune ran a small piece titled, “Hawaii Will Create Bird Paradise Anew.” The article began, “Hawaii is slowly becoming the bird paradise it was before great numbers of rare tropic species were exterminated by natives in search of brilliant plumage for regal feather capes and helmets. Thousands of songbirds have been imported from the Orient and the mainland by the Hui Manu. . . . Once knowing virtually only the boisterous mynah and ubiquitous English Sparrow, the territory is being populated by Kentucky cardinals, southern mocking birds, Japanese and Chinese nightingales, Robins and bluebirds.” Ironically, the article vilified native feather hunters, who appear to have been far less culpable than other factors in species decline, including habitat loss brought by the very industrial activities Hui officers’ husbands and forebears had engaged in for a century. A one-sentence squib about the group was also published widely across the country between September 1936 and February 1937: “The Hui

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Release of Mexican Rainbow Bunting in Ma¯noa Valley by Hui Manu officer, 1941 (Hawaiʻi State Archives)

Manu, or Bird Society, imports songbirds yearly to stock the Hawaiian islands.” This little blurb appeared in many city newspapers, ranging from the tiny (the Maryville Daily Forum in Missouri) to the big (the New York Tribune), but mostly in small-town newspapers in Iowa, Texas, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma. This probably led to a variety of offers of birds for the Hui from afar.

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The group’s releases were meticulously planned. On April 14, 1939, members released eighty-four Shama Thrushes, carefully distributed around different locations by seven of the officers, at Diamond Head, the Nuʻuanu Valley, and elsewhere on the leeward side of Oʻahu. They also released twenty-eight Van Hasselt’s Sunbirds (Cinnysis brasilianus), a pretty little nectar-feeding bird from Asia. “We confidently believe that both of these species can become established on Oahu,” wrote E. H. Lewis, the superintendent of the Waikiki Bird Park, to Castle.68 The Hui was deeply persistent with some species, and tried for decades to import what they described as the Rainbow Bunting (Passerina leclancherii). Twenty pairs of the birds—a partial order due to short supply—were sent to the Hui Manu in 1941 from San Francisco. “We will do all in our power to ship you birds which will be strong, robust breeders,” wrote Ansel Robison, the pet store owner who sold the birds. “Do you think you will be wanting Red Cardinals?” he added solicitously. All of the buntings survived the trip, with more scheduled to arrive the following spring. But World War II intervened, and correspondence between Robison and the Hui Manu didn’t resume until the spring of 1946. C. G. Carter, the Secretary of the Hui, wrote that year to ask about getting the remaining fifty-five pairs. She also asked eagerly, “Are they merely ornamental or have they a lovely song?”69 The officers’ lack of an ornithological background, not to mention their failure to consider whether the birds they imported would have appropriate habitat, was somewhat breathtaking, and they were often even more uninformed than the commissioners had been in the ’teens, some thirty years earlier, about birds’ relationship with their environments. “The Buntings which arrived in such good condition seem to have disappeared entirely,” Carter complained in her letter to Robison. “They were seen for only a short time. We released them in a mountainous wooded valley and I wonder if that might not have suited them. Do they live in a wet or dry jungly part of Mexico?”70 Although World War II brought their efforts to nearly a complete halt, the Hui remained busy with importation leading up to, and immediately following, the conflict. Specific families of birds were of long-standing interest,

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such as hummingbirds, which seemed perfect for Hawaiʻi. Robison was an enthusiastic helpmate, but others—including the airlines—were also complicit in facilitating the import of birds. “I am trying to get you some humming birds that are really different from those found here in California,” Robison wrote to Hui President Mrs. E. W. Peterson in the fall of 1941. “Although we have a few varieties here, they are not as magnificent as those that come from Mexico. I have already received permission from Pan-American to bring them by plane.” The war intervened, but the Hui picked right up after the conflict ended. “Will you also will you please give me the latest information on the ‘magnificent’ humming birds from Mexico, that you mentioned in your letter of Oct. 9th, 1941?” wrote a Hui officer in 1946.71 The Hui Manu was not the only group of bird lovers bent on introducing feathered friends from afar. A little-known organization on Oʻahu, the Honolulu Mejiro Club, which was founded by Japanese immigrants, wanted to introduce Asian birds to the islands. This group stood in ethnic contrast to the white upper-middle-class founders of the Hui Manu. But like the Hui officers, they were also importing species. The Honolulu Mejiro Club probably was short-lived, its existence numbered in months rather than years. Its founders and members all appear to have been Japanese, and they released a group of twenty-two Japanese Bush-Warblers—Horornis diphone, small brown and gray birds with a strong propensity to sing—in February 1941, although the birds don’t seem to have ever become established. The group worked closely with the Hui Manu, donating the birds to the Hui and releasing them at the Lowreys’ residence. The introduction of the bush warblers was likely the group’s only release, because when Pearl Harbor was attacked ten months later the organization disappeared entirely from view. The bush warblers were a popular import as a cage bird, and the Honolulu Mejiro Club held a series of singing contests whereby caged birds—as many as seventy at a time—were entered in a contest to see which bird could sing the longest.72 The Hawaiʻi Audubon Society, which was founded in 1939 by Charles M. Dunn and which continues to be very active in island conservation matters today, also played an important role in promoting birds to a wider audience. The society was created near the height of the Hui Manu’s

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importation and release efforts, and it agreed officially and enthusiastically with the Hui’s mission. At the inaugural meeting Dunn was named as secretary-treasurer, and John d’Arcy Northwood—an English import—was named as president. The group began as the Honolulu Audubon Society, and continued with that name until the summer of 1946, when it took its current name. The group promoted information and understanding about birds, and waxed ideological about introduced species only rarely. But there’s no doubt that many Hui members were also Audubon members, and sometimes articles were explicit about the benefits and joys of introduced species. “The exotic birds seen here would be practically nonexistent had it not been for the vision and enterprise of a few public-spirited individuals and organizations,” one contributor wrote in 1943 in the Elepaio, the group’s publication.73

The Myna and the Mockingbird To better understand the White-eye’s place in the island’s cultural history, and the mix of attitudes about it, we can look to the Common Myna— Pihaʻekelo (“full of voice”) in Hawaiian, or Acridotheres tristis tristis—often raucous, always clever and highly adaptable. The Myna is another bird that generates fierce opinions, both for and against. As one author noted in 1966, “To some Hawaiians the myna bird is amusing, to some he is of no concern one way or the other, but to some he is a threat to the mental health of the human race.” The bird—not to be confused with the other Myna in the islands, the Common Hill Myna (Gracula religiosa)—was introduced from India in the fall of 1865 by a Honolulu physician, William Hillebrand, “to combat the plague of army worms that was ravaging the pasture lands of the islands.” The Hawaiian-language newspaper Ke Au Okoa commented on the birds’ initial arrival from Asia in early October 1865: “Containers of New Birds.—Aboard the trading ship of the Chinese that arrived were brought containers of new birds. The purpose of these birds are to eat bugs found in the dirt like caterpillars [peelua], koe [worms], etc. Last Wednesday, the birds were released. When they were immediately released, they quickly went in search of bugs. The number of those birds was one-hundred and

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eighty-four. Some of them died, but the majority are living.” The 1859 Penal Code provided them with immediate protection, and the article concluded, “Therefore, anyone who sees these new birds is prohibited from killing them lest they be in trouble with the Law.”74 Although Hillebrand imported the birds as an official member of the king’s Privy Council, the Board of Health, and the Kingdom’s Bureau of Immigration, and he did so on behalf of the Hawaiian government, the bird’s reputation promptly tanked, and its presence has remained controversial to the present day. George Munro found the “Miners,” as he called them, quite interesting during his time on the Big Island in the 1890s, skinning several for practice and taking some interest in their habits. But, he noted, “they are very destructive to the doves.”75 Many considered the bird to be loud, of vulgar habit, and a pest, and numerous ills were attributed to it. One of the Hawaiian terms for the Common Myna is manu ʻaipilau (“trash-eating bird”). However, some did think it worth protecting, and its evils overstated. “We believe that a recommendation should be made to the Legislature . . . so as to put the mynah on the protected list,” wrote Edward L. Caum to the commissioner of agriculture in 1926. “In spite of its usual reputation, the mynah is an extremely valuable bird. . . . The bird has been accused of many crimes, most of which it does not commit. While it is fond of figs and mangoes (papaia also), the insects it eats more than compensate for the fruit it destroys.”76 Beyond its feeding habits, many found the bird charming. “He is saucy and game, and struts like a Bantam rooster,” opined a Honolulu newspaper in 1902. “He has the color of a catbird, the head of a crow and the wing of a mockingbird. Like man he is omnivorous, not always select in his company. . . . The Minah does not sing, but has a little cat-call of his own. . . . He is very fond of cooks . . . About dusk the Minah flocks in hundreds to the place of general assembly. This is always the top of some high tree near the house of a nervous man. . . . At sunrise they bid each other a loving farewell, promising faithfully to be in the dormitory at the evening jollification.”77 Alfred Newton noted to Perkins, “I don’t remember Wilson having told me of the devastation caused by the ‘Mynahs’—but I can well believe

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it—only I thought they had not been forest haunting birds, keeping rather to the cultivated portions. I suppose you have satisfied yourself that they do interfere with the native species—People who are not naturalists take up such strange ideas on subjects of this kind.” The Mynas did engage in acts of pillage (and continue to do so), affecting endangered species in the islands. For instance, they destroyed 60 to 70 percent of the Wedge-Tailed Shearwater eggs at Kilauea Point in the mid-1970s, in the midst of efforts to restore the shearwater populations. But sometimes the cure for the Common Myna was worse than the problem. A hotel on Waikiki Beach wanted to prevent mynas from roosting in trees on its property to keep their attendant noise and poop from disturbing the guests. The hotel was prevented by law from killing the birds, and so it “tried a gamut of measures with little success, including jerking branches with ropes, hoisting cats into the canopy, setting off fire crackers, and using high-frequency sound waves. It appeared that the hotel guests were more perturbed by these measures than the mynas.”78 Darwinian evolution tells us that everything comes from common ancestors. Beyond the concept’s scientific truthiness, it is an important aspect of attitudes about belonging. One mark of “nativeness” seems to be whether or not something is different in the islands than it is elsewhere. What if it has diverged to a relatively small degree, such as the Pueo—the Hawaiian Owl that’s similar to, but different from, its mainland cousin, the ShortEared Owl (many consider the Hawaiian version to be a subspecies, since it’s weakly differentiated from the owl known across Eurasia and North America)—or the Hawaiian Stilt, which descended from the Black-Necked Stilt and has status as an endemic subspecies? So in the case of the myna, what are those in the “hate” camp to make of the fact that it has already differentiated itself genetically into something new in the past 150 years? Who hates “Hawaiian birds”? Status alone is often enough for us to change our attitudes. These are not your grandfather’s myna birds. DNA analysis shows us that in the past century random genetic drift among the island populations has promoted genetic shifts equal to those between different subspecies of birds. In other words, the mynas in the Hawaiian Islands are already on their way to becoming something else, found only in Hawaiʻi.79

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Unlike the Myna, with its numerous supporters as well as detractors, no one seems to have ever had anything good to say about the mongoose after its arrival—charismatic, it was not. Mongooses (not mongeese, as they are sometimes called by the uninitiated), native to India, were first established on the Big Island in 1883, when a group of seventy-two animals was released along the Hilo and Hamakua coasts in an attempt to control the pernicious rat populations. Wrote Newton to Perkins in 1896, in response to some observation by Perkins about depredations by the mongooses on the Big Island, “I have gnashed my teeth at what you write of Mongeese, and am ready to consign them to the place of torment that no doubt awaits the German Emperor and President Cleveland to say nothing of other officials— Yet I am sure you will give me credit for being a kind-hearted Christian.”80 Yet the small Indian mongoose, introduced to a variety of islands outside of its native Asia, including not just Hawaiʻi but the West Indies, Fiji, Mauritius, Okinawa, and elsewhere, has evolved in almost all its new homes to be bigger than in Asia. And the muskrat, the House Sparrow, and Asian Velvetleaf—just a few among countless examples—have become larger in new homes. The Eurasian fruit fly rapidly evolves larger wings in cooler climates. These species and others all evolve different life history strategies for survival in new places. As a result, they become something unique to their new area.81 To further mess with a not-so-black-and-white narrative about what stays the same and what evolves in Hawaiʻi, other introduced birds have experienced measurable change. By 1920, ornithologists like Joseph Grinnell had begun to suspect that introduced species could undergo significant changes of their own by way of adaptation. “There is always the chance that a new environment will be found to have induced changes in specific characters—evolution under way, possibly, though well attested cases of this sort are so far wanting,” he wrote to bird eye expert Casey Wood. But evidence now abounds of rapid evolutionary change. In Hawaiʻi, House Sparrows, which have demonstrated rapid differentiation within 100 generations, now differ strikingly from their mainland counterparts.82 Other isolated populations in Hawaiʻi have changed form substantially. Monarch Butterflies in the islands have a much higher incidence of

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albinism. Brushtailed Rock Wallabies in Kalihi on Oʻahu are, as Nature Conservancy Chief Scientist Sam Gon told me, “an important and distinctive population relative to the genetic makeup of the original populations in Australia, which are endangered.”83 Other introduced birds have been controversial in the islands. One of the best-known of these is the Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos). These arrived frequently as caged birds; a Honolulu newspaper noted in 1873 that “by the last steamer from San Francisco, a number of California mocking birds were received by His Excellency the Minister of Foreign Affairs.” Twelve were shipped from San Diego, and ten survived the voyage. “If they shall eventually increase and thrive here, they will be an undoubted benefit as they are noted as destructive of insects.” In 1893, a local paper reported that Chinese travelers passing through Hawaiʻi “made a thriving business during their stay of about nine hours in port, selling canaries, mocking birds, etc., to eager buyers.” So there had been a long series of both uncontested and illegal importations of the mockingbird, and it had been considered a desirable import for a long time. The earliest known intentional release of the bird was in 1897, when C. F. Pfluger, a Portland, Oregon, resident, furnished several birds. Three pairs were turned loose at Queen’s Hospital by Joseph Marsden, the commissioner of agriculture, but they don’t seem to have become established. One turned up dead a few days later, and its death immediately provoked a sort of cross-species bragging. Indeed, the myna and the mockingbird were often held up and compared, both being pugnacious, loud creatures. “Mr. Pfluger writes that the one bird killed by minahs was probably unable to fly. He knows both birds and says a mocking bird in proper trim will whip a minah.” Furthermore, noted a Honolulu newspaper article, Mr. Pfluger, whom it stated would be coming back to Hawaiʻi from Oregon soon, was one of the leaders of the introduction of mockingbirds into the islands, “and other sweet and harmless singers of the feathered tribe.”84 Other well-known birdmen, though, were not fans. Perkins, writing a cautionary letter to the Hawaiian Gazette in 1896, noted about the mockingbird that “their subsequent behavior under totally changed conditions is purely enigmatical . . . . no harm may follow the introduction—possibly,

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even, some good; but more likely, the very opposite will be the result.” Echoing modern conservation philosophy, he noted that one thing could unexpectedly lead to another, pointing out, “How close is the connection between very different animals and between fauna and flora was playfully shown by Darwin in his great work. Old maids, he said, have a fondness for keeping a number of cats; cats kill great numbers of field mice, which largely destroy the nests of bumble bees—the latter are necessary for fertilizing the flower of the red clover, and therefore the number of old maids in a district may be said to influence the clover crop.”85 Back and forth went people on the issue. The Maui News noted that the bird would combat insects. “California mocking birds would prove a boon to the Islands from a utilitarian point of view,” it insisted, “to say nothing of the cheerful influence of the feathered songsters.” Again, though, people really had no scientific backing for their ideas about the efficacy of introduced birds in combating insects, only opinions. Others lauded the mockingbird for, of all things, its truthfulness. Despite the fact that its main attraction was its beautiful song, opined one editorial in the Hawaiian Gazette, it had other qualities—some of them willfully oriented toward humans. “It knows better than any other birds how to acquire the love and good will of man,” the editorial opined. “Its happy disposition, its extraordinar[il]y developed gift of mimicry, its wonderful song, and not the least their truthfulness, make them the most beloved and most cherished of all bird kind.”86 As the twentieth century progressed, people continued to make persistent efforts to introduce the mockingbird to the islands, but the territorial commission continued to vigorously oppose these attempts. Writing in 1930 to the new president of the Hui Manu, commission President George Brown noted that while members had approved the bird’s importation as a cage bird, they hadn’t approved its liberation. “The introduction of mocking birds into the territory is opposed because of grain and fruit destroying habits,” he noted.87 By June 1931, however, the Bureau of Biological Survey had changed its mind about the bird’s official introduction. Perhaps the bureau considered it a lost cause, or else it realized that the presence of a few escaped or released mockingbirds now breeding in the islands at least hadn’t wreaked

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immediate havoc. As Edward Caum noted in a letter to Brown, “Another factor to consider is the fact that mocking birds have already been liberated in Hawaii, despite the regulations to the contrary, and I am told that they have been seen on several occasions quite some time after liberation, so that it is not improbable that they are nesting.” The bird’s introduction was finally authorized by the Biological Survey. Writing to Maud Lowrey, the president of the then newly formed Hui Manu, Brown noted that Redington had approved the introduction of the mockingbird. “It seems that your request did the trick,” Brown noted, exactly a year after writing Lowrey to note that the bird’s introduction was opposed. The bird was out of the bag, so to speak.88 A great number of other nonbird species have been introduced into the islands—what one ornithologist called “ugly handmaidens of civilization.” Introduced plants in particular have had a dramatic effect on the composition of Hawaiian birdlife. It’s not in the scope of this book to say anything comprehensive about these plants, but as an integral part of birdlife in the islands they warrant some mention here. I find it striking how much of the edible landscape seemed—and still seems—native to visitors, but in fact mostly it is not. One visitor to Oʻahu in the 1890s remarked dreamily, “If there were forbidden fruits in that other Eden, there are none in this. Grapes hang from the vines in profusion, bananas are found in countless number, mangoes that no man can number, while pineapples scent the air in every direction.” Yet all but one of those delicious fruits came to the islands on ships of postcontact explorers and conquerors: grapes (probably brought by Captain Vancouver in 1792), mangoes (from Manila in 1824 by the American captain John Meek), and pineapples (introduced from South America in the early nineteenth century, but not grown on plantations for nearly a century). Only the banana was brought by precontact Polynesians, and there are some nineteen varieties now extant. It’s a heartening sign that these older varieties of bananas are being preserved and grown. Again, it’s all about species protection: the obscure varieties of Hawaiian bananas help to protect genetic diversity.89 The same illusion applies to flowers. Most of what casual observers and visitors consider as endemic to Hawaiʻi are imports, including plumeria

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(1860, introduced by William Hillebrand, who also introduced the myna bird five years later); heliconia (mostly native to South and Central America); and anthuria (brought from London in 1899). However, there are three rare native species of orchids (the Hawaiʻi Jewel-orchid, Anoectochilus sandvicensis; the Hawaiʻi Widelip orchid, Liparis hawaiensis; and the Hawaiian Bog orchid, Platanthera holochila), but the brightly colored ones that grace leis and are sold in nurseries are all imports. If any living things get credit for being “natives” of Hawaiʻi in the truest relative sense of the word, these three plants qualify. Their tiny dust-like seeds can travel long distances on the wind, and arrived in the islands before any humans. Endemic plants like these, numerically, at least, are great exceptions among the flora found in the islands. Domestic cats probably showed up in the islands not long after Captain Cook, and it’s possible they played an earlier major role in species decline. They were certainly a problem in the nineteenth century. As Newton noted to Perkins, “What you say about the abundance of cats in the forest is very sad and at the same time suggestive—They may have had more to do with the extinction of the birds than I had given them credit for.” Munro also described them as threats to endemic species, noting “the droppings of cats about in the open on the mountain,” which he thought probably had ¯ maʻo (Myadestes obscurus).90 something to do with the scarcity of the ʻO Other four-leggers have caused, to use the common euphemism, issues—both for Hawaiian birdlife and for other animals. The Polynesian Rat from Chapter One, despite its profound impact in the islands, has not been the only culprit among the family of rats. Rattus rattus, known variously as the Black Rat, Roof Rat, Ship Rat, and House Rat, had long been thought to have arrived with European ships in the late 1700s, but may have arrived nearly a century after that—as late as the 1870s. This argument has been put forward as a key factor, along with mosquito-borne diseases, in the somewhat mysterious decline in Hawaiian forest birds that were common in the 1870s and 1880s but which were effectively extinct by the middle of the twentieth century.91 Through the first half of the twentieth century, the Hui Manu kept ’em coming. Between 1930 and 1933, the group released 1,264 individual birds of numerous species, mostly on Oʻahu. By 1937 the recording secretary could

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report the following results, directly stemming from their introduction efforts: “Kentucky Cardinal: Well established on Oahu and Hawaii, present on Maui. Pope Cardinal and [Brazilian] Crested Cardinal: One or both of these established on Oahu. Mocking Bird: Getting established on Oahu, present on Maui.” The report also noted that the Hwamei was established on Oʻahu, Kauaʻi, Molokaʻi, and Hawaiʻi, and described distributions: “Pekin nightingale, Japanese Hill Robin: Well established on Hawaii from National Park round Hamakua Coast, Kohala Mountains to Waimea. Also present on Oahu and Kauai. White-eye, Majiro: Quite established on Oahu. Worthy of further distribution. Yamagara: Established on Kauai; present on Oahu. Western Meadow Lark: Present on Kauai and Molokai. Japanese Bush Warbler, Uguisu: Present on Oahu in Waianae mounts. Shama Thrush: Present on Kauai. Willie Wagtail; A few at Koko Head, Oahu.”92 Many liberations failed soon after release. H. D. Sloggett of Lihue liberated three flamingos from Cuba in 1929, which survived on Kauaʻi for about a year and then sank without a trace. Others, introduced directly by the Hui, disappeared almost immediately. These included the Komadori, or Japanese Robin, Misito, Sunbirds, Colored Buntings, Indigo Buntings, various hummingbirds, the Dayal Thrush, Narcissus Flycatchers, and others. Identifying the specific birds being imported is also a challenge, because the group seemed to have sometimes misunderstood which bird was which, or used as many as four or five common-name synonyms for a single species. For example, the Hui Manu referred to a bird it called the “Japanese Robin,” which is the above-mentioned bird now known as Erithacus akahige. But the Hui also called the Red-Billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea) by its common moniker, Japanese Hill Robin. They also referred to the “Rainbow Bunting,” which they described as Passerina leclancheri. But that scientific name describes the Orange-breasted Bunting. It seems very likely they were referring instead to the striking Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris).93 Still other species hung on for years, only to blink out decades later. Local birds colored local life. The Pale-Headed Rosella (Platycercus adscitus) was introduced on Maui in 1877 by Captain James Makee. Its

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apparently tiny population was rarely seen, but it established a breeding population restricted to forested areas around Olinda, near Makawao, into the 1920s, surviving a good half-century before being extirpated in Hawaiʻi. Parrots, and parrot-like birds, are usually colorful and gregarious, and while some people hate them and some people love them (witness the numerous species of parrots now established in my home territory of Southern California), they are part of the background of people’s lives. The Varied Tit (Parus varius) was also widespread in mid-elevation forests on Kauaʻi for some sixty years, and on Oʻahu for forty years, but had disappeared by the late 1960s.94 The importation of all of these birds—by the BCAF as well as the Hui Manu—may have had a specifically pernicious effect on native bird species beyond more typical aspects like competition for resources, but it has not come to light until recently. Studies based on molecular data show that it is possible the parasite that has caused avian malaria and pox may have come from passerine birds introduced in the twentieth century. Mortality in endemic species from malaria can range from 50 to 90 percent. The virus has been found in off-island populations of the Common Myna and the House Sparrow, both of which came to the island late in the nineteenth century, as well as in other introduced species that showed up in the twentieth century.95 The Hui Manu maintained a vigorous presence in the islands between 1930 and 1968, working hard to promote its goals and to raise money even as its membership and importation activities dwindled after the war. The group made money from garden tours, life memberships, annual dues from both adults and the Junior Hui Manu group established to promote youth interest in birds and conservation, and donations. My boarding school roommate’s maternal grandmother, Anita Hecht, a prominent Honolulu philanthropist, donated stock to the group in 1961. The Hui Manu tours and talks reached many people, and they were a well-known presence in the islands. Throughout the 1950s the Junior Hui Manu remained an important aspect of the group’s outreach, as the Hui continued to proselytize. Membership for kids was just ten cents annually. In doctrinaire fashion, the leadership would also get hundreds of schoolchildren to recite a pledge: “I promise to protect all wild birds from harm and will do my best

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to see that others do the same.” A Star Bulletin article noted that 420 children took the pledge, and vowed “to continue to protect all the birds, especially the unusually beautiful and lovely-voiced ones introduced to the islands by Hui Manu.” This hope for a new future with introduced birds seems to be, in its essence, a reflection of the Hui officers’ own transplanted hopes, desires, and self-identity. Talk about gilding the lily: Hawaiʻi would still be one of the most beautiful and breathtaking places in the world even without a single one of the birds the Hui Manu imported. We map our own desires, insecurities, and hopes onto other things in the world. As anthropologist Gary Urton has noted, “The world of animals forms a backdrop against which humans continually formulate and reformulate, in the language of metaphor, their ideology of themselves, the particular characteristics of their own forms of social interaction, and their personal and social histories.” Again, it seems that we belong to them—or at the very least, we are under their sway, at the same time that they are under ours.96 The mid-1950s saw problems for the slew of birds imported by the Hui—species which were, by then, well established in large numbers: farmers were shooting the introduced species that were wreaking havoc on agriculture. “Farmers have complained to the Board of Agriculture that birds are destroying their crops,” the Hui’s board minutes noted in the spring of 1957. The Board of Agriculture supported the shooting, too: 600 permits were issued that spring to farmers to kill birds. “Reports have come from Maui,” the minutes noted, “that the farmers have shot 1300 birds, including skylarks, cardinals, mocking birds, etc.” Other reports came to the Hui that people were finding badly wounded birds, which the group seems to have assumed was the work of children taking aim at them.97 Meanwhile, mainland people’s perceptions of the Hui were not positive, as conservation sensibilities continued to rise after World War II. Writing in 1950, none other than Rachel Carson noted, “There was once a society in Hawaii for the special purpose of introducing exotic birds.” Although she didn’t mention the group by name, and talked of them in the past tense, she was surely writing about the Hui. “Today when you go to the islands,” she continued, “you see, instead of the exquisite native

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birds that greeted Captain Cook, mynas from India, cardinals from the United States or Brazil, doves from Asia, weavers from Australia, skylarks from Europe, and titmice from Japan.” But she was probably wrong about Cook’s being greeted at the shore by native birds, for the native humans had long ago eliminated them both inadvertently—the result of the introduction of the Polynesian Rat—and intentionally—the result of clearing lowland forests for agriculture. And the very substantial role of the BCAF’s governmental introduction of birds also certainly commingled responsibility for imported species of birds in the first half of the twentieth century. Historic invasion narratives are rarely simple and often not accurate in retrospect.98 And what of the BCAF’s work with bird importations? It continued up to and into statehood. For instance, between 1958 and 1963, the BCAF imported eighty-six Barn Owls—today the most commonly seen owl in the islands—from the San Diego and San Antonio Zoos to Hawaiʻi Island, Molokaʻi, Oʻahu, and Kauaʻi to control rat populations in the cane fields. The birds became well established, and today this generalist predator is found widely in all the main Hawaiian Islands. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the Barn Owl has made any significant dent on rat populations; its main diet consists of mice. However, evidence does exist of Barn Owl predation of endemic species such as Newell’s Shearwaters, as well as of native forest birds. The Hui’s numbers began to dwindle after the war. In 1955 some 300 members remained, falling to just 150 by 1962. After the group failed to convince all of the key parties to import the beautiful-voiced Clarino from Mexico in 1962, it wrote to a dozen prominent mainland scientists to ask just what birds would be useful to import to the islands. Almost to a person the respondents noted the inadvisability of importing any birds at all. Times had changed; knowledge of the biological complexity and uncertainty of introductions stood in sharp relief to earlier understandings, and now habitat restoration was a better route to increasing bird populations, as several people noted in their letters. The release of the Guamian Swiftlet would prove to be the group’s last hurrah, when 175 birds were taken straight from the airport in 1962 and released in Niu Valley; they were seen for some

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months afterward. Scientists from around the country also began writing strongly worded letters suggesting that importation of birds could pose unanticipated dangers to the native avifauna. The end of importation was upon the group, as was its very existence.99 Still, attitudes died hard, and even into the mid-1960s some people were agitating for the introduction of new species to the islands. “Perhaps the strongest argument advanced for introducing new species is that various land uses have diminished native populations and that understocked habitats or empty niches exist,” argued a non-staff member of the National Audubon Society in an article in the Elepaio in 1968 discussing the pros and cons of introducing species. This belief that ecological niches were otherwise empty bottles to be filled was not uncommon, and even as the Hui Manu declined, fans of introduced species continued to support the idea.100 In 1968, the Hui Manu membership received a letter from Vice President James A. H. Wilder, announcing that the executive board had voted to disband the society. He cited increasingly strict regulations, the lack of younger members, diminishing funds, and “the feeling that, since its founding, the Hui Manu has served its purpose.” But fund-raising had never been a particular problem for the group, and there’s no doubt that new regulations, as well as compelling objections by scientists on the mainland, were the largest reasons by far. The group felt very good about its work with restoring the Ne¯ne¯ to the islands, which it had consistently and actively supported, and publicized widely. The balance of the group’s funds ($879.41) was donated to the Honolulu Zoo Animal Fund, and after thirty-eight years the group was extinct.101

I am not claiming that every species on an island should be considered a native. I’m also not in any way supporting the introduction of new species from off-island. However, I’m interested in how we cope with what is here, and how we think about it. I want to suggest a new way of thinking

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about nativeness. Living things have been brought to the islands by humans and have then evolved to different degrees to adapt to their new home, and nativeness should no longer be defined by whether humans played a role in species’ introductions to new lands. Clearly, belonging is subject to both cultural factors and scientific findings. But the role of time plays an even more essential role. In the debates about native versus introduced, time changes everything. Less time equals less native; more time confers more nativeness. Time scales have different cultural meanings. A thousand years isn’t the same as a hundred years, which isn’t the same as a dozen years. Cultural and biological norms take time to change, and to settle. And relentlessly, organisms adapt in place to new circumstances. Changes in environment mean changes in behavior and resources, which leads to natural selection, which leads to evolutionary change. And change means that something becomes identifiably, morphologically, of a place. As writer Michael Pollan asked in a 1994 New York Times article about some species of introduced plants in New England, “Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on their alien status?”102 What was new becomes established, what was foreign becomes culturally exalted, and what was reviled is now revered. It couldn’t be more obvious from their similarities that iconic Hawaiian birds have come from off-island congeners: the ʻAlala¯, or Hawaiian Crow; the Pueo, or Hawaiian Owl; the Aeʻo, or Hawaiian Stilt. The list continues. These “Hawaiian” birds have Hawaiian names, which makes people feel good about their continued presence. Some of the oldest endemics are now extinct, because they long ago lost the need for defenses. The ability to defend oneself to survive is how life works. Unlike people, birds have no bad intentions and, anthropomorphizing aside, no deceit, nothing we could readily identify as longlived regret or disappointment. They live almost entirely in the present, unlike humans, who live almost entirely in the past or the future. To vilify introduced species as a category is to reduce them to cartoons; in actuality they are organisms playing complex and changing roles—not just biologically, but culturally, economically, and politically.103 Our tolerance for seemingly undesirable impacts also changes. For instance, the ʻAlala¯—the Hawaiian Crow, Corvus hawaiiensis—was most

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distinctly considered an undesirable pest resident of the islands, its evolutionary status as native be damned. Like other corvids, it disturbed crops, domestic life, and the peace and quiet of the islands—much like the myna did upon its introduction. The ʻAlala¯ was once expressly omitted from a list of protected birds earlier in the twentieth century. But now it is a treasured cultural icon in the islands—extinct in the wild and surviving only in captivity, and the focus of intense resuscitative efforts. To put it simply, there haven’t been enough Hawaiian Crows around in enough density to deeply annoy people, and rarity almost always equals desirability. So the crows’ status has changed. Crows have such a negative reputation as scavengers, in fact, that conservationists in Hawaiʻi made a conscious decision to refer to the bird by its Hawaiian name, thus emphasizing its distinctiveness and its Hawaiian-ness, and no doubt helping with funding and support. It helps to be the most endangered corvid on the planet. But if they were as common as the myna and in the same habitats, people would likely have very different attitudes about them. And today there are local groups opposed to the release of the ʻAlala¯ back into the wild—most notably pig hunters, who have expressed concern that management decisions about the bird’s habitat would mean eliminating pigs from the lands in question. And the ʻAlala¯ is by no means the only endemic animal to go from nuisance to national treasure; take the case of marsupials—native kangaroos, wallabies, and others—which were considered a nuisance in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Australia, and whose destruction was encouraged; they are now afforded legal protection.104 So it’s clear that introduced species don’t have a lock on vilification. Other endemic animals in Hawaiʻi are also reviled, sometimes killed. Take the case of the Hawaiian Monk Seal (Neomonachus schauinslandi)—known in Hawaiian as Ilio-holo-i-ka-uaua, or “dog that runs in rough water”—the only seal considered native to Hawaiʻi. Evidence shows that it was present in the Hawaiian Islands long before Polynesians. Like the Palila, the Monk Seal’s population is down to about a thousand individuals, and it faces a variety of natural risk factors. However, it has endured anthropogenic threats as well, from whalers and sealers in the nineteenth century and a series of mysterious killings in the twenty-first century—both a state and a

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federal offense—as some people seem to see the animals as extensions of the much-maligned and often-hated federal government (which is working to save them) rather than as endangered animals. Once again, the association is the thing. These attitudes are also commingled with the issue of rebounding populations of endangered animals. Writing about the Monk Seal killings, Jon Mooallem of the New York Times noted that “now that we’ve recovered many of those [endangered] species, we don’t quite know how to coexist with them. We suddenly remember why many of us didn’t want them around in the first place. Gray wolves, sandhill cranes, sea otters: species like these, once nearly exterminated, are now rising up to cause ranchers, farmers and fishermen some of the same frustrations all over again.” Their reappearance challenges our preconceptions about just what belongs where, as Mooallem notes: “These animals can feel like illegitimate parts of the landscape to people who, for generations, have lived without any of them around—for whom their absence seems, in a word, natural.” Would we once again consider the ʻAlala¯ undesirable if it somehow surged back to large populations encroaching on humans and their daily activities? We claim to give agency to other beings, and call them sacred, only when it suits us. Humans are fickle, and again our exceptionalism leads us to consider not other beings, but ourselves before all else.105 The future also plays an important role in thinking about these issues. Just as venerated Hawaiian birds came from elsewhere and evolved, there’s no reason to think that other birds won’t do the same as decades, and then centuries and millennia, pass, with or without humans. The moment a species from somewhere else arrives in the islands, things begin to change for both the introduced species and the environment in which it finds itself. After more time, more changes. In a landscape that was disturbed from its prehuman state long ago, new interactions begin. Introduced species are known to offer services to native species that have become essential to the survival of those native species. In the case of the White-eye, the little bird can apparently help with pollination after native pollinators have gone extinct—in particular, several Clermontia species endemic to the islands. Conservation biologist Clare Aslan, who has studied the White-eye and its role in pollinating these endemic plant species, told

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me, “Although nonnative species have certainly caused extremely damaging impacts in high-profile situations, it is also true that they have become integral parts of every ecological community. In some cases, they are actually carrying out important ecological functions—as we see with the White-eye as a pollinator of Hawaiian plant species. As we try to protect native species and ecosystem processes as much as possible, it is impossible to ignore those nonnatives that are now supporting those species or processes.” She also feels that it’s dangerous to adopt a universal antipathy toward nonnatives, just as it is dangerous to introduce or spread them. “The key is in understanding how species interact in each system and in making case-by-case management decisions for maximum diversity,” she noted.106 There are other examples of introduced species—often tagged as invasive by biologists—helping promote the survival of endemic species in Hawaiʻi. For instance, the Red-Billed Leiothrix, which has been extremely successful at colonizing native forest communities, is known to disperse seeds that had previously been dispersed by native frugivores. These introduced bird species cannot be untangled from the native because they share habitat, food supplies, and much else. As one biologist has written about these relationships, “In an era of widespread extinction and invasion of island ecosystems, understanding the consequences of novel animal assemblages for processes like seed dispersal will be critical for maintaining diverse and self-regenerating plant communities.” Novel assemblages: this is the essential phrase, because we cannot untangle the communities, nor can we anticipate the consequences if we could.107 A prime example in Hawaiʻi of an admixture of old and new is that of the Red Junglefowl (the RJF, or Gallus gallus), which arrived with the original Polynesian settlers. These birds have interbred with domestic chickens—a subspecies of the RJF—over the past two centuries, and then have interbred further with RJF introduced by the Hawaiʻi Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry in the late 1930s for game hunters. This last group of birds would have likely been quite different genetically from the long-standing population in Hawaiʻi. This history has led to a layered complexity in terms of managing the futures of these birds. As one molecular study of the mixed ancestry of Kauaʻi’s feral chickens notes, “Our findings

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complicate management priorities for Kauai’s feral flocks, which defy simple classification as RJFs (which are considered threatened) or as domestic chickens (the world’s most abundant bird).” Ecologists will tell you that genetic diversity is extremely important for the planet’s health. If the example of the RJF doesn’t exemplify genetic diversity, I’m not sure what does.108 Introduced species have the potential to play other surprising roles relating to endemic species, and although the following example dates from during World War II, it is instructive. Frank E. Egler, a pioneering and enormously influential American plant ecologist, as well as a helpmate to Rachel Carson in preparing Silent Spring, floated an intriguing idea in 1942: an introduced species, if it could take hold in arid parts of Hawaiʻi, could provide a future toehold for native species that could not otherwise survive in denuded areas. The very hardiness and persistence of an introduced species could essentially create a more temperate world. He was a clear-eyed and unsentimental scientist who concluded that only after successive waves of alien crops had “tempered the extremes of an arid tropical landscape [could] some of the rare and requirent indigenes . . . find the site suitable for their development.”109 There are other examples of endemic species pressing introduced ones into service as aids in survival. The ʻElepaio, for instance, is known to wipe several introduced species under its wings, where parasites often accumulate. ʻElepaio researcher Eric VanderWerf has seen the little bird use four different nonnative plants and animals (a snail, an ant, a millipede, and a fruit from the Christmas berry tree), each of which produces a different toxin, as an insecticide.110 In a large and fecund archipelago like Hawaiʻi, total eradication will almost always be impossible, as well as slow, erratic, and ferociously expensive. And what does the complete elimination of a species mean for other species in the planet’s entangled life? I defy anyone to anticipate the full range of consequences. As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus notes, you cannot step into the same river twice. And the technical difficulties of total eradication, besides being impossibly costly, seem biologically impossible. With some organisms, like the White-eye, there will be no eradication. There are too many other conservation tasks to undertake in the islands. The White-eye is here to stay. As Storrs Olson told me, “If the Hawaiian Islands were

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abandoned by people and allowed to grow up into whatever kind of forests would eventually take over, mynas would probably disappear, but the Whiteeyes will be there forever.” Darwinian evolution describes what all species do everywhere: adapt, or die. How can we say the bird doesn’t belong when it’s so superbly suited for its habitat? And who among us isn’t an opportunist?111 Humans consider their own nativeness in a way that is different than the way they consider that of other species. While the classic biological definition of a native is an organism that arrived under its own power, this doesn’t seem to apply consistently to humans in Hawaiʻi. We all got here under our own power, yet we distinguish sharply between native and nonnative humans. In Hawaiʻi, blood quantum laws determine which humans get to legally call themselves “Hawaiian.” By the definition of the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which provides long-term land leases, a native is “any descendant of not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778.” In other words, you must have a blood quantum of at least 50 percent Hawaiian. This requirement has not changed since passage of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act in July 1921. But wait a minute. Why 50 percent, and not 75 percent, or 100 percent? Presumably, it’s because someone with more than half of their ancestry traceable to the original settlers is “more” Hawaiian—more than half, that is, which means it constitutes the bulk of their ancestral DNA. For it’s not really about their “blood.” But constructing Hawaiian identity is much more complex than determining the percentage of DNA from the precontact settlers (who might have not all come with the original colonizers around 1000 CE; it’s thought that perhaps the islands were settled in more than one wave from different locations around Polynesia). Many consider the blood quantum the only true marker of Hawaiianness. But what about location, and language? There is a Hawaiian diaspora; approximately one-third of the population of blood Hawaiians is located on the U.S. mainland. Some significant numbers of this diaspora have actually never been to Hawaiʻi, and may spend their entire lives without having set foot in the islands once. And does the ability to speak Hawaiian confer some nativeness on those with less than 50 percent Polynesian blood in their veins? Conversely, what about those of

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more than 50 percent Hawaiian blood who don’t speak any Hawaiian— does that diminish their “native” status? The idea that half of one’s DNA derives from this endemic group becomes more difficult to accept as something other than a highly elitist notion when one considers that in 1921, people of at least 50 percent Hawaiian blood totaled just 23,723 people. This 50 percent aspect operates as a kind of racial purity test, but it’s one that very few people in the islands can claim—about 6 percent of the state’s population of 1.42 million people, although many more—about 21 percent total—claim some Hawaiian blood. There is a highly practical aspect to this: In 1921 Congress passed the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, which created a 200,000-acre land trust for those who could demonstrate they were at least half Hawaiian. Such natives are eligible to apply for a ninetynine-year lease at $1 per year. The lease can also be passed along to direct descendants as long as they in turn can prove a 25 percent blood quantum. If descendants don’t meet this requirement, they can either sell to a more native Hawaiian (50 percent) or sell any improvements to the house or property. It’s a crowded scene, too; there are 10,000 leaseholders statewide, but another 29,000 on the waiting list—and many of the lands can’t be leased because they have no roads, electricity, or services.112 From a bureaucratic perspective, parsing of distinctions about nativeness can be quite hairsplitting in Hawaiʻi, or nearly nonexistent, depending on the agency. The Office of Hawaiian Affairs uses the term “Native Hawaiian” to denote all persons of Hawaiian ancestry regardless of blood quantum; and “native Hawaiian” (with a lower-case “n”) to refer to those with 50 percent or more Hawaiian blood; the Department of Hawaiian Affairs uses the same metric. But other state agencies have different, and usually more general, definitions of “Hawaiian,” distinguishing between only those with any Hawaiian blood and those with none (or else don’t make it clear what they mean by “Hawaiian”); these agencies include the Department of Human Services, the Hawaiʻi Housing Authority, the Office of Youth Services, the Department of the Attorney General, and a number of others. The U.S. Census also reports different numbers of Hawaiians than does state data, which include the very comprehensive Health Surveillance Program. In the 1970s Hawaiʻi experienced a “paper genocide” when Census categories

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dropped the part-Hawaiian description and included simply “Hawaiian”—a circumstance that caused many people of mixed race, when pressed to select a single self-identifier, to choose a race other than Hawaiian.113 It’s also true that, even in prehistoric Hawaiʻi, not all bloodlines were considered equal, and genealogies of better and worse lineages abounded. “Genealogists on both sides were always busy exalting the purity of their champion’s bloodlines and deriding the mean ancestry of the enemy,” Gavan Daws has noted.114 The purity test just doesn’t hold up. For instance, you hear the word “local” in countless contexts in Hawaiʻi, and this bears examination too: a “local” boy; “local” food”; a “local” custom: all are “from” the islands, or “of ” the islands. But again, thing start to fall apart upon trying to pin specific examples to nativeness of some kind. Manapua, the Chineseinfluenced, sweet pork-filled buns? Kimchi, the pickled Korean food? The loco moco, which consists of an egg over a hamburger patty and rice? All are typically described as “local” in the islands. But they’re from somewhere else, or a modern mash-up, conditioned by the intense and longstanding cultural vectors that have passed through Hawaiʻi. They’ve earned their reputation as local through affection, habit, and cultural inclusion. Purity as a notion is overrated, and over. Ethnic identity is fluid. Beyond the issue of blood, grasping Hawaiianness can be breathtakingly complex, because it comes into being “in social relation to other categories—nativism, foreignness, race, gender, nationalism, and citizenship—and other spheres—the historical imagination, law and governance, the boundaries of modernity, tourist discourses and sovereignty discourses—if in uneven and contradictory ways.”115 There is also an international dimension to Hawaiianness. New scholarship on Hawaiians of earlier centuries also demonstrates that they had a dramatic effect outside of the islands—their explorations and travels around the Pacific, and the globe, had a dramatic effect on their identity and their influence on a wider world. All of these complications mean that identifying Hawaiianness—as well as “nativeness,” “introduced,” and “belonging”—has resulted in situating these characteristics in specific, and often relative, contexts.116

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The original settlers were introduced, as were the rats, dogs, pigs, stowaway spores, seeds, plants, microbes, and other life they brought along. Should they be subjected to the demonizing reflex that colors our attitudes about more recent introductions? They were, after all, from elsewhere. And the missionaries? Also introduced. And their ideas about life, religion, comportment? Also introduced. What of that, and how should that influence how we think of humans as invasive species? New York Times writer Verlyn Klinkenborg observed that “when it comes to the distinction between native and nonnative, we always leave one species out: call us what you will—native, naturalized, alien or invasive.” We simply don’t care that we humans blithely overrun the planet while wringing our hands at other species that have done the same. In the face of some scientists’ seemingly endless and persistent claims that invasive species are a disservice to an ecosystem—and they often are, make no bones about it—I find their lack of willingness to acknowledge the hypocrisy of this to be astonishing.117 The issue was recently summarized neatly by Tom Munden, a resident of Kapaʻau, a wide spot in the road near the northern tip of the Big Island, as he criticized attitudes held by the staff of the Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) about invasive species in a letter penned to the island newspaper West Hawaii Today. Munden, a linguist and scholar, described the DLNR staff as an “overpaid bevy of career puritanical scolds,” and urged them to “temper their sentimentality with a dose of science—and a little thoughtfulness.” He went on to say, “That the most pesky invasive species on this island is Homo sapiens . . . is a fact no thinking person would deny. . . . So if you want to rid the local environment of a singularly depredatory alien, do you really need me to suggest your solution? Just something to mull as you pick the alien food from your teeth as you sit on your imported hardwood lanai or cruise to the transfer station in your diesel pickup.” We think of ourselves as exceptional, and this is how we justify our presence everywhere. Thom Van Dooren’s work on the Hawaiian crow, and his attempts to break down human exceptionalism, should be required reading for everyone interested in the topic.118 But let us return to the little White-eye. Arguments for its having had a substantial negative impact on forest birds have been controversial.

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Ornithologist Leonard Freed, and his wife and co-author, geneticist Rebecca Cann, have made multiple claims about the negative effects of the White-eye on native forest bird populations. Their most recent article made the argument that annual census data that have been collected are flawed, and that the native bird populations are not stable but declining. Freed and Cann’s most recent article was in response to several others that claimed that several native species of birds were not only stable, but had “conclusively increased” in the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, despite the presence of the White-eye. As Mike Scott told me dryly, “Lenny’s data set does not allow him to extrapolate beyond his study area.” This leads to inaccurate conclusions. For instance, predictions Freed has made about the collapse of the ʻA¯kepa have not occurred. Other investigations have reached what seem to be very ambiguous conclusions about the negative role of introduced bird species in Hawaiʻi—one key article from 1991, by Daniel Simberloff, the tireless invigilator of introduced species around the world, observed that introduced species either succeed on every island or fail on every island, “no matter what other species or how many other species were present.”119 The twentieth century brought bird-importing organizations with different stakes to Oʻahu, and thence to the rest of the islands. The territorial commission, which included sportsmen in their ranks, wanted to promote game birds and, at the same time, introduce birds that would do battle against the economic ravages of insects. The Hui Manu’s officers mostly wanted to bring a new aesthetic to the islands—beautiful song and plumage to fill an “empty” landscape, and some variety to provide comfort on their expansive estates, where many of the birds were released. The hunters cared about the birds, too, but primarily because they wanted to enjoy the thrill of the hunt, the bond of shared activity, and the eating of the catch. And many others, a loose but large group of people, wanted to bring in birds for their own aesthetic purposes—be it enjoying caged birds, propagating bird species as a hobby, or actually introducing new species into the wild as civilians unaffiliated with any particular group. The world gets bigger and busier. Air and ocean traffic into Hawaiʻi increases every year, and with those humans come undesirables and deplorables. We will remain vigilant, but we will never stop them entirely, and

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once they’ve arrived they will always modify their new homes through adaption. Today becomes tomorrow becomes another millennium. We will resist them, and understandably, because of the risk of unintended consequences and the norms they upset. We will contemplate, guiltily or not, their eradication from our established ways of life, or we will rage against them. We will breathe a sigh of relief when they seem to assimilate without causing a commotion. And far in the future, as the spring of time’s clock unwinds, they will be a part of us that we can’t live without.

Epilogue “We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong.” —Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

r a c h e l c a r s o n r e m a r k e d o n what she called “the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures.” Humans think of themselves as exceptional, not bound by the same behavior for which they criticize nonsentient plants and animals for their introduced place among Hawaiʻi’s biota. Usually, humans can’t even figure out how to allow any other species—introduced or otherwise—to coexist if it threatens anything about their lives. But inevitably, humans on the earth lead to species loss, more than any other factor. Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford ecologist, put it pointedly: “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it stands.” Fecundity and rich abundance are seemingly solid, yet they can be so fleeting. Witness the Passenger Pigeons that darkened our skies, the Tasmanian Tiger once spread across the Australian continent, the moa-nalo spread across four islands in Hawaiʻi—all the “known-nolongers,” as Natalie Angier termed the named species we’ve wiped out.1 I propose that being a native in the islands—for humans as well as nonhumans—is a spectrum rather than a fixed category, not based on origin or means of arrival, but shaped and determined by an alchemical mix of time, charisma, relative scarcity, utility to others, evolutionary processes, and changing relationships with other organisms in their ecosystems, as I’ve laid out in these pages. Nativeness isn’t the same thing as 244

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belonging—once you’ve scrutinized it in context, you can make nativeness into a fact. Belonging, on the other hand, is a judgment, and perhaps a sensation. The two also differ in this sense: once something is assigned status as a native, that status more or less becomes permanent. A sense of belonging, however, is more ephemeral, and can come and go. At what point do people, at least, not seem to belong? Certainly before their arrival at, and their integration into, a new place. In the same way that (I believe) an embryo is just a collection of cells, and not a person, a person not of a place has no conception of it, or has only an abstract sense. Understanding a place seems to be a prerequisite for belonging. Helen Mather, in her book One Summer in Hawaii in 1891 (originally written as a journal to please her sister), in the waning years of the monarchy, observed before her first visit there that “the Sandwich Islands have always been floating about in my mind in a vague, uncertain way, never having been able to quite locate them, any more than I have the heaven I hope some day to reach.”2 It’s easy to drown in the complexities of being, and belonging. I was born in Hawaiʻi, and just as my genes do not hark back to those of the Hawaiians who arrived over the ocean a thousand years ago, neither do many hundreds of thousands of others whose way of life is deeply enmeshed with the islands. I’m invasive in the way all beings are invasive. I use resources; I am occasionally reckless in an animal way beyond my own understanding, and the fact that my actions have unintended consequences makes me part of a larger tribe of living beings. In a comment guaranteed to cause conservationists in Hawaiʻi to pull out their hair, Storrs Olson has noted, “One way of looking at it is that on islands the crisis is over.” He takes the long view of the paleontologist, who unlike the rest of us deals in much, much longer spans of time. “Most of the diversity in birds that existed on islands only a few hundreds or thousands of years ago is long gone.” It’s hard not to feel hopeless when confronted with popular responses to some introduced species. Miconia calvescens, sometimes called the “green cancer,” has been pointed to as the poster child for invasive plants across the Pacific. An import from Latin America, it overruns landscapes, and has been the basis of containment efforts across the

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islands. Yet, as restoration ecologist Robert Cabin reported, “When I took my visitors on the Onomea Bay Scenic Drive along the Big Island’s Hamakua Coast, most were far more impressed by the exotic beauty of the ‘purple plant’ than they were by my efforts to explain its ecological destructiveness or point out the uniqueness and tenacity of the few remaining native plants that miraculously still inhabit this region of the island.”3 Thinking like a paleontologist, or at least understanding the long arc of history, seems like a critically important aspect to understanding these matters of endangerment, introduction, and modification of the environment. As butterfly expert Arthur Shapiro has observed, existing ecosystems are “freeze-frames from a very long movie. Ecological change is the norm, not the exception.” Chaos and complexity rule.4 We are everywhere, and we sometimes hate ourselves and others for it. We are now all part of a rambunctious garden. Jedediah Purdy has remarked that “As a practical matter, ‘nature’ no longer exists independent of human activity. From now on, the world we inhabit will be one that we have helped to make, and in ever-intensifying ways.” But the natural world is still real. Just reach out and touch it, be in it, let it build your strength. To say that we’re now intertwined with nature doesn’t mean there isn’t a specificity to species and their survival. Humans need to feel useful, and doing something—however imperfect, and frequently dispiriting—seems far better than doing nothing. We should continue to work bravely on conservation approaches that are effective and sustainable. Those efforts require enormous effort, money, and concentrated will, with uncertain outcomes. Various threats to endemic Hawaiian birds loom on the horizon, and some of them trump habitat management. Avian malaria, for instance, has to be controlled, for taking some conservation actions while ignoring that problem risks “painting the parlor while the house burns down,” as Doug Pratt has noted. The effects of climate change on the Hawaiian avifauna means that warmer temperatures push mosquitoes higher and higher into territories previously uninhabitable for them, compressing the surviving populations of some birds into less and less territory. Introducing genetically modified mosquitoes to reduce the transmission of malaria seems promising, and conservationists continue to make sustainable plans

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to enlarge at-risk species’ habitats, consider translocation activities, and undertake other large-scale efforts that will help these species survive.5 It’s hard to walk back. Eliminate the White-eye, which seems like an utterly impossible task from a conservation perspective, and you remove a bird that does bring aesthetic pleasures to the backyards of many thousands of residents; eliminate a pollinator of native plants; and take millions of small lives. And what would be gained? Potentially, the enhanced survival of endangered species sharing the same resources, but in unknown degrees, and perhaps to some detriment. I’m not convinced that the White-eye really has had a substantial impact on endemic species in the islands. And remove the Leiothrix, one of the Hui Manu’s importation obsessions, and you remove a tuneful and successful generalist whose mysterious population fluctuations could, in one researcher’s words, “provide great insight into the dynamics of island populations, and provide information that could assist in the conservation of Hawaii’s native forest birds.” The impact of every species needs to be taken in context.6 I’ve proposed a highly relativist conception of nativism—one that doesn’t care as much about where birds or humans are from as about what they are doing and influencing today, and what they might do tomorrow. What’s in a name, and who cares what’s in a name? And who cares where we are from? We are all from somewhere. We all have a history and, often, pride in our heritage, and when our collective or individual identities are under assault we turn to our pasts—the longer ago the better—to build a case for our rights to be, and do, and believe. But humans are not simple, and their beliefs and self-conceptions are not singular, and we get to identify ourselves in a variety of ways. I’ve intentionally entangled a story of animals and humans, because ultimately, we are all biological entities on the planet, and all impactful on the planet we share. We obsess about shades of meaning as they relate to our heritage, but we still get to decide how we, and others, survive as individuals. The birds have no such choices, because they are not the choice-makers on the planet; we are. Anything can happen. We need to get over ourselves. Humans could be gone soon as well. As H. G. Wells noted in 1898, as numerous Hawaiian birds were headed toward extinction, “Even now, for all we can tell, the coming terror may be

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crouching for its spring and the fall of humanity be at hand.” We’re just one species, juxtaposed against many. Humans—be they native Hawaiians or modern, megaconsuming Americans—just aren’t good for the planet. But there are footprints of different sizes, ranging from Menehune-size tracks in the mud to massive, trampling steps that shake the ground. Humans historically have had a bad habit of taking actions they think will help, but these deeds typically end up either ineffectual or doing actual harm. And most such activities have proven to be self-interested. I think we can take some instruction from Aldo Leopold, who writes, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” “Intelligent” is the operative word here, because if we have any chance for salvation, it’s because of our big brains rather than in spite of them. Another way to think about this is to maximize variation: to provide diversity to ecosystems that will let them experience genetic drift, develop more robust defenses against relatively new predators, and keep a watchful eye on the outcomes.7 Want to help preserve Hawaiian birds? Walk lightly on the planet. Give money to organizations that preserve open land and manage protected land, or whose explicit mission is to study and protect Hawaiian birds. Continue to formally prohibit the arrival of bioentities, especially plants, that are known to dampen diversity; animal importations are relatively well controlled, but plants are less so. However, also understand that introduced species that are here now actually can and do contribute to biodiversity. Ask questions, and seek context: are species producing benefits or harm to biodiversity, human health, ecological services, and economic matters? And get to know the birds themselves—and remember them, and tell your children, your friends, your family about them. Some species of Hawaiʻi’s endemic birds will surely be gone soon. But we humans cannot remove ourselves from the complex equations of survival and extinction. In a syncretic sense, and in the same way that native Hawaiians felt they belonged to the land, we do belong to these birds, indigenous and introduced—the world is our mirror, and we need them as much as they need us, to help us feel better about ourselves, our goals, and our necessary place as stewards of the planet.

Abbreviations

AL

AMNH

BAN BPBM B-W

HEHL

HMHHSA Scott Papers, HEHL

HSA BAF Corr George Brown, 1925–1932, Birds Import of 1926, Box COM2–12 HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14

Alexander Library, Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology [now part of the Radcliffe Science Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford] American Museum of Natural History, Ornithology Department, Archival Collections [primarily citations related to George Munro materials], New York, NY Clinton Hart Merriam Papers, 83/129c, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Archives, Honolulu, HI Blacker-Wood Library (now the Blacker-Wood Collection in Zoology and Ornithology), Special Collections Libraries, McGill University, Montreal, Canada Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA [individual collections cited by name, but see note below per Scott Collection at HEHL] Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site & Archives, Honolulu, HI John Sincock materials (copies of memos and correspondence to and from Patuxent Wildlife Service, J. Michael Scott Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA Hawaiʻi State Archives. Territory of Hawaiʻi—Board of Agriculture and Forestry records, 1903–1959. George Iʻi Brown, President of the Board of Agriculture and Forestry, 1925–1932. COM2–12, Birds—Importation of, 1926 Hawaiʻi State Archives. Territory of Hawaiʻi—Board of Agriculture and Forestry records, 1903–1959. COM2– 14, Correspondence files: Birds—Importation of, 1915–1927

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HSA BAF Corr Birds Gen 1917–1927, Box COM2–14 HSA BAF Corr Birds Gen 1927–1942, Box COM2–15 HSA BAF Corr Birds Gen 1932–40, Box COM2–15 HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927–1928, Box COM2–16 HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1929–1931, Box COM2–16 HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1932–1941, Box COM2–16 HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 1 Bird Release Rpts HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 1 Folder Minutes 1954–1968 HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 1 Folder 2 Treas. Rpts 1938–68 HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 1 Folder 3, Minutes 1930–1954 HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 2 Bird Import 1930–1955 HSA Hui Manu M-465 Box 2 Gen Corresp 1930–62

Abbreviations

Hawaiʻi State Archives. Territory of Hawaiʻi—Board of Agriculture and Forestry records, 1903–1959. COM2– 14, Correspondence files: Birds—General, 1917–1927 Hawaiʻi State Archives. Territory of Hawaiʻi—Board of Agriculture and Forestry records, 1903–1959. COM2–15, Executive Secretary. Birds—General, 1927–1942 Hawaiʻi State Archives. Territory of Hawaiʻi—Board of Agriculture and Forestry records, 1903–1959. COM2–15, Executive Secretary. Birds—General, 1932–1940 Hawaiʻi State Archives. Territory of Hawaiʻi—Board of Agriculture and Forestry records, 1903–1959. COM2–16, Birds—Import, 1927–1928 Hawaiʻi State Archives. Territory of Hawaiʻi—Board of Agriculture and Forestry records, 1903–1959. COM2–16, Birds—Importation of, 1927–1941 [sic; actual contents are only 1929–1931] Hawaiʻi State Archives. Territory of Hawaiʻi—Board of Agriculture and Forestry records, 1903–1959. COM2–16, Birds—Import, 1932–1941 Hawaiʻi State Archives. Hui Manu M-465 Box 1 Bird Release Reports [n.d.] Hawaiʻi State Archives. Hui Manu M-465 Box 1 Folder Minutes, 1954–1968 Hawaiʻi State Archives. Hui Manu M-465 Box 1 Folder 2 Treasurers’ Reports, 1938–1968

Hawaiʻi State Archives. Hui Manu M-465 Box 1 Folder 3 Minutes, 1930–1954 Hawaiʻi State Archives. Hui Manu M-465 Box 2 Folder Bird Importation, 1930–1955 Hawaiʻi State Archives. Hui Manu M-465 Box 2 General Correspondence, 1930–1962

Abbreviations

HSA Hui Manu M-465 Box 2 Bird Importation 1963–67 MCZ (Harvard)

NHM (London) NMNH SIA

251

Hawaiʻi State Archives. Hui Manu M-465 Box 2 Bird Importation, 1963–1967

Museum of Comparative Zoology Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. All items from the incoming correspondence files of William Brewster Natural History Museum Library and Archives, London, England National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC

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Notes

Introduction 1. Sahotra Sarkar, “Defining ‘Biodiversity,’ Assessing Biodiversity,” Monist 85, no. 1 (2002): 13. 2. Noelani Arista, Davida Malo, a Hawaiian Life. Part II of The Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi of David Malo, Vol. 2: Text and Translation, ed. and trans. Charles Langlas and Jeffrey Lyon (forthcoming, University of Hawaiʻi Press), 99n. 3. Herbert George Wells, Certain Personal Matters: A Collection of Material Mainly Autobiographical (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1898), 172.

Chapter 1. Sitting Ducks Epigraph: Frances C. James, Auk 4, no. 2 (2002): 1206. 1. As of this writing, the most recent analysis of the date of human arrival in Hawaiʻi is from an article which integrates paleoenvironmental data, archaeological data, and statistical modelling to arrive at an estimated arrival of between CE 1000 and 1100: J. Stephen Athens, Timothy Reith, and Thomas Dye, “A Paleoenvironmental and Archaeological Model-Based Age Estimate for the Colonization of Hawaiʻi,” American Antiquity 79, no. 1 (2014): 144–155. Pinning down a more accurate date of arrival of the settlement of Polynesians in the Hawaiian Islands is “probably the most enduring problem in Hawaiian archaeology” (Patrick Kirch, “Understanding the Hawaiian Past: A Personal Reflection,” Journal of Pacific Archaeology 5, no. 2 [2014]: 111). “Catastrophic wave”: Alison G. Boyer, “Extinction Patterns in the Avifauna of the Hawaiian Islands,” Diversity and Distributions 14, no. 3 (2008): 509. Faulkner quote: Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), 92. 2. Percent: Boyer, “Extinction Patterns,” 513. As Storrs Olson noted some years ago, “It is probable that the historically known avifauna represents only a third, or less, of the total number of endemic species of birds that were present in the Hawaiian Islands when man first arrived there”; Storrs L. Olson and Helen James, “Fossil Birds from the Hawaiian Islands: Evidence for Wholesale Extinction by Man before Western Contact,” Science 217 (1982): 633–635. Also

253

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Notes to Pages 10–13

see J. Stephen Athens et al., “Avifaunal Extinctions, Vegetation Change, and Polynesian Impacts in Prehistoric Hawaiʻi,” Archaeology in Oceania 37, no. 2 (Jul. 2002): 57–78. For a discussion of the estimated numbers of bird species across the Pacific beyond Hawaiʻi, see John L. Curnutt and Stuart L. Pimm, “How Many Bird Species in Hawaii and the Central Pacific Before First Contact?,” Studies in Avian Biology 22 (2001), 15–30, as well as Pimm et al., “Bird Extinctions in the Central Pacific,” in Extinction Rates, ed. John H. Lawton and Robert M. May (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 75–87. Modern extinction rates low because ancient ones were high: Tim M. Blackburn, Phillip Cassey, and Richard P. Duncan, “Extinction in Island Endemic Birds Reconsidered,” Ecography 27, no. 1 (2004): 124. 3. Richard P. Duncan, Alison G. Boyer, and Tim M. Blackburn, “Magnitude and Variation of Prehistoric Bird Extinctions in the Pacific,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110, no. 16 (Apr. 16, 2013): 6436. Ninety percent of extinctions on islands: Judith K. Szabo et al., “Global Patterns and Drivers of Avian Extinctions at the Species and Subspecies Level,” PloS ONE 7 no. 10: 1, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0047080, accessed Nov. 17, 2016. Also see Olson and James, “The Role of Polynesians in the Extinction of the Avifauna of the Hawaiian Islands,” in Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution, ed. Paul Martin and Richard Klein (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984): 768–780. 4. “Nature’s chronic winnowing”: Natalie Angier, “New Creatures in an Age of Extinction,” New York Times, Jul. 25, 2009, WK1; Stuart Pimm, pers. comm., Oct. 10, 2013. 5. Articles dealing with the difficulties in getting an accurate fix on this number include Helen James et al., “Radiocarbon Dates on Bones of Extinct Birds from Hawaii,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 84, no. 8 (Apr. 1987): 2350–2354; Helen M. Regan et al., “The Currency and Tempo of Extinction,” American Naturalist 157, no. 1 (2001), 1–10; and Curnutt and Pimm, “How Many Birds Species,” 15–30. 6. Bats’ arrival: the ʻopeʻapeʻa, or Hawaiian hoary bat, came in at least two separate migrations—one 10,000 years ago, the other much more recently, around 800 years ago. A. L. Russell et al., “Two Tickets to Paradise: Multiple Dispersal Events in the Founding of Hoary Bat Populations in Hawaiʻi,” PLoS ONE 10, no. 6 (2015): doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127912. 7. “Dark belly”: James Michener, Hawaii (New York: Ballantine Books, 1959), 7. “Sweepstakes dispersal” was a term coined by American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, to describe animals or plants moving (rarely but also accidentally, as implied by the term) along routes to new destinations. Simpson

Notes to Pages 13–19

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also anticipated the concept of punctuated equilibrium and played a key role in the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis. His book Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944) used the phrase “sweepstakes dispersal” for the first time. 8. For details on the Ko¯lea’s transoceanic migrations, see Oscar W. Johnson et al., “Tracking the Migrations of Pacific Golden-Plovers Between Hawaii and Alaska,” Wader Study Group Bulletin 118, no. 1 (Apr. 2011), 26–31. 9. See Alan Feduccia, The Origin and Evolution of Birds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), especially the section on flightless Hawaiian birds, 265–268. 10. Olson and James, “Descriptions of Thirty-Two New Species of Birds from the Hawaiian Islands: Part I. Non-Passerines,” Ornithological Monographs, no. 45 (1991), 28–42; James, “Prehistoric Extinctions and Ecological Changes on Oceanic Islands,” Vitousek et al., eds., Ecological Studies 115 (1995): 97; Alan C. Ziegler, “Flightless Birds and Fossil Sites,” in Hawaiian Natural History, Ecology, and Evolution (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002), 277–288. Risks of larger size for the Moa-Nalo: Boyer, “Extinction Patterns,” 515. 11. Helen F. James and James A. Burney, “The Diet and Ecology of Hawaii’s Extinct Flightless Waterfowl: Evidence from Coprolites,” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 62, no. 2 (1997): 279–297. 12. Storrs Olson and Helen James interview by Beverly and Stephen Stearns, unpub., Jun. 16, 1996. 13. Jonathan Paul Price and Deborah Elliott-Fisk, “Topographic History of the Maui Nui Complex, Hawaiʻi, and Its Implications for Biogeography,” Pacific Science 58, no. 1 (2004): 27–45. 14. Size: Michael D. Sorenson et al., “Relationships of the Extinct Moa-Nalos, Flightless Hawaiian Waterfowl, Based on Ancient DNA,” Proceedings: Biological Sciences 266, no. 1434 (1999): 2187–2193; morphology: Feduccia, Origin and Evolution of Birds, 265–267; Storrs Olson, pers. comm., Nov. 29, 2011; coprolites: James and Burney, “The Diet and Ecology of Hawaii’s Extinct Flightless Waterfowl,” 282. 15. Beverly Peterson Stearns and Stephen C. Stearns, Watching, from the Edge of Extinction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 15; Alan C. Ziegler, “Hawaiian Archipelago Formation,” in Hawaiian Natural History, Ecology, and Evolution (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002), 17–31; Patrick Kirch, A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawaiʻi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 111. 16. Olson and James, interview with Stearnses, 1996.

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Notes to Pages 19–26

17. Curnutt and Pimm, “How Many Bird Species,” 15; Data turned to stone: David J. Bottjer, pers. comm., 2012. 18. Olson and James, “Descriptions of Thirty-Two New Species,” Part I, 10. 19. For a readily-digestible overview, see Bottjer, Paleoecology: Past, Present and Future (Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 2016). 20. Per Milberg and Tommy Tyrberg, “Naïve Birds and Noble Savages: A Review of Man-Caused Prehistoric Extinctions of Island Birds,” Ecography 16, no. 3 (1993): 232. 21. Storrs as hunter in boyhood: pers. comm., Feb. 8, 2017; “I got into studying rails”: Olson and James, interview with Stearnses, 1996. 22. “Obvious and intense devotion”: Allyn W. Kimball to Frederick Bang, Feb. 9, 1971, NMNH, Division of Paleontology, Curatorial Records, 1956–2000, Box: Acc: #01–060, folder “Olson, Storrs L., 1971–1980.” Details on Olson’s early association with the Smithsonian: Matthew C. Perry, ed., Washington Biologists’ Field Club: Its Members and Its History (1900–2006) (Washington, DC: Washington Biologists’ Field Club, 2007), 217; and Olson and James, interview with Stearnses, 1996. 23. Clayton Ray to Elizabeth S. Wing, Jun. 6, 1977, NMNH, Division of Paleontology, Curatorial Records, 1956–2000, Box: Acc: #01–060, folder “Olson, Storrs L., 1971–1980.” 24. Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), Jul. 27, 1897; Munro diary, Oct. 14, 1891, Munro Papers, Acc. 1.2, BPBM. 25. Olson told me that the dating of the flow took place considerably after Wetmore’s paper. Olson, pers. comm., Feb. 8, 2017. 26. Alexander Wetmore, “An Extinct Goose from the Island of Hawaii,” Condor 45, no. 4 (1943): 146–148. The discovery was actually first described in print (albeit very briefly) in a 1930 publication: Harold T. Stearns, W. O. Clark, and O. E. Meinzer, “Geology and Water Resources of the Kau district, Hawaii,” U.S. Geological Survey, Water-Supply Paper 616, 1930. The most current (and most useful) article on this first Hawaiian fossil bird find is Storrs Olson’s 2013 piece “Hawaii’s First Fossil Bird: History, Geological Age, and Taxonomic Status of the Extinct Goose Geochen rhuax Wetmore (Aves: Anatidae),” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 126, no. 2: 161–168. Ever the diligent researcher, Olson tried to duplicate the bone’s condition by placing modern chicken bones on fireplace coals until they glowed red hot; “this resulted in longitudinal splits in the bone with distinctive warped edges similar to the condition in the holotypical material of Geochen,” he reported (164). 27. Storrs Olson on Aidem: Olson, pers. comm., Nov. 29, 2011.

Notes to Pages 26–35

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28. Joan Aidem on her discovery: Aidem, pers. comm., Jul. 8, 2011; Olson, pers. comm., Feb. 8, 2017. 29. Storrs L. Olson and Alexander Wetmore, “Preliminary Diagnoses of Two Extraordinary New Genera of Birds from Pleistocene Deposits in the Hawaiian Islands,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 89, no. 18 (1976): 247–258. 30. Commentary by Olson about Joan Aidem: Olson, pers. comm., Jul. 10, 2011. 31. Pimm et al., “Bird Extinctions in the Central Pacific,” 27–30. 32. Story about stickers and Larry Small: Pamela Henson, SIA, pers. comm., Jul. 15, 2011, and Storrs Olson, pers. comm., Jun. 16, 2015. Also see “Convicted Museum Boss Still Quibbling,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco): Feb. 17, 2005, A2. 33. Marjorie Ziegler, pers. comm., Jun. 28, 2016. 34. “Surely ranks”: Alan Feduccia, The Origin and Evolution of Birds (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999 [2nd ed.]), 265. Full accounting of probable new species discovered: Olson and James, interview with Stearnses, 1996. 35. “My contribution is superior”: Olson to Randall T. Schuh, SIA, Feb. 12, 1979. See also the thread of related correspondence in this folder between Olson and Schuh, SIA, which is mostly undated, but contains all of Jan. and Feb. 1979. 36. Olson to Peter Raven, Secretary, National Geographic, Nov. 1, 1999. The best place to read this letter, and Olson’s follow-up, is via this Dinosaur listserv post hosted by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History: http://dml.cmnh. org/1999Nov/msg00263.html, accessed Jan. 2, 2017. 37. Details about Helen James’s life and background: interview, Washington, DC, Aug. 7, 2013, and biographical sketch in Perry, ed., The Washington Biologists’ Field Club: Its Members and Its History (1900–2006), 167–168; also see: https:// www.amnh.org/science/biodiversity/extinction/Day1/bytes/JamesInterview. html, accessed Jun. 13, 2016. 38. Stearns and Stearns, Watching, from the Edge of Extinction, 7; Olson and James, interview with Stearnses, 1996; Helen James, interview with author, Aug. 7, 2013, Washington, DC. 39. Helen James, interview with author, Aug. 7, 2013. 40. Helen James, interview with Smithsonian staff, n.d. but ca. 2010: http://naturalhistory.si.edu/onehundredyears/profiles/Storrs_Olson.html#, accessed Jun. 12, 2016. 41. Ibid. 42. Olson and James, interview with Stearnses, 1996, 7. 43. Olson, “A Flightless Bird, Lost and Found,” Smithsonian Magazine 2, no. 3 (1971): 65.

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Notes to Pages 36–39

44. Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, 280–283. 45. The best and most contextualized account of the prehistory of the Polynesians who came to Hawaiʻi and of their preparations and travel, and certainly the most readable for a lay audience, is Kirch’s Shark Going Inland. Also see his “The Peopling of the Pacific: A Holistic Anthropological Perspective,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 131–148. 46. Ko¯lea as instrumental element: Kirch, “Follow the Golden Plover,” in Shark Going Inland, 50–67. However, research scientist Oscar Johnson, who has done extensive work on the bird’s migrational life, told me in 2015 that “I’m somewhat on the fence about this [ancient seafarers following the Ko¯lea in the Spring],” because his and colleagues’ recent tracking studies had indicated that the species’ major spring movements are to feeding stopovers in Japan rather than northward towards an intersection with Hawaiʻi. “Perhaps the important clue for the ancients was in the fall rather than the spring,” he noted. “In autumn, they would have seen Ko¯lea arriving from the north.” Their work is currently ongoing. Oscar Johnson, pers. comm., Jul. 4, 2015. 47. I. N. Gabrielson and F. C. Lincoln, Birds of Alaska (Stackpole Co., 1959), 330. 48. Thirty-two plants: John R. McNeill, “Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific,” Journal of World History 5 (1994): 307. 49. Rats’ deliberate arrival: Storrs Olson, pers. comm., Feb. 8, 2017; other rat details and “Main source of destruction”: Athens et al., “Avifaunal Extinctions,” 57; Kirch, Shark Going Inland, 109. 50. Athens et al., “Avifaunal Extinctions,” 57–78; Athens, “Rattus exulans and the Catastrophic Disappearance of Hawaiʻi’s Native Lowland Forest,” Biological Invasions 11 (2009): 1489–1501. “Sobering thought”: Kirch, Shark Going Inland, 109. Also see G. M. Murakami, “Analysis of Charcoal from Archaeological Contexts,” Report 20 in Archaeological Investigations of the Mudlane-Waimea-Kawaihae Road Corridor, Island of Hawaiʻi: An Interdisciplinary Study of an Environmental Transect, ed. J. T. Clark and P. V. Kirch, Anthropology Department, BPBM (1983): 514–526. “The areas burned bore little relation to the actual needs of agriculture”: McNeill, “Of Rats and Men,” 299–349. 51. Bernice Pauahi Bishop Estates, “Additional Animals,” in The Ahupuaʻa: Life in Early Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools Press, 1994), 42. However, Storrs Olson described this possibility that the rats destroyed all of the native lowland forests as “nonsense” to me; Olson, pers. comm., Feb. 8, 2017. 52. Rats’ coverage of the islands: Athens et al., “Rattus exulans and the Catastrophic Disappearance of Hawaiʻi’s Native Lowland Forest,” Biological Invasions 11 (2009): 1489–1501.

Notes to Pages 40–51

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53. Melvyn V. Garrison and Charles P. Breidenstein, “Digestion of Sugarcane by the Polynesian Rat,” Journal of Wildlife Management 34, no. 3 (Jul. 1970): 522. 54. Diversification not continuous: Robert M. May, John H. Lawton, and Nigel E. Stork, “Assessing Extinction Rates,” in Extinction Rates, ed. John H. Lawton and Robert M. May (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1–2. Majority of species now extinct: May, Lawton, and Stork, “Assessing Extinction Rates,” 4. 55. Stearns and Stearns, Watching, from the Edge of Extinction, 13; Olson on swift and profound biological catastrophe: “Extinction on Islands: Man as Catastrophe,” in Conservation for the Twenty-First Century, ed. David Western and Mary C. Pearl (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 52. 56. Nick Middleton, The Global Casino: An Introduction to Environmental Issues (Routledge, 2013 [5th ed.]), 354; Richard P. Duncan et al., “Magnitude and Variation of Prehistoric Bird Extinctions in the Pacific,” PNAS 110, no. 16 (Apr. 16, 2013): 6436. 57. Newton to Perkins, Jun. 16, 1892, BPBM. 58. James and Olson, interview with Stearnses, 1996; James, pers. comm., Feb. 10, 2017. 59. David A. Burney, “Tropical Islands as Paleoecological Laboratories: Gauging the Consequences of Human Arrival,” Human Ecology 25, no. 3 (Sept. 1997): 438. 60. McNeill, “Of Rats and Men,” 309. 61. Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 211. 62. Ibid.; Krech quoting Breckenridge, 26–27. 63. Ibid.; Krech quoting Martin, 29; Krech, “Beyond the Ecological Indian,” in Native Americans and the Environment (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 3. 64. Robert J. Hommon, The Ancient Hawaiian State: Origins of a Political Society (Oxford University Press, 2013), 12–14. 65. Ibid., 84. 66. Noah Gomes, “Meha ka Leo i ka Nahele: He Noiʻina i ka Poʻe Ka¯pili Manu o ke Au Kahiko” [“The Silenced Voice of the Forest: A Search for the Historical Bird Hunters”] (MA thesis, University of Hawaiʻi, 2015). Also see: Gomes, “Some Traditional Native Hawaiian Bird Hunting Practices on Hawaiʻi Island,” Hawaiian Journal of History 50 (2016): 33–51. Olson on extinction: Stearns and Stearns, 1999, Watching, from the Edge of Extinction, 9. 67. Conant interview, Sept. 8, 2014. 68. Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 162.

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Notes to Pages 53–56

Chapter 2. Counting Extinction Epigraph: Newton to Perkins, Jun. 16, 1892, BPBM. 1. First recording taken Jun. 1, 1968 by J. Richard Gauthey and Ian Atkinson, Alakaʻi Swamp, Koaie Stream Cabin, Kauaʻi, at an elevation of 1,273 meters: http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/5895. Atkinson’s recording has survived in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Kauaʻi ʻŌʻo¯’s fluting call is faint but ¯ ʻo¯ sighting took place in the Alakaʻi Swamp on Sept. distinctive. The 1963 ʻO 2, 1963, by Ord and Ashmole, as described by W. M. Ord, “Birds of the Month,” Elepaio 24, no. 5 (Nov. 1963): 23. (The ʻokina, or apostrophe before the “E,” wasn’t added to the journal’s title until 36, no. 6, Dec. 1975.) In the interest of completeness, the bird was also apparently heard by a trio of researchers in Sept. 1965: “The Kauai ʻo¯ʻo¯ . . . was not seen, but the clear call from which it derives it [sic] name was unmistakable. Only two birds were heard during our three days,” Elepaio 27, no. 5 (Nov. 1966): 44. 2. The Garden Island (Kauaʻi), Jun. 2, 1971. 3. John Sincock to Erickson, Jun. 16, 1971, Scott Papers, HEHL. 4. Sincock to Director, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Periodic Activity Report Memos, Jun. 6, Jul. 12, and Jul. 26, 1971, Scott Papers, HEHL. 5. Sincock to Erickson, May 5, 1968, Scott Papers, HEHL. 6. Photographs: Sincock to Erickson, Jun. 16, 1971, Scott Papers, HEHL. Scott noted to me that it was on one of those summer trips that he realized the importance of conducting a statewide survey to determine the numbers and distribution of the endangered birds in the state. He also began to appreciate the difficulties that would be involved in conducting such a survey, and the role Sincock’s willingness could play in making it happen. Scott, pers. comm., Mar. 11, 2016. 7. Audio recording in 1976: The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology holds eight videos and eleven audio recordings of the bird, ranging from Gauthey and Atkinson’s 1968 recording to those by Sincock, Doug Pratt, Thane Pratt, and Fred Zeillemaker. “We were fortunate”: Sincock to Erickson, May 31, 1973; “Beep-beep”: Sincock to Erickson, May 28, 1974; both Scott Papers, HEHL. The film footage (both the 16-mm film and a high-res digital copy) given to me by Bruce Benson has also been donated to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. 8. Sincock to Erickson, Jun. 16, 1975. Sincock also estimated that there were ¯ ʻo¯ alive between 1968 and 1973; during the later Hawaiian Forest Bird 36 ʻO Survey, their number was estimated at just two surviving individuals in 1981. Scott et al., Studies in Avian Biology 9 (1985): 103.

Notes to Pages 57–62

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9. Early names for the bird: John Cassin, United States Exploring Expedition . . . Mammology and Ornithology (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1858), 170–172; “Mr. Knudsen writes”: Leonhard Stejneger, “Birds of Kauai Island, Hawaiian Archipelago, Collected by Valdemar Knudsen, with Descriptions of New Species . . .,” Proceedings of the United States National Museum 10 (1887): 102. 10. “Less than one out of a thousand”: Sincock, Jun. 2, 1975, HEHL; “Up at dawn”: Sincock, Jul. 25, 1977, HEHL; for published accounts prior to Sincock’s work, see: Bessel D. van’t Wouldt and Robert E. Nelson, “Hydrology of the Alakai Swamp,” Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 132 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, Jan. 1963); and Robert E. Burgan and Nelson, “Decline of Ohia Lehua Forests in Hawaii,” USDA Forest Service General Technical Report PSW-3 (1972). 11. See, for instance, https://cms.ctahr.hawaii.edu/rod/Home.aspx (accessed Jul. 20, 2017). For earlier descriptions of ʻo¯hiʻa dieback, see Burgan and Nelson, “Decline of Ohia Lehua.” ¯ ʻo¯ not vocalizing: Jul. 6, 1978; collecting in12. Decline of ʻo¯hiʻa: Jul. 25, 1977; ʻO florescences: Oct. 3, 1978; survey results: Aug. 29, 1978; “very little bloom”: Apr. 7, 1978; briefest note: Oct. 1, 1979; all Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL. 13. Interview with Sheila Conant, Honolulu, Sept. 8, 2014; Conant, pers. comm., Dec. 29, 2016; also see interview with Conant at http://vimeo.com/39979315. Also essential is Sheila Conant, H. Douglas Pratt, and Robert J. Shallenberger, “Reflections on a 1975 Expedition to the Lost World of the Alakaʻi and Other Notes on the Natural History, Systematics, and Conservation of Kauaʻi Birds,” Wilson Bulletin 110, no. 1 (1998): 1–22. Comments by Scott, pers. comm., various dates between 2013 and 2016. Rob Shallenberger, pers. comm., May 13, 2015. 14. Doug Pratt, pers. comm., Jun. 6, 2015; Shallenberger, pers. comm., May 13, 2015. 15. Conant, interview, Honolulu, Sept. 8, 2014; Shallenberger, pers. comm., May 13, 2015. 16. Conant, interview, Sept. 8, 2014; Scott on Sincock as bulldog: Scott, pers. comm., Mar. 11, 2016; Sincock uglier than hog: Sincock to Erickson, Jan. 6, 1969, Scott Papers, HEHL; Scott comment about Sincock’s gull pendant: Scott, pers. comm., Mar. 2, 2016. Account of jumping into river: Sincock to Erickson, Oct. 21, 1969, Scott Papers, HEHL. I gleaned the helicopter type ¯ ʻo¯ and its from the 24 minutes of film footage Bruce Benson sent me of the ʻO habitat. Pilot’s license and other experience: Eugene H. Dustman to Regional Director, U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries & Wildlife, Portland, May 29, 1967, Scott Papers, HEHL.

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Notes to Pages 62–67

17. Bruce Benson, pers. comm., May 24, 2015. 18. “Cold, wet, miserable night”: Sincock to Erickson, Nov. 6, 1967; “wettest biologist on earth”: Sincock to Erickson, Feb. 24, 1969; both Scott Papers, HEHL. 19. Bruce Benson, pers. comm., May 24, 2015; Doug Pratt, pers. comm., Jun. 6, 2015. Also see comments about Perkins’s stamina and work ethic described throughout a recent work about Perkins: Neal Evenhuis, ed., Barefoot on Lava: The Journals and Correspondence of R. C. L. Perkins in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007). Sincock’s going through three pairs of boots: Sincock to Erickson, Sept. 24, 1975 (“Virtually wore out a pair of new boots; the third pair this year”), Scott Papers, HEHL. 20. Sincock to Erickson, Nov. 6, 1967, Scott Papers, HEHL; trail marking: George Laycock, “The Bird Man of Kauai,” Exploring (Nov. 1974): 47. 21. Dustman to Regional Director, U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries & Wildlife, Portland, May 29, 1972 (via pers. corr. from Mike Scott) itemizes much of Sincock’s background. Also see: Ethel A. Starbird, “Kauai: The Island That’s Still Hawaii,” National Geographic (Nov. 1977): 584–613, with several color photos of Sincock in the field; and Morning Herald (Uniontown), Aug. 12, 1950, 5 for a wedding announcement for Sincock and his wife Isobel, with photo. 22. Sincock coming from Patuxent: Laycock, “Bird Man,” 46. Mike Scott and Cam Kepler, “Endangered Species Research in Hawaii: The Early Years (1965–1987),” forthcoming, USGS, 2017. 23. Evening Standard (Uniontown), Nov. 3, 1977, 1, 8; National Geographic (Nov. 1977); David Wilcove and Margaret McMillan, “The Class of ’67,” in The Endangered Species Act at Thirty: Renewing the Conservation Promise, ed. Dale Goble, J. Michael Scott, and Frank W. Davis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), 45–50. 24. Marriage: Sincock to Erickson, Apr. 12, 1971, Scott Papers, HEHL. 25. Knudsen to Rothschild, Jan. 9, 1896, NHM (London), Tring correspondence, Series: Correspondence & Papers, 1890–1920; File: Correspondence I-M, 1896, TM1/21/11. 26. Munro’s diaries for Kauaʻi: MS SC Munro / Acc. 1975.193, Box 1.3, BPBM. 27. Sincock botanical work: Dec. 18, 1967; Manuscript revision: May 8, 1978; chafing at job: Feb. 17, 1977; all Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL. Sincock straight shooter: Kelvin Taketa, pers. comm., Dec. 5, 2016; Scott comment on Sincock heart issues and outlook: Scott, pers. comm., Mar. 3, 2016. 28. Knee injury: May 29, 1968 and Jun. 10, 1968; broke foot chasing dog: Dec. 2, 1969; ear infection: Jul. 1, 1974; minibike: Apr. 15, 1973; all Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL.

Notes to Pages 68–78

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29. Truck crash and judge fine, and “most unfortunate summer of my life”: Oct. 6, 1969; motorcycle crash: Nov. 8, 1978; defensive driving course: Mar. 3 and 9, 1969; all Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL. 30. Carpal tunnel troubles: Nov. 24, 1975 and Oct. 12, 1976; cervical traction: Aug. 5 and 18, 1968, Dec. 2, 1969; “all I need is a dog license”: Feb. 19, 1974; fungus: May 23, 1969; all Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL 31. Truck problems: Mar. 22 and May 10, 1971; fire in shed and broken finger: Mar. 25, 1972; all Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL. Aug. 12, 1969, Sincock to Erickson, SIA, Acc. No. T89021. 32. For technical details on the Alakaʻi’s topography, soil, rainfall, and other ecological matters, see Van’t Woudt and Nelson, “Hydrology of the Alakai Swamp.” 33. Turtle bite on Tern Island mention and “a young man’s sport”: Apr. 4, 1968, Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL. 34. Shark anecdote: Jack Harter, pers. comm., Feb. 5, 2015. 35. Scott, pers. comm., Mar. 10, 2016; Conant, pers. comm., Dec. 6, 2016. 36. Conant interview, Sept. 8, 2014. 37. Kay Kepler as “old fashioned naturalist”: http://www.pbif.org/images/akkbio, accessed Dec. 27, 2016. 38. There are numerous interviews with Conant online; useful was “Bugs, Birds, Plants and Snails: A Biography of Naturalist Sheila Conant” (Division of Forestry & Wildlife, Rare Plant Program Video, Hawaiʻi, Nov. 2011). 39. Most of Conant’s background details come from Conant, pers. comm., Dec. 6, 2016, and various other communications around that time. 40. W. A. Bryan and Alvin Seale, “Notes on the Birds of Kauai,” Occasional Papers BPBM 1, no. 3 (1901): 130; account of employee skinning and sending bird to Newell: Werner von Graevemeyer to Henry C. Palmer, Jun. 2, 1983, TM1/47, NHM (London); “As you will see” and “As to nests and notes”: Henshaw to Hartert, May 2, 1900, NHM London; “Numerous enough”: Henshaw, “Description of a New Shearwater from the Hawaiian Islands,” Auk 17 (Jul. 1900): 246; and 1947 sighting: Harvey L. Fisher, “The Avifauna of Niihau Island, Hawaiian Archipelago,” Condor 53, no. 1 (Jan. 1951): 36. 1955 sighting: Frank Richardson, “Reappearance of Newell’s Shearwater in Hawaii,” Auk 72, no. 4 (1955): 412. Sincock to Erickson, Jul. 30, 1967, Scott Papers, HEHL. Also see Sincock and Gerald E. Swedberg, “Rediscovery of the Nesting Grounds of Newell’s Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus newelli), with Initial Observations.” Condor 71, no. 1 (Jan. 1969): 69–71. 41. William A. Bryan to Richard B. Sharpe, Mar. 4, 1908, B-W; Sincock landing in Makaleha Mountains: Sincock and Swedberg, “Rediscovery,” 69. 42. Account of Jack Harter, pers. comm., Jan. 28, 2015.

264

Notes to Pages 79–84

43. Shearwaters and wing-loading: David G. Ainley, Thomas C. Telfer, and Michelle H. Reynolds, “Townsend’s and Newell’s Shearwater (Puffinus auricularis),” in The Birds of North America Online ed. A. Poole (Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 1997): http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/297; doi:10.2173/bna.297, accessed Jul. 15, 2015. Birds crash-landing and mortality: Sincock and Swedberg, “Rediscovery,” 70. 44. Jack Harter, pers. comm., Jan. 28, 2015. 45. Henshaw to Hartert, Jul. 17, 1900, NHM (London), Tring correspondence, Series: Correspondence & Papers, 1890–1920; File: Oversize Correspondence A-Z (1898–1903), TM1/156/10. 46. Immobility from light sources: Sincock and Swedberg, “Rediscovery,” 70. Hotel lighting: Nov. 16, 1967, Dec. 1 and 18, 1968, Apr. 12, 1969; cane haul road lights: Jul. 27, 1979; all Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL. There is extensive correspondence in Sincock’s memos about the issue of lights and the hotels’ responses, written throughout most of his years on Kauaʻi. 47. Sincock to Erickson, Jan. 31, 1980. 48. Rehabilitating injured birds: Nov. 5, 1979; release of named birds: Nov. 14, 1979; both Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL. It’s difficult to be sure what events caused Sincock to tend to oiled birds, but several contemporary spills in the archipelago might have been the cause: in 1977, the Hawaiian Patriot lost 715,000 barrels and Irene’s Challenge lost 238,000 barrels, both in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. See David Duffy and Linda Elliott, “Oil and Hawaiian Seabirds,” ʻElepaio 70, no. 6 (Aug./Sept. 2010): 41–43. 49. Sincock raising shearwaters: Aug. 8 and Sept. 5, 1967, Oct. 13, 1978, and Jul. 11 and 13, 1979; all Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL. 50. “All goes well” and “busted my rump”: Sincock to Erickson, Oct. 13, 1878, Scott Papers, HEHL; “made us braver”: Conant interview, Sept. 8, 2014. 51. Gene Kridler details: Transcript of oral history interview with Kridler, Jan. 27, 2006, National Conservation Training Center Museum and Archives, from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s National Digital Library: http://digitalmedia. fws.gov/cdm/ref/collection/document/id/1146, accessed Nov. 27, 2016. Kridler as effective refuge manager: Shallenberger, pers. comm., May 13, 2015; Kridler as bureaucrat: Pratt, pers. comm., Jun. 6, 2015; Kridler as conservation hero: Scott, pers. comm., May 28, 2015; Washington Ornithological Society News 109 (Jun./Jul. 2007): 1. 52. Scott, pers. comm., Mar. 5, 2016. 53. A seminal paper in 2008 corrected previous analyses of the origins of the ¯ ʻo¯ was collected— Mohoidae—dating back to Cook’s voyage when the first ʻO which had always considered the genus as being descended from Australasian

Notes to Pages 85–91

265

honeyeaters (Meliphagidae). Rather, the taxon is a striking example of convergent evolution due to common selective pressures; see Fleischer, James, and Olson, “Convergent Evolution of Hawaiian and Australo-Pacific Honeyeaters from Distant Songbird Ancestors,” Current Biology 18, no. 24 (2008): 1927–1931. Munro and danger of extinction: George C. Munro, Birds of Hawaii (Honolulu: Tongg Publishing Co., 1944), 84. 54. Munro, journal, Mar. 9 and 29, 1892, MS SC Munro / Acc. 1975.193, Box 1.3; Journal excerpts, Kauai, Mar. 3–Apr. 12, 1892, BPBM. 55. Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1898), 196–197. 56. Munro, Birds of Hawaii, 85. 57. Henshaw to William Brewster, Nov. 20, 1900, MCZ (Harvard). 58. Newton to Perkins, Apr. 24, 1896, BPBM. 59. Account of Acrulocercus nobilis: Wilson, Aves Hawaiienses (London: R. H. Porter, 1890–1899), 5; also recounted by Munro in his diary, Dec. 27, 1891, BPBM; Henshaw to Rothschild, Oct. 21, 1899, NHM (London). 60. Pimm et al., “Bird Extinctions in the Central Pacific,” 76. 61. Observing the Kauaʻi Nukupuʻu and “undoubtedly the best field trip so far”: Jun. 13, 1972; nesting boxes and Ko¯keʻe Dam project: Mar. 25, 1972; both Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL. 62. Sincock to Erickson, Mar. 20 and 26, 1979, both Scott Papers, HEHL. Scott description of long-billed bird: Scott, pers. comm., Mar. 5, 2016. 63. Helicopter cost: May 5, 1968; “I was much impressed”: May 29, 1968; both Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL. Sincock previously used a helicopter at least once, in Jul. 1967, to locate the forgotten nesting grounds of Newell’s Shearwater. 64. Scott, pers. comm., Jun. 13, 2016. 65. Honeymoon: Bev Harter, pers. comm., Oct. 26, 2016; Remote work: Jack Harter, pers. comm., Jan. 7, 2015; Sincock to Patuxent, Mar. 13, 1973; helicopter cost (Sincock quoting Jack Harter): Sincock to Patuxent, May 5, 1968; both Scott Papers, HEHL. 66. “Innumerable delays”: diary of Henry Palmer; Avifauna of Laysan (London: R. H. Porter, 1893–1900), Part I, vii; details about conflict: H. Ross McKenzie to John Farrand, Oct. 6, 1978, recounting this story as Munro had told it to him, AMNH (New York), Ornithology Collections. 67. Myna as starling: Munro journal, Dec. 13, 1890; “Miner”: Munro journal, Dec. 10, 1890; both BPBM. 68. Lanaʻi Hookbill: Helen James, Richard L. Zusi, and Storrs Olson, “Dysmorodrepanis munroi (Fringillidae: Drepanidini), a Valid Genus and Species of Hawaiian Finch,” Wilson Bulletin 101, no. 2 (1989): 159–179.

266

Notes to Pages 92–98

69. Munro diary, Nov. 23, 1891, BPBM. 70. Newton to Perkins, Apr. 30, 1892, BPBM. 71. Birds in Munro collection: Munro diary, Nov. 29, 1891; arsenic soap: Munro diary, Oct. 30, 1891; Munro close observer: Munro diary, Jul. 23, 1892; all BPBM. 72. Munro diary, Feb. 28, 1892, BPBM. 73. Palmer’s treatment of Wolstenholme: Munro to Dean Amadon, Jun. 30, 1961, AMNH. 74. Wolstenholme’s arrival: Munro diary, Feb. 14, 1892, BPBM; Munro to Amadon, Jun. 30, 1961, AMNH. 75. Munro diary, Mar. 25, 1893 and Nov. 20, 1895, BPBM. Munro outlived his first wife Jean and married a second time to a woman named Jessie, who survived him. Names of Munro’s first wife and children harvested from several letters by him to Dean Amadon in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Jul. 18, 1961, where he compares his first wife Jean to his second wife Jessie, AMNH. Mention of Ruby in the 1940 Federal Census, Honolulu, Tract 21. Munro returns to islands in Jul. 1892, and citizenship: Munro diary, Apr. 9, 1895, MS SC Munro 1.3, BPBM. 76. “Benevolent despot” and other details: Michael Egan, “Tale of Lanai is an Instant Classic,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin 12, no. 176 (Jun. 25, 2007). 77. Henshaw to Brewster, Jan. 5, 1899, MCZ (Harvard). 78. “They are not so numerous”: Munro diary, Nov. 9, 1891; spider webs on and in birds: Munro diary, Dec. 11 and 16, 1891; all BPBM. 79. “It is mournful”: Henshaw to Brewster, Dec. 31, 1899, MCZ (Harvard); “astonishingly local”: Henshaw to Rothschild, Nov. 10, 1899, NHM (London). 80. Henshaw to Rothschild, Feb. 6, 1900, NHM (London). 81. Professionalization in ornithology: Daniel Lewis, Feathery Tribe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Henshaw, “My experience”: Henshaw to Brewster, Oct. 25, 1903, MCZ (Harvard). 82. Hawaiians want to learn to skin birds: Munro diary, Feb. 27, 1892, BPBM; “Two natives are powerfully inspired”: Henshaw to Brewster, Mar. 17, 1899; lazy natives: Palmer to Hartert, Apr. 24, 1893; Munro diary, May 3, 1891. 83. “Impossible to get without natives”: Palmer to Hartert, Apr. 24, 1893, NHM (London). Old woman knew more than anyone else on island: R. C. L. Perkins to Munro, 18 May 1936, BPBM, MS SC Munro Box 13.3. 84. Henshaw to Brewster, Mar. 17, 1899, MCZ (Harvard). 85. Newton to Perkins, Jul. 17, 1896, MS Group 141, Box 2, BPBM. 86. Correspondence in a friendly fashion: Newton to Perkins, Oct. 21, 1893, BPBM. Anti-Semitic comments: Newton to Perkins, Aug. 21, 1896, BPBM; and Newton to Perkins, Oct. 9, 1896, BPBM. Inactions: Newton to Perkins, Oct. 9,

Notes to Pages 98–103

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1896, BPBM; unduly influenced: Newton to Perkins, Feb. 4, 1896, BPBM; “medieval belief that Jews stink”: Newton to Perkins, Jul. 17, 1896, BPBM. Also see the very useful article by Storrs Olson, “On the History and Importance of Rothschild’s Avifauna of Laysan”: http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections /nhrarebooks/rothschild/essays/storrs_rothschild.htm, which covers Newton’s and Rothschild’s relationship in some detail. 87. Newton to Perkins, May 21, 1892, BPBM. 88. Munro diary, May 19, 1894, BPBM; room details from Evenhuis, Barefoot on Lava, 30n7. “Getting a fine collection”: Munro diary, May 30, 1894, BPBM. 89. Ernst Hartert to Palmer, Mar. 22, 1894, NHM (London). Palmer’s biographical details have been researched extensively by Arleone Dibben-Young; see Dibben-Young and Jonathan S. Crocker, “Scott Barchard Wilson,” ʻElepaio 75, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 2015): 41–44. Death certificate: New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages, Death Certificate, Reg. No. 1920-004101. 90. Ernst Hartert to Valdemar Knudsen, Mar. 25, 1896, NHM (London). 91. Most of these details are in the book itself, but the presence of a Part VIII was confirmed by Leslie Overstreet, Curator of Natural-History Rare Books for the Smithsonian, pers. comm., Oct. 27, 2015. There are very few people on the planet—if any—who are more expert on bibliographic matters for natural history books than Overstreet. Wilson paying his own way: Dibben-Young and Crocker, “Scott Barchard Wilson,” 41–42. 92. Newton in Hawaiʻi in 1896: Newton to Perkins, May 13, 1896, BPBM. 93. “He is very easily led”: Newton to Perkins, Jul. 22, 1895; Newton disappointed: Newton to Perkins, Oct. 9, 1896, BPBM. 94. W. Warde Fowler to O. V. Aplin, Jun. 12, 1907, AL. 95. H. Ross McKenzie to John Farrand, Jr., Oct. 6, 1978, AMNH; http://www.sil. si.edu/DigitalCollections/nhrarebooks/rothschild/essays.htm, accessed Dec. 7, 2016. 96. For detailed information on Henshaw’s other activities, see Lewis, Feathery Tribe. Also see Nelson, “Henry Wetherbee Henshaw—Naturalist,” Auk 49, no. 4 (Oct. 1932): 399–427. 97. “There seems to be nothing the matter with me”: Henshaw to Merriam, May 1, 1894, Merriam Papers, BAN. 98. “They are a curious lot”: Henshaw to Merriam, Apr. 16, 1896, BANC MSS 83/129c; a very similar version of this quote is found in Henshaw’s obituary by Nelson, perhaps harvested from this letter, in Nelson, “Henshaw,” Auk (1932): 421–422; “I have much more endurance”: Henshaw to Brewster, MCZ (Harvard), Oct. 3, 1897. 99. Evenhuis, Barefoot on Lava, 276.

268

100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

112. 113. 114.

115.

116. 117. 118.

119.

Notes to Pages 104–111

Ibid. Newton to Perkins, Mar. 20, 1896, BPBM. Henshaw to Brewster, Mar. 17, 1899, MCZ (Harvard). “Curious how dead within me”: Oct. 3, 1895; “You speak of your inability”: Sept. 12, 1897; “I have found it rather difficult”; all Henshaw to Brewster, MCZ (Harvard). Henshaw to Brewster, Jul. 30, 1901, MCZ (Harvard). Henshaw really wrote for island readers: Henshaw to Brewster, Sept. 14, 1901; publisher badly scared by length: Henshaw to Brewster, May 21, 1902; both MCZ (Harvard); Henshaw wants to get the paper where it would reach the people of the Islands, and written for island readers: Henshaw to Rothschild, Jan. 21, 1901, TM1/155/8, NHM (London). Henshaw to Brewster, Dec. 19, 1902, MCZ (Harvard). Henshaw to Brewster, Feb. 16, 1901, MCZ (Harvard). Henshaw to Brewster, Sept. 14, 1901, MCZ (Harvard); “much improved”: Hilo Tribune (Hilo), May 27, 1904, 5. Henshaw to Ridgway, Apr. 12, 1898, B-W. Alvin Seale, “Field Notes on the Birds of Oahu, H.I.,” Occasional Papers BPBM 1, no. 2 (1900): 33. Henshaw to Brewster, Jan. 5, 1899, MCZ (Harvard); mucky vegetable mold: Munro diary, Feb. 23, 1892; Munro sinking past his knees: Munro diary, Feb. 26, 1892; both BPBM. Collecting “indescribably hard”: Henshaw to Ridgway, Apr. 12, 1898, B-W; Henshaw to Brewster, Apr. 13, 1898, MCZ (Harvard). Henshaw to Brewster, Jul. 16, 1902, MCZ (Harvard). Scott et al., Forest Bird Communities of the Hawaiian Islands: Their Dynamics, Ecology, and Conservation, Studies in Avian Biology 9 (Santa Barbara: Cooper Ornithological Society, 1986), 4. Henshaw delay in visiting Kona: Henshaw to Brewster, Mar. 17, 1899; Sincock’s request for office space: Sincock to Erickson, Jul. 17, 1967, Scott Papers, HEHL. Newton to Perkins, Mar. 3, 1894, MSS Group 141, Box 3, BPBM. Sincock to Erickson, Jul. 27, 1979, Scott Papers, HEHL. Na Pali coast dangers: Sincock to Erickson, Dec. 27, 1967, Acc. No. T89021, SIA; and Erickson to Sincock, Jan. 5, 1968, Scott Papers, HEHL; Sincock’s fall: Laycock, “Bird Man,” 49. Last time bird heard: Thane K. Pratt, “Native Forest Birds,” ʻElepaio 47, no. 9 (Sept. 1987): 94. These climate comments in Henshaw to Brewster, Jul. 17, 1896 and Mar. 9, 1897; both MCZ (Harvard).

Notes to Pages 112–126

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120. “Of course it is all outlaw”: Henshaw to Brewster, May 26, 1902, MCZ (Harvard); Scott description of collecting: Scott, pers. comm., 2014. 121. “By guess and by gosh”: Transcript of oral history interview with Kridler, Jan. 27, 2006; Paul Banko, pers. comm., Nov. 3, 2016. 122. Scott, pers. comm., Mar. 5, 2016. 123. Sincock to Erickson, Scott Papers, HEHL. 124. Beyond Scott’s unpublished report, protocols and training methods were published in several places, such as Kepler and Scott, “Reducing Count Variability by Training Observers,” in C. J. Ralph and J. M. Scott, Estimating Numbers of Terrestrial Birds, Studies in Avian Biology 6 (Santa Barbara: Cooper Ornithological Society, 1981), 366–371. 125. Scott, pers. comm., Nov. 11, 2016. 126. Bill Birchard, Nature’s Keepers: The Remarkable Story of How the Nature Conservancy Became the Largest Environmental Group in the World (John Wiley and Sons, 2005), 68. 127. Birchard, Nature’s Keepers, 179–185; “It made me realize”: Taketa, pers. comm., Dec. 5, 2016. 128. Scott conception of gap analysis: http://gapanalysis.usgs.gov/about-gap /our-history/, accessed Nov. 27, 2016. 129. Scott, pers. comm., May 30, 2012. 130. Paul H. Baldwin to Frank Locey, Jul. 25, 1939, and Locey to Baldwin, Aug. 8, 1939; both HSA BAF Corr Birds Gen 1932–1940, Box COM2–15. 131. On the importance of study collections, see J. V. Remsen Jr.’s essential article “The Importance of Continued Collecting of Bird Specimens to Ornithology and Bird Conservation,” Bird Conservation International 5 (1995): 145–180. 132. “Prevalent belief among the London people”: Newton to Perkins, Nov. 12, 1892, BPBM; “Would rather the poor birds were left alone”: Newton to Perkins, Jan, 3, 1896, BPBM; “sombre plumage”: Newton, Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (Nov. 7, 1893): 690. 133. “Priceless value of their own”: Henshaw to Brewster, Aug. 20, 1899, MCZ (Harvard); “Nearly all of these birds are very rare”: Herbert E. Gregory to Commissioners, Jul. 19, 1920, HSA BAF Corr Gen 1917–1927, Box COM2–12. 134. W. A. Bryan to R. B. Sharpe, Mar. 4, 1908, B-W. 135. Joan Conrow, “Team Hopes to Save Kauai Ecosystem,” Honolulu StarBulletin (Honolulu), Jan. 2, 1997. 136. Joseph P. Linduska, “Endangered Species—the Federal Program,” Elepaio 29, no. 1 (Jul. 1968): 1.

270

Notes to Pages 126–131

137. Richardson and Bowles, A Survey of the Birds of Kauai, Hawaii, Bishop Museum Bulletin 227 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1964). Conant interview, “Bugs, Birds, Plants and Snails,” Nov. 2011. 138. Henshaw to Ridgway, Jun. 7, 1898, B-W.

Chapter 3. Overcoming Extinction 1. Thane Pratt et al., eds., Conservation Biology of Hawaiian Forest Birds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 513. 2. Richard J. Camp, Kevin W. Brink, and Paul C. Banko, “2015–2016 Palila Abundance Estimates,” Technical Report HCSU-076, Hawaiʻi Cooperative Studies Unit, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, May 2016. Population size: Banko, pers. comm., Nov. 20, 2016; also Joanna C. Zeigler, “Palila, People, and Politics: Perfect Facts, Law, and Lawsuits with Imperfect Results,” University of Hawaiʻi Law Review 37, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 245–292. “Extraordinarily tame”: Henshaw to Brewster, May 7, 1903, MCZ (Harvard). Range: the first detailed information about the bird’s range and density was meticulously researched and recorded in Charles van Riper III et al., “Distribution and Abundance Patterns of the Palila on Mauna Kea, Hawaii,” Auk 95 (Jul. 1978): 518–527, the work undertaken during breeding season in 1975 as the HFSB got under way. Van Riper did some of the earliest and most important research on the bird, including work on its epizoology. 3. Paul C. Banko, Richard J. Camp, Chris Farmer, Kevin W. Brinck, David L. Leonard, and Robert M. Stephens. “Response of Palila and Other Subalpine Hawaiian Forest Bird Species to Prolonged Drought and Habitat Degradation by Feral Ungulates,” Biological Conservation 157 (2013): 70–77. 4. Thane Pratt et al., Conservation Biology, 514; parasitic wasps: Paul C. Banko and Chris Farmer, eds., Palila Restoration Research, 1996–2012, Hawaiʻi Cooperative Studies Unit Technical Report HCSU-046 (University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, 2014), 472; and G. J. Brenner, P. T. Oboyski, and Paul Banko, “Parasitism of Cydia spp. (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae) on Sophora chrysophylla (Fabaceae) along an Elevation Gradient of Dry Subalpine Forest on Mauna Kea, Hawaii,” Pan-Pacific Entomologist 78 (2002): 101–109. 5. H. Douglas Pratt et al., A Field Guide to the Birds of Hawaii and the Tropical Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 297. Wolf whistle: see, for instance, “The Battle to Save Our Native Birds,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin (Honolulu), Jul. 2, 1966, B-1. 6. “Closer than mother to child”: Oliver A. Houck, “More Unfinished Stories: Lucas, Atlanta Coalition, and Palila/Sweet Home,” University of Colorado Law Review 75 (2004): 403.

Notes to Pages 133–138

271

7. Ballieu’s arrival and Berenger’s departure: Jun. 30 and Jul. 3, 1869; subscription list for relief of French suffering: Oct. 22, 1870; donation of playthings: Apr. 8, 1871; Ballieu’s furniture: Jan. 19, 1878; Ballieu’s departure: Apr. 6, 1878; all in Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu). The couple also suffered the death of their infant child not long after their arrival: Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), Aug. 21, 1869. 8. Details about items collected by Ballieu: Archives Nationales, Pierrefittesur-Seine, France, Box AJ/15/542. 9. Ballieu’s residence: Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), Nov. 8, 1871, 4. Much of this information about Ballieu’s collecting interests comes from extensive investigations on my behalf by Noël Garrigue in the Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, which holds correspondence by Ballieu, as well as numerous lists of his collection. Garrigue, pers. comm., 2013 and 2014. Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), Aug. 11, 1877, 3. 10. M. E. Oustalet, “Description de quelques especes nouvelles de la collection ornithologique du Muséum d’histoire naturelle,” Bulletin de La Société Philomathique de Paris 7, no. 1 (Paris: Société Philomathique de Paris, 1876): 100, trans. Carla Zecher, Newberry Library, 2014. 11. Other nineteenth-century accounts also got the French Consul’s name wrong, i.e., Scott Wilson, Aves Hawaiienses (1890), footnote on p. 1 of Palila account: “The late M. Bailleu was an enthusiastic naturalist, and spent some months at Dr. Trousseau’s mountain cottage in the district of Kona in Hawaii, engaged in forming a collection of birds which he forwarded to the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes.” 12. “I know of no authority for it”: A Preliminary Catalogue of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History, Part IV: The Natural History Collections (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1893), 6. ¯ ʻu¯: Fish and Wildlife Information Exchange (1996), ʻO ¯ ʻu¯, 13. Capped ʻO ESIS101027 (draft), Virginia Tech., Mar. 14, 1996 version; Palila account: Wilson, Aves Hawaiienses, 2. Also see Rothschild’s Avifauna of Laysan, Part III (Dec. 1900), 197–198, for the Palila description. “Gray color of the bird”: Munro, Birds of Hawaii, 125. 14. John Cassin, United States Exploring Expedition, 170–172. 15. First archival mention of Palila: Munro diary, May 23, 1891, BPBM. 16. Munro diary, Oct. 16, 1891, BPBM; Andrew J. Berger, “The Eggs and Young of the Palila, an Endangered Species,” Condor 72, no. 2 (1970): 239. 17. Newton to Perkins, Apr. 30, 1892, BPBM. 18. Paul Banko, pers. comm., Nov. 2 and Nov. 29, 2016.

272

Notes to Pages 139–144

19. Palila’s historic distribution: David A. Burney et al., “Fossil Evidence for a Diverse Biota from Kauaʻi and Its Transformation since Human Arrival,” Ecological Monographs 714, no. 4 (Nov. 2001): 639. 20. Separate directions: Munro journal, Dec. 3, 1891, BPBM; “extraordinarily tame”: Henshaw to Brewster, May 7, 1903, MCZ (Harvard). 21. Wilson, Aves Hawaiienses, accounts for Palila and Chloridops kona. This is a curious error, because Wilson’s account for Chloridops kona was issued in early 1893, while the Palila account appeared in late 1890. 22. “Extremely rare”: Chloridops kona account in Aves Hawaiienses; bird’s cracking noises: Munro diary, Sept. 9, 1891; also see numerous details about Munro and Palmer’s collecting totals in Sept. and Oct. 1891 entries in Munro’s diaries, all BPBM; also Michael Walther and Julian Hume, Extinct Birds of Hawaii (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2016), 175; “exaggerated green finch”: Newton to Perkins, Jan. 25, 1892, BPBM. 23. “We would hardly find this bird”: Oct. 9, 1891; “Seem to go a good deal in communities,” Sept. 24, 1891; Chloridops kona song and call: Oct. 19, 1891; green leaves in bird’s throat: Oct. 20, 1891; all Munro diaries, BPBM. 24. Green leaves in bird’s throat and stomach contents: Oct. 20, 1891; difficulty skinning: Sept. 25, 1891; both Munro diaries, BPBM. 25. A Preliminary Catalogue, 6. 26. Oustalet, “Description de quelques especes nouvelles,” 100. 27. Wilson, Aves Hawaiienses, Palila account. 28. “There is one singer here”: Henshaw to Brewster, Mar. 17, 1899, MCZ (Harvard); “In Olaa”: Henry W. Henshaw, Birds of the Hawaiian Islands, Being a Complete List of the Birds of the Hawaiian Possessions (Honolulu: Thomas G. Thrum, 1902), 64. 29. Helen F. James, “The Osteology and Phylogeny of the Hawaiian Finch Radiation (Fringillidae: Drepanidini), Including Extinct Taxa,” Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 141, no. 2 (2004): 235. 30. James and Olson, “A New Species of Hawaiian Finch (Drepanidini: Loxioides) from Makauwahi Cave, Kauaʻi,” Auk 123, no. 2 (Apr. 2006): 335–344; interview with Helen James, Aug. 7, 2013. 31. John Latham, A General Synopsis of Birds, vol. 1, pt. 2 [Second Supplement] (London: Printed for Benj. White, 1782), 739, http://www.biodiversitylibrary. org/item/105229. 32. Scott et al., Forest Bird Communities of the Hawaiian Islands, 170. Also see Steven G. Fancy and C. John Ralph, “Apapane (Himatione sanguinea),” The Birds of North America Online, Jan. 1, 1997, http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/ species/296, accessed Mar. 2, 2016. Also see George H. Waring et al., “Study on

Notes to Pages 144–148

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

273

Use of Alien versus Native Plants by Nectarivorous Forest Birds on Maui, Hawaii,” Auk 110, no. 4 (1993): 917–920. See James A. Jobling, A Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 107. Pratt, Field Guide to the Birds of Hawaii, 311; Handbook of Birds of the World: http://www.hbw.com/node/61450, accessed Dec. 28, 2015. 600 birds per sq. km: Scott et al., “Conservation of Hawaii’s Vanishing Avifauna: Hawaiian Birds Provide One of the Best, and Most Spectacular, Showcases of Divergent Evolution,” BioScience 38, no. 4 (Apr. 1988): 249. High of 3,000 birds per sq. km, and birds at Lyon Arboretum: Fancy and Ralph, “Apapane (Himatione sanguinea),” accessed Dec. 14, 2015. Also see Scott et al., Forest Bird Communities of the Hawaiian Islands, 170–181. “Apapane will always remain”: Henshaw to Brewster, Mar. 17, 1899, MCZ (Harvard); thousands of ʻIʻiwi and ʻApapane: Henshaw to Ridgway, May 14, 1898, B-W. R. Terry Chesser, “Fifty-sixth Supplement to the American Ornithologists’ Union Check-list of North American Birds,” Auk 132 (2015): 750. Also see Peter Pyle, “Nomenclature of the Laysan Honeycreeper Himatione [sanguinea] fraithii,” Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club 131, no. 2 (2011): 116–117; Storrs L. Olson, “On the History and Importance of Rothschild’s Avifauna of Laysan,” http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/nhrarebooks/rothschild/essays/storrs_rothschild.htm, accessed Dec. 12, 2016; Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). “To Hell with it and its islands” and sandstorm description: Storrs Olson, transcription of Donald R. Dickey’s diary, Apr. 23 and 24, 1923, “History and Ornithological Journals of the Tanager Expedition of 1923 to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Johnston and Wake Islands,” Atoll Research Bulletin, no. 433 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Feb. 1996): 140. Storrs’s comment on the birds: Olson and James, interview with Stearnses, 1996, 16. Cyril E. Pemberton, “Highlights in the History of Entomology in Hawaii 1778–1963,” Pacific Insects 6, no. 3 (1964): 689–729; D. L. Van Dine, “Mosquitoes in Hawaii,” Bulletin of the Hawaiian Agricultural Experiment Station 6 (1904): 7. Wellington arrives in 1822: Jun. 26, 1822, Sandwich Islands Mission Journal for Jan. 1, 1822–Jul. 4, 1822; Bell from Wellington: Amos Cooke, Aug. 13, 1822; use of wood for church, Oct. 10 and 12, 1822; all from Levi Chamberlain’s journal, Jul. 4–Dec. 8, 1822, HMHHSA.

274

Notes to Pages 149–154

40. Levi Chamberlain, journal, Aug. 16, 1826, vol. 6, Apr. 16, 1826–Nov. 27, 1826, HMHHSA; Neal Evenhuis, pers. comm., Aug. 29, 2016. 41. Wellington in 1828: Fred Gregory, pers. comm., Aug. 29, 2016. 42. “The musquetoes have got here”: Clarissa Armstrong, journal, Aug. 21, 1835; “very much fatigued and annoyed”: Amos Starr Cooke, journal, Sept. 4 and Oct. 9, 1837, vol. 3–4, Dec. 20, 1836–Dec. 31, 1838; all HMHHSA. 43. “Bilious wretches”: James J. Jarves, “A Trip to the Crater of Kilauea,” Polynesian (Honolulu), Nov. 13, 1847, 2. “Mosquitos are rather sharp at nights”: Polynesian (Honolulu), Sept. 3, 1859, 2. 44. Au Okoa (Honolulu), Jun. 29, 1871, 3. 45. Munro diary, May 3, 1891, BPBM. 46. Munro sending text to Wilson: Munro diary, May 9, 1891, BPBM; also see Charles van Riper III et al.’s groundbreaking article: Charles van Riper III, Sandra G. van Riper, M. Lee Goff, and Marshall Laird, “The Epizootiology and Ecological Significance of Malaria in Hawaiian Land Birds,” Ecological Monographs 56, no. 4 (1986): 327–344; “Sores on their feet”: Oct. 10, 1891; lump on head: Oct. 20, 1891; both Munro diary, BPBM. 47. Carter Atkinson, pers. comm., Nov. 28, 2016. 48. Paul Banko and Carter Atkinson, pers. comm.; both Nov. 29, 2016. The only published report of Palila susceptibility to malaria as of this writing is in Charles van Riper III, Sandra G. van Riper, M. Lee Goff, and Marshall Laird, “The Impact of Malaria on Birds in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park,” Technical Report 47 (Nov. 1982), https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/ 4006/1/047.pdf, accessed July 18, 2017. 49. Polynesian (Honolulu), Apr. 9, 1859, 2. 50. Civil Code of the Hawaiian Islands . . . (Honolulu: Printed for the Government, 1859), 436–437; Hilo Police Justice: 218. 51. Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), Jul. 27, 1870, 4. 52. Revised Laws of Hawaii, 1915, Sections 597–599. For a useful extract specifically about birds under the law, see item in Hawaiʻi State Archives Box COM2–14, undated but attached to item dated Sept. 19, 1918, related to collecting native birds. 53. Proposed 1876 bill: Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), Jul. 12, 1876, 3; 1905 bill: Evening Bulletin (Honolulu), Mar. 31, 1905, 5. 54. Henshaw to Brewster, Feb. 16, 1901, MCZ (Harvard). 55. Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), foreword. For extensive details about threats to the bird and possible mitigations, see: Banko and Farmer, eds., Palila Restoration Research, 1996– 2012. Also centrally useful and important is the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Notes to Pages 155–161

275

draft document “Revised Recovery Plan for Hawaiian Forest Birds,” 2006: http://ecos.fws.gov/docs/recovery_plan/060922a.pdf, accessed Aug. 26, 2016. 56. Mauna Kea Recreational Users Group, “Palila v. DLNR.” Quote is comment by Robert DeCoito, Apr. 22, 2013, http://maunakearug.com/?page_id=2685, accessed Jul. 24, 2015. 57. Mouflon intro to Kauaʻi in 1954: P. Q. Tomich, Mammals in Hawaii: A Synopsis and National Bibliography (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1986), 37. “If the sheep are allowed to stay”: Isaac Davis to Keoni Ana, Misc. Box 146, Interior Department Record Unit, HSA; Steven C. Hess and Paul C. Banko, “Sheep vs. Palila on Mauna Kea: After 200 Years of Habitat Damage, Can Native Palila Recover?” Wildlife Professional (Fall 2011): 60–63. 58. “Forest Trees,” Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), Feb. 7, 1872. 59. Houck, “More Unfinished Stories,” 403. For details on the impact of feral herbivores on ma¯mane, see: Paul G. Scowcroft and Howard F. Sakai, “Impact of Feral Herbivores on Ma¯mane Forests of Mauna Kea, Hawaii: Bark Stripping and Diameter Class Structure,” Journal of Range Management 36, no. 4 (Jul. 1983): 495–498; and Hess and Banko, “Sheep vs. Palila on Mauna Kea,” 61. 60. “Ice cream”: “Planet Earth News: Sierra Club Lawsuit Against N.R.A.,” Mother Earth News, no. 114 (Nov./Dec. 1988); U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaiʻi, 649 F. Supp. 1070 (Dist. Haw., 1986), Section B, “The Sheep.” 61. Conant, “Fifty Years of SPAM (Science, Policy and Management): Reflections on Conservation in Hawaiʻi” (lecture, Hawaiʻi Conservation Conference, Aug. 2, 2012). 62. Tracey Heatherington, “From Ecocide to Genetic Rescue,” in The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death, ed. Genese Marie Sodikoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 44–47. 63. Houck, “More Unfinished Stories,” 407. For a broad overview of the ESA at its thirty-year anniversary, see David S. Wilcove and Margaret McMillan, “The Class of ’67,” in The Endangered Species Act at Thirty: Renewing the Conservation Promise, ed. Dale Goble, J. Michael Scott, and Frank W. Davis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006). 64. S. Henderson, “Evolution of PTA Palila Critical Habitat Rules,” compiled Dec. 2, 1999, http://www.malamamaunakea.org/library/reference/index/refid/ 747-evolution-of-pta-palila-critical-habitat-rules, accessed Dec. 7, 2016. 65. Houck’s article “More Unfinished Business,” on three environmental cases, provides good context for the legal actions and responses related to the Palila. There have also been other excellent law review and scholarly articles on the Palila litigation, most notably Zeigler, “Palila, People, and Politics,” 245–292.

276

Notes to Pages 162–168

66. Oliver Houck, pers. comm., Aug. 14, 2015. 67. Ibid. 68. Michael Sherwood, “An Endangered Hawaiian Bird: The Palila (1975–1988),” unpub. memoir, ca. 2013. 69. Richard E. Warner, “A Forest Dies on Mauna Kea: How Feral Sheep Are Destroying an Hawaiian Woodland,” Pacific Discovery 13 (1960): 6–14; Houck, “More Unfinished Stories,” various places; Tom Turner, “Saving a Honeycreeper,” Defenders 65 (1990): 10–15; and Turner, “Palila versus N.R.A,” Mother Earth News 114 (1988): 126. 70. At the federal level, codification of multiple land use for conservation purposes has occurred via the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960 and the Forest Reserve Management Acts of 1974 and 1976. For a useful view of the difficulties of the multiple use approach in Hawaiʻi, see J. O. and S. P. Juvik, “Mauna Kea and the Myth of Multiple Use: Endangered Species and Mountain Management in Hawaii,” Mountain Research and Development 4, no. 3 (1984): 191–202. Also see the section “Inappropriateness of Multiple Use Approach” in U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaiʻi, 649 F. Supp. 1070 (Dist. Haw., 1986). 71. Michael Sherwood, pers. comm., Nov. 21, 2015, and unpub. memoir. 72. Houck, “More Unfinished Stories,” 412, and Sherwood, pers. comm., Nov. 21, 2015. 73. Sherwood, pers. comm., Nov. 21, 2015. 74. John G. Sidle and David B. Bowman, “Habitat Protection under the Endangered Species Act,” Conservation Biology 2, no. 1 (Mar. 1988): 116–118. 75. Mike Sherwood memo accompanying report “17th Status Report from Palila v. Hawaii Department of Natural Resources,” Scott Collection, Box 13, Folder 10, HEHL. 76. King observation: Hess and Banko, “Sheep vs. Palila on Mauna Kea,” 63. Other details from Jon G. Giffin, “Ecology of the Mouflon Sheep on Mauna Kea,” Pittmann-Robertson Project No. W-17-R, Study No. R-III, 1975–1979 (State of Hawaiʻi: Department of Land and Natural Resources, Division of Forestry and Wildlife). Also see: http://dlnr.hawaii.gov/restoremaunakea/home/ threats/, accessed Jul. 28, 2015. 77. Banko, pers. comm., Nov. 20, 2016. The project concluded in 2014 with the completion of the final report: Paul C. Banko and Chris Farmer, eds., Palila Restoration Research, 1996–2012. Degener quote about orgies and conservation: Otto Degener, “Help Save the Dwindling Endemic Flora of the Hawaiian Islands at Least as Herbarium Specimens for Museums of the World,” Phytologia 37, no. 4 (1977): 284. 78. Palila v. Hawaiʻi Dept. of Land and Nat. Resources, 73 F. Supp. 2d 1181 (Dist. Haw., 1999); Sherwood, pers. comm., Nov. 21, 2015.

Notes to Pages 169–179

277

79. Sherwood, unpub. memoir, ca. 2013. 80. Houck, pers. comm., Mar. 1, 2017. 81. Hess and Banko, “Sheep vs. Palila on Mauna Kea,” 60. 82. Steven C. Hess, “Wild Sheep and Deer in Hawaiʻi—A Threat to Fragile Ecosystems,” USGS Fact Sheet 2008–3102 (Feb. 2008). 83. María Valeria Berros, “El Estatuto Jurídico de la Naturaleza en Debate (Meulen en el Mundo del Derecho),” Revista de Derecho Ambiental, no. 36 (Dec. 2013). 84. See, for example, Eben H. Paxton et al., “Keeping Hawaiʻi’s Forest Birds One Step Ahead of Avian Diseases in a Warming World: A Focus on Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge,” in A Case Study from the Structured Decision Making Workshop, Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, Feb. 28–Mar. 4, 2011. 85. Mike Scott on lack of will to resolve conservation problems: Scott, pers. comm., Mar. 11, 2016. Funds held by treasurer: HSA BAF Corr Birds Gen 1917–1927, Box COM2–14. 86. Peter Stine, “Environmental Assessment: Proposal to Establish an Upper Hakalau National Wildlife Reserve” (Honolulu: Department of the Interior), draft, Mike Scott Papers, HEHL. “Biologic vandalism”: Otto Degener, “Save the Palila,” Honolulu Advertiser (Honolulu), Apr. 5, 1977. 87. An excellent overview of these practical conservation difficulties is David L. Leonard, Jr., “Social and Political Obstacles to Saving Hawaiian Birds: Realities and Remedies,” in Conservation Biology of Hawaiian Forest Birds, ed. Thane Pratt et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 533–551. 88. David J. Flaspohler, “In Hakalau, a Modern Success Story,” New York Times, Jun. 6, 2012. 89. Charles van Riper III, “The Use of Sheep Wool in Nest Construction by Hawaiian Birds,” Auk 94, no. 4 (Oct. 1977): 646–651. Van Riper notes that the Palila was one of three species studied between 1969 and 1975 that used wool extensively in their nests: “The Use of Sheep Wool,” 648. 90. Banko, pers. comm., Nov. 20, 2016.

Chapter 4. Becoming Endemic 1. Clare E. Aslan, Erika S. Zavaleta, Bernie Tershy, Don Croll, and Robert H. Robichaux, “Imperfect Replacement of Native Species by Non-Native Species as Pollinators of Endemic Hawaiian Plants,” Conservation Biology 28, no. 2 (2014): 478–488. 2. Sincock to Erickson, Jul. 19, 1968, Scott Papers, HEHL. One naturalist who spent several weeks doing an informal survey of the birds of Kauaʻi in 1936 and

278

Notes to Pages 180–183

then again in 1940 reported this in his second report: “Interesting note among the Exotic list is the great increase of Mejiros since 1936, when only one was heard by the writer. They have literally overrun the island, ranging everywhere, excepting in the Alakai Swamp, into which they seemingly haven’t penetrated.” Walter Donaghho, “A Report of Ornithological Observations Made on Kauai,” Elepaio 2, no. 7 (1940): 52. Sincock’s experience showed that in the space of barely twenty years, they had moved into new territory in dramatic fashion. Finally, one of the most obscure but best pieces on the White-eye’s natural history, and especially its nesting habits, is by Sandra J. Guest, “A Reproductive Biology and Natural History of the Japanese White Eye (Zosterops japonica japonica) in Urban Oahu,” Technical Report No. 29, Island Systems IRP, U.S. International Biological Program, Sept. 1973. 3. Glenn M. Grasso, “What Appeared Limitless Plenty: The Rise and Fall of the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Halibut Fishery,” Environmental History 13, no. 1 (2008): 66–91. 4. Bryan Walsh, “Invasive Species: Not Always the Enemy,” Time, May 29, 2014. Also see Mark A. Davis et al., “Don’t Judge Species on Their Origins,” Nature 474, no. 7350 (Jun. 9, 2011): 153–154. 5. Albert F. Judd to BCAF, Aug. 9, 1938, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1932–1941, Box COM2–16. White-eye eating insects: Munro, Birds of Hawaii, 171. John d’Arcy Northwood, Familiar Hawaiian Birds (Honolulu: Thomas Nickerson, 1940), 47. 6. “This is the best for import”: Nagamichi Kuroda to David T. Fullaway, Dec. 12, 1926, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14; unhesitatingly recommended: Joseph L. Dwight to Paul G. Redington, Sept. 14, 1928, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927–1928, Box COM2–16. 7. Redington to J. L. Dwight, Oct. 27, 1928, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927– 1928, Box COM2–16; White-eye “suitable for our conditions and needs”: Fullaway to commissioners, Mar. 21, 1929; and Fullaway to commissioners, Oct. 24, 1929, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927–1928, Box COM2–16. Release details of White-eye (this letter notes, some months after the fact, that “this bird was liberated on Oahu about a year ago, at the H.S.P.A. Arboretum in Manoa. Individuals have been seen and heard from time to time”): HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1929–1931, Box COM2–16. 8. Hui buys twenty birds: receipt from Dwight, Aug. 18, 1930, HSA BAF Corr George Brown, 1925–1932, Birds Import of 1926, Box COM2–12; “so happy to have their freedom”: L. A. Whitney to J. L. Dwight, Jan. 17, 1931, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1929–1931, Box COM2–16. White-eyes “now seen in vast numbers”: “Importation of Birds of the Hui Manu,” HSA Hui

Notes to Pages 184–186

279

Manu M465 Box 1 Bird Release Rpts. White-eyes “so happy to have their freedom”: undated but ca. late 1930, HSA M465, Box 1, Folder 3, Minutes 1930–1943. 9. “Correct a blunder by a crime”: Thomas R. Dunlap, “Remaking the Land: The Acclimatization Movement and Anglo Ideas of Nature,” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 303–319. Hotspur and sparrows: Robert M. Myers, “Crane’s City: An Ecocritical Reading of Maggie,” American Literary Realism 47, no. 3 (2015): 189. Also see David N. Livingstone, “Human Acclimatization: Perspectives on a Contested Field of Inquiry in Science, Medicine and Geography,” History of Science 25, no. 4 (1987): 359–394. Livingstone considers efforts at acclimatization in the nineteenth century, and even earlier, to be “scientific,” but in the case of the Hui Manu, at least, there was nothing particularly scientific to their approach, as ideology and breezy desire—and lack of scientific expertise among their officers—usually trumped any truly systematic investigations into the potential impacts of bird importations. New Zealand translocations are usefully covered in Joan Druett, Exotic Intruders: The Introduction of Plants and Animals into New Zealand (Auckland: Heinemann, 1983); the French group is described in Michael A. Osborne, “The Société Zoologique D’acclimatation and the New French Empire: Science and Political Economy,” in Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion ed. Patrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami, and Anne Marie Moulin, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 136 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 299–306; another essential piece focusing on France and England is Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science,” Osiris, ser. 2, vol. 15, Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise (2000): 135–151. Also useful is Christopher Lever, They Dined on Eland: The Story of the Acclimatisation Societies (London: Quiller Press, 1992). 10. Record-keeping: Edward L. Caum, “The Exotic Birds of Hawaii,” Occasional Papers 10, no. 9 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1933): 3–50; “Need more songsters”: Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), Aug. 6, 1860; Kramer quoting Sutton about song of Slate-Colored Solitaire: HSA M465, Box 2, Bird Importation 1963–1967. 11. “Almost universal absence of singing-birds”: George Washington Bates, Sandwich Island Notes (New York: Harper and Bros., 1854), 273; “I have seen few varieties of birds”: Helen Mather, One Summer in Hawaii (New York: Cassell Publishing Co., 1891), 50–51. 12. Introduction of first “exotic”: Stanley A. Temple, “Exotic Birds: A Growing Problem with No Easy Solution,” Auk 109, no. 2 (1992): 395–397. “Degraded

280

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

Notes to Pages 187–192

nation”: R. Armstrong, Robert Crichton Wyllie, L. Chamberlain, and Samuel Northrup Castle, Answers to Questions Proposed by His Excellency, R. C. Wyllie, His Hawaiian Majesty’s Minister of Foreign Relations, and Addressed to All the Missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands, May, 1846, Hawaii Dept. of Foreign Affairs (1848), 94; birds “very wild and uncivilized”: Charles Bishop to Edward Walsworth, Nov. 13, 1858, Walsworth Papers, call no. WW14, HEHL; newspaper account of species sent by Walsworth: Polynesian (Honolulu), Apr. 9, 1859, 2. Ke Au Okoa (Honolulu), Jun. 29, 1871. Henshaw to Brewster, Nov. 20, 1900, MCZ (Harvard). “Sad, sad, sad”: Newton to Perkins, Apr. 24, 1896, BPBM. Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), Jul. 3, 1904. L. W. Haworth, “Stand Together,” Hilo Tribune (Hilo), Apr. 25, 1902. Ties to Kilohana Art League: Hawaiian Star (Honolulu), Jan. 21, 1912; and Evening Bulletin (Honolulu), Feb. 10, 1912; Outdoor Circle’s initial purpose: Hawaiian Star (Honolulu), Jan. 20, 1912; description of early meeting at Lowrey residence: ibid., May 11, 1912. Membership and billboards: Honolulu Star-Bulletin (Honolulu), Nov. 17, 1916; bird importations: Ellen Fullard-Leo to A. L. C. Atkinson, Sept. 1, 1920, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. Atkinson to Fullard-Leo, Sept. 24, 1920, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, “Harmful Non-Indigenous Species in the United States,” OTA-F-565 (Sept. 1993), 242; and C. E. Pemberton, “Highlights in the History of Entomology in Hawaii 1778–1963,” Pacific Insects 6, no. 4 (1964): 707. Brown and Governor golf buddies: Vernon D. Shutte to George Brown, Feb. 8, 1930, HSA BAF Corr Gen 1927–1932, Box COM2–12. Brown was also educated on the mainland, attending Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and then Burdett Business College in Boston. Early days of the commission: First Report of the Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry of the Territory of Hawaii (Honolulu: Bishop Publishing Co., 1905), 4, 12. For a mix of correspondence and reprinted copies of legislation, see unnumbered pages 11–15 of the folder HAS BAF Corr George Brown, 1925–1932, Birds Import of 1926, Box COM2–12. Finding aid: Territory of Hawaii, Board of Agriculture & Forestry, 1903–1959, HSA. Ordinance being passed: Evening Bulletin (Honolulu), Sept. 12, 1910; E. W. Nelson to Ehrhorn, Aug. 20, 1919, HSA BAF Corr Birds Gen 1917–1927, Box COM2–14.

Notes to Pages 192–201

281

25. Details of Game Farm activities: Report of the Governor of Hawaii to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1928); Brown to Samuel Spencer, Chairman, Board of Supervisors, Hilo, Feb. 5, 1930; and Vernon D. Shutte to Brown, Aug. 7, 1930, HSA BAF Corr Gen 1927–1932, Box COM2–12; H. L. Kelly to Commissioners, Apr. 16, 1930, HSA BAF Corr Gen 1927–1942, Box COM2–15. 26. For a typical letter from the commission offering support to the Hui, see George Brown to Mrs. Frederick Lowrey, Jul. 2, 1930, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1929–1931, Box COM2–16. 27. Lindsley Austin to Board of Commissioners, Dec. 23, 1938, HSA BAF Corr Gen 1932–1940, Box COM2–15. 28. A. R. Grammer, A History of the Experiment Station of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, 1895–1945 (Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association [hereafter HSPA], 1947). 29. Memorandum and draft memorandum, Commission to Governor Lawrence M. Judd, n.d. but Jan. 1930, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1929–1931, Box COM2–16. “Birds or Starvation,” Farm Journal, Apr. 1923; Farm Journal circulation statistics: Ayer Directory of Publications (Philadelphia: Ayer Press, 1927). 30. Perkins, “The War on Pests: Perkins Explains Work of Entomology Division,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), Mar. 18, 1904; D. T. Fleming to George Iʻi Brown, May 11, 1926, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. Information on Fleming’s background from 1930 U.S. Federal Census, Lahaina, Maui. 31. Draft report, apparently unpublished, “Introduced Birds of Hawaii,” Mar. 20, 1930, HSA M465 Box 2 Bird Import 1930–1955. 32. Edward M. Ehrhorn to Charles S. Judd, Feb. 14, 1926, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. 33. Fullaway handling bird matters: Charles S. Judd to Clinton S. Childs, Jul. 11, 1927; “extreme caution”: J. L. Dwight to Fullaway, Nov. 17, 1927; Panama bird introductions: Fullaway to BCAF, Aug. 28, 1924; “. . . do the needful”: Harry Baldwin to C. S. Judd, Apr. 27, 1926; all HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. 34. Fullaway to BCAF, Mar. 23, 1922; “Squaring accounts”: Frederick A. G. Muir to H. P. Agee, Nov. 10, 1921; both HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. 35. C. S. Judd to BCAF, Nov. 7, 1927, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927–1928, Box COM2–16. 36. Bruce Cartwright to George Iʻi Brown, Nov. 18, 1927, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927–1928, Box COM2–16.

282

Notes to Pages 201–208

37. Lewis, Feathery Tribe, 265. 38. Importing Formosa Crow: Muir to head of HFAB, May 25, 1915; “Much as I personally love wild birds”: Muir to Director, Experiment Station, HSPA, Oct. 31, 1924; both HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. 39. Caum and Ehrhorn to Charles S. Judd, Nov. 6, 1924, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. 40. Muir to Agee, May 20, 1926, HSA BAF Corr George Brown, 1925–1932, Birds Import of 1926, Box COM2–12. 41. Ibid. 42. Francis X. Williams to H. P. Agee, Nov. 3, 1924, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. 43. Joseph Grinnell to David T. Fullaway, Jul. 7, 1921, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. Grinnell as leader of doctoral dissertations about birds: Lewis, Feathery Tribe, 265–266. 44. Fullaway to Cyril E. Pemberton, Feb. 13, 1922, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. Shepherd’s Companion briefly established: John L. Long, Introduced Birds of the World: The Worldwide History, Distribution and Influence of Birds Introduced to New Environments (Sydney, Australia: Reed Publishing, 1981), 325. 45. Redington to Cartwright, Jan. 11, 1928, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927–1928, COM2–16, HSA. 46. Bruce Cartwright to George Brown, Oct. 18, 1927, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927–1928, Box COM2–16. 47. Proposals for bird importations: China, David T. Fleming to BCAF, Dec. 27, 1920; Australia, Fullaway to Judd, Jan. 21, 1922; England, Judd to Perkins, May 13, 1922; Fiji, Swezey to Director, HSPA, Oct. 31, 1924; Philippines, Fullaway to BCAF, Aug. 28, 1924; all HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14; India, E. H. Lewis to Mrs. Alfred [Ethelinda] L. Castle, Feb. 12, 1939; Mexico, Ansel W. Robison to President, Hui Manu, Aug. 22, 1941, and C. G. Carter to Robison, Mar. 14, 1946; all HSA M465 Box 2 Bird Import 1930– 1955. “They will not be injurious in any way”: Arthur A. Wilder to Arthur H. Rice, Jan. 27, 1915, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. Wilder was a judge on the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court. 48. $50,000 damage from cutworms to Parker Ranch: David T. Fullaway to “Gentlemen,” BCAF, May 11, 1922, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. 49. “Not under any circumstances”: Caum to Dwight, Aug. 9, 1928, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927–1928, Box COM2–16; Fisher warning against

Notes to Pages 208–211

50.

51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

56.

57.

283

importation: HSA BAF Corr George Brown, 1925–1932, Birds Import of 1926, Box COM2–12. Ehrhorn citing Henshaw’s report on “any of the small spotted woodpeckers” OK for import: Ehrhorn to George Brown, Mar. 13, 1926; Perkins expresses concern in a letter of July 14, 1922, about woodpeckers (“I should be very careful in the matter of introducing forest birds, especially anything of the woodpecker lot”). For these two items from Ehrhorn and Perkins, as well as Fleming correspondence on a variety of importation matters, see HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. Chachalaca intro misstep: Dwight to L. W. Bryan, Dec. 2, 1927, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927–1928, Box COM2–16. “Understanding of the Commissioners”: Charles S. Judd to Harry A. Baldwin, Apr. 30, 1926; distribution of Leiothrix: Harry A. Baldwin to Charles S. Judd, May 15, 1926; both HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14. Baldwin notes that he’d gotten one batch of a hundred birds through Ehrhorn from China, and he also tried to translocate birds from one island to another. White-eye not very susceptible: Carter Atkinson, pers. comm., Nov. 29, 2016; also see Michael D. Samuel et al., “The Dynamics, Transmission, and Population Impacts of Avian Malaria in Native Hawaiian Birds: A Modeling Approach,” Ecological Applications 21, no. 8 (2011): 2960–2973. Wetmore to J. L. Dwight, Dec. 7, 1927, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927–1928, Box COM2–16. Wetmore to J. L. Dwight, Jan. 17, 1928 ([sic]; probably 1929), HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1927–1928, Box COM2–16; Redington to Wetmore, Dec. 19, 1928, ibid. Brown to Charles Lucas, Jan. 24, 1928, and Brown to Ronald von Holt, Apr. 17, 1928, HSA BAF Corr Gen 1927–1932, Box COM2–12. The Hui Manu’s later work with the Ne¯ne¯ continued to impress even as its own importation efforts dwindled. By the spring of 1964 the group had raised more than $2,200 for its Noah’s Ark Ne¯ne¯ Fund; the funds also covered the expenses of bringing a flock of Ne¯ne¯ from the Big Island to Slimbridge, England, in the early 1950s. See HSA BAF Corr Gen 1927–1932, Box COM2–12, as well as Janet Kear and Andrew J. Berger, The Hawaiian Goose (Vermillion: Buteo Books, 1980), Chapter 4. Although at least one source has noted that the term “Hui Manu” is erroneously used and means “group of birds,” Hawaiian linguist Puakea Nogelmeier told me that the term is accurate to describe a club or group, as compared to a flock of birds (ʻauna manu). Nogelmeier, pers. comm., Nov. 18, 2015. Plan to “revivify forests”: Josephine Campbell, “Our Objectives,” Sept. 26, 1930, HSA M465 Box 2 Gen Corresp 1930–62.

284

Notes to Pages 211–222

58. Ibid. 59. Hui Manu formed with encouragement and help of BCAF: Outdoor Circle Annual Report, 1926–1931, 12. 60. Suggestion by Langton-Boyle to start importing birds: ibid. 61. Hui Manu Minutes, Mar. 21, 1930, HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 1 Folder 3, Minutes 1930–1954. 62. Josephine L. Campbell, Sept. 26, 1930, HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 2 Gen Corresp 1930–1962. 63. Hui Manu minutes, Mar. 25, 1931, HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 1 Folder 3, Minutes 1930–1954. 64. “It was decided”: Hui Manu minutes, Apr. 8, 1930; “eager to take”: Josephine L. Campbell, Sept. 26, 1930; both HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 2 Gen Corresp 1930–62. 65. Local radio station: Lever, They Dined on Eland, 189; Hui goals: Mar. 10, 1930, HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 1 Folder 3, Minutes 1930–1954. 66. Membership numbers: ibid. 67. Mrs. George P. Cooke to Mrs. Alfred L. [Ethelinda] Castle, Oct. 18, 1943, HSA M465 Box 2 Bird Import 1930–1955. 68. E. H. Lewis to Mrs. Alfred L. [Ethelinda] Castle, Apr. 29, 1939, HSA M465 Box 2 Bird Import 1930–1955. 69. Robison to E. W. Peterson, Sept. 24, 1941; and C. G. Carter to Robison, Mar. 14, 1946; both HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 2 Bird Import 1930–1955. 70. C. G. Carter to Robison, Mar. 14, 1946, HSA M465 Box 2 Bird Import 1930–1955. 71. Robison to Peterson, Oct. 9, 1941; and Carter to Robison, Mar. 14, 1946; both HSA M465 Box 2 Bird Import 1930–1955. 72. Lever, They Dined on Eland, 189. 73. Hazel Peppin, “Exotic Birds of Hawaii,” Elepaio 4, no. 6 (Dec. 1943): 25. 74. George Laycock, Alien Animals: The Story of Imported Wildlife (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 111ff; Ke Au Okoa (Honolulu), Oct. 2, 1865, 2. 75. Munro diary, Dec. 21, 1890, MS SC Munro / Acc. 1975.193, Box 1.1, BPBM; Hillebrand: “German Doctor’s Botanical Legacy Still Thrives,” Honolulu Advertiser (Honolulu), May 6, 2005. 76. Edward L. Caum to George Iʻi Brown, memo, Feb. 11, 1926, HSA BAF Corr George Brown, 1925–1932, Birds Import of 1926, Box COM2–12. 77. The Independent (Honolulu), Aug. 14, 1902, 1. 78. Devastation caused by mynas: Newton to Perkins, Apr. 30, 1892, BPBM; shearwaters and mynahs: Sincock to Ray Erickson, Jun. 26, 1978, Scott Papers, HEHL; hotels and mynas: Laycock, Alien Animals, 111.

Notes to Pages 222–228

285

79. A. J. Baker and A. Moeed, “Rapid Genetic Differentiation and Founder Effect in Colonizing Populations of Common Mynas (Acridotheres tristis),” Evolution 41 (1987): 525–538; and R. C. Fleischer, R. N. Williams, and A. J. Baker, “Genetic Variation Within and Among Populations of the Common Myna Acridotheres tristis in Hawaii,” Journal of Heredity 82 (1991): 205–208. 80. Newton to Perkins, Jan. 17, 1896, BPBM. 81. Daniel Simberloff, Invasive Species: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 109. 82. “There is always the chance”: Grinnell to Albert Casey Wood, Sept. 1, 1923, B-W; house sparrow differentiation: R. F. Johnson and R. K. Selander, “House Sparrows: Rapid Evolution of Races in North America,” Science 144 (May 1, 1944): 548–550; and Hubert Fringa, “Hawaii’s Own House Sparrow,” Elepaio 25, no. 3 (Sept. 1964): 13–15. 83. Sam Gon, pers. comm., Dec. 6, 2016. 84. Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), Sept. 6, 1873, 3; mockingbird release briefly detailed in Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), Jul. 2, 1897; followup query asking if anyone has seen them alive: Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), Jul. 4, 1897; Marsden receives birds: Evening Bulletin (Honolulu), Jul. 2, 1897; Pfluger returning to Hawaiʻi: Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), Nov. 12, 1897. 85. Perkins: Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), Feb. 11, 1896. 86. Mockingbird would combat insects: Maui News (Wailuku), Nov. 16, 1901; mockingbird can acquire love and goodwill of humans: Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu), Jul. 2, 1897. 87. Brown to Lowrey, Jul. 2, 1930, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1929–1931, Box COM2–16. 88. “Another factor to consider”: Caum to Brown, Jun. 19, 1931; “It seems your request did the trick”: Brown to Lowrey, Jul. 2, 1931; both HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1929–1931, Box COM2–16. 89. “Ugly handmaidens”: James C. Greenway Jr., Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), 51; Mather, One Summer in Hawaii, 55. 90. Abundance of cats in forest: Newton to Perkins, Mar. 3, 1894, BPBM; droppings of cats: Munro diary, Dec. 6, 1891, BPBM. 91. I. A. E. Atkinson, “A Reassessment of Factors, Particularly Rattus Rattus L., That Influenced the Decline of Endemic Forest Birds in the Hawaiian Islands.” Pacific Science 31 (1977): 109–133. 92. 264 birds released: “Importation of Birds of the Hui Manu,” HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 1 Bird Release Rpts; results in 1937: “Recently Imported Birds: To What Extent Established.” Jun. 13, 1937, HSA M465 Box 2 Bird Import 1930–1955.

286

Notes to Pages 228–233

93. Flamingos from Cuba: Importation unanimously given the okay: Judd to Fullaway, Dec. 10, 1929, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import 1929–1931, Box COM2–16; also noted by Munro, Birds of Hawaii, 146. Release details: “Importation of Birds of the Hui Manu,” HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 1 Bird Release Rpts. Some of the species identifications are somewhat tentative because of the group’s fairly casual use of competing, and sometimes conflicting, common names, and it’s not always certain exactly to which species they’re referring. 94. Pale-headed Rosella in Hawaiʻi: Robert L. Pyle and Peter Pyle, The Birds of the Hawaiian Islands: Occurrence, History, Distribution, and Status (Honolulu: Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Dec. 31, 2009), version 1, Pale-Headed Rosella account: http://hbs.bishopmuseum.org/birds/rlp-monograph/pdfs/ 06-PTER-TIMA/PHRO.pdf, accessed Oct. 30, 2015. Also see Munro, Birds of Hawaii, 146–176. Varied Tit widespread in mountains of Kaua‘i: Judd to Ehrhorn, Apr. 20, 1926, HSA BAF Corr Birds Import of 1915–1927, Box COM2–14; Pyle and Pyle, Birds of the Hawaiian Islands, Varied Tit account: http://hbs.bishopmuseum.org/birds/rlp-monograph/pdfs/06-PTER-TIMA /VATI.pdf, accessed Oct. 30, 2015. 95. Jon S. Beadell et al., “Global Phylogeographic Limits of Hawaii’s Avian Malaria,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, Biological Sciences 273, no. 1604 (2006): 2935–2944, doi:10.1098/rspb.2006.3671; also Carter Atkinson, pers. comm., Nov. 29, 2016. 96. Children taking pledge: Honolulu Star-Bulletin (Honolulu), Jan. 8, 1952; Anita Hecht donating stock to Hui: Rick Habein, pers. comm., Jul. 3, 2016; Gary Urton, Animal Myths and Metaphors in South America (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985), 281. 97. Executive Board minutes, Apr. 3, 1957, HSA Hui Manu M465 Box 1 Folder Minutes 1954–1968. 98. Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (London: Staples Press Ltd., 1950), 95. 99. Postwar Hui membership numbers: Honolulu Advertiser (Honolulu), “Hui Manu Schedules Anniversary Meeting,” May 8, 1955, and Honolulu Star-Bulletin (Honolulu), “A Bird’s Best Friend Is Still a Hui Member,” May 2, 1962. Guamian Swiftlet release: Hui Manu Corresp Bird Importation, 1963–1967, HSA. 100. Paul M. Scheffer, “Exotic Non-Game Bird Introductions—Pro and Con,” Elepaio 29, no. 5 (Nov. 1968): 43. 101. No birds imported in 1955: Hui Manu minutes, May 12, 1955, in HSA M465, Minutes 1955–1958. For details on income and expenses, see HSA M465 Box 1 Folder 2 Treas. Rpts 1938–1968. 102. Michael Pollan, “Against Nativism,” New York Times, May 15, 1994.

Notes to Pages 233–240

287

103. I’ve gotten some of the questions posed here from a chapter by Jill Constantino, “Tortoise Soup for the Soul: Finding a Space for Human History in Evolution’s Laboratory,” in The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death, ed. Genese Marie Sodikoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 90. 104. Thom Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 127–128, 146; marsupials: Brett J. Stubbs, “From ‘Useless Brutes’ to National Treasures: A Century of Evolving Attitudes Towards Native Fauna in New South Wales, 1860s to 1960s,” Environment and History 7, no. 1 (Feb. 2001): 23–56. 105. Jon Mooallem, “Who’s Killing the Monk Seals?” New York Times, May 12, 2013, 33. 106. Clare Aslan, pers. comm., Jan. 6 and Jan. 25, 2014. 107. Liba Pejchar, “Introduced Birds Incompletely Replace Seed Dispersal by a Native Frugivore.” AoB Plants 7 (2015), doi:10.1093/aobpla/plv072. 108. E. Gering et al., “Mixed Ancestry and Admixture in Kauai’s Feral Chickens: Invasion of Domestic Genes into Ancient Red Junglefowl Reservoirs,” Molecular Ecology 24, no. 9 (May 2015): 2112–2124, doi:10.1111/mec.13096. 109. Frank E. Egler, “Indigene Versus Alien in the Development of Arid Hawaiian Vegetation.” Ecology 23, no. 1 (1942): 23. 110. Shannon Wianecki, “ʻElepaio Enduring,” Hana Hou! 19, no. 4 (Aug./Sept. 2016): 56–57; Eric A. VanderWerf, “Elepaio ‘Anting’ with a Garlic Snail and a Schinus Fruit,” Journal of Field Ornithology 76, no. 2 (2005): 134–137. 111. Storrs Olson, pers. comm., Nov. 29, 2011. 112. One-third diaspora: Rona Tamiko Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians: Native Identities and Cultural Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 247. Hawaiian Homes Commission Act land: Brittany Lyte, “Native Soil,” Atlantic, Sept. 25, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2016/09/native-soil/501419/, accessed Dec. 6, 2016. 113. Native Hawaiian Data Book 2015 (Honolulu: Office of Hawaiian Affairs), appendix, http://www.ohadatabook.com/fr_appendix.11.html, accessed Jun. 28, 2016; Susan Jaworowski, “Hawaiian Ethnographic Data: Ehia Ka¯naka Maoli? (How Many Hawaiians?),” Report no. 5, Legislative Reference Bureau, State of Hawaiʻi (Honolulu, 1998). 114. Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1982), 36. 115. “Grasping Hawaiianness”: Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians, xvi. 116. David A. Chang, The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

288

Notes to Pages 241–246

117. Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Hey, You Calling Me an Invasive Species?,” New York Times, Sept. 7, 2013. 118. Thomas L. Munden, Commentary, West Hawaii Today, Jul. 3, 2014: http:// westhawaiitoday.com/opinion/letters/most-invasive-species-homo-sapiens, accessed Jul. 3, 2014. 119. Tireless invigilator: Daniel Simberloff and William Boecklen, “Patterns of Extinction in the Introduced Hawaiian Avifauna: A Reexamination of the Role of Competition,” American Naturalist 138, no. 2 (Aug. 1991): 300–327. Leonard A. Freed and Rebecca Cann, “Problems with Hawaiian Forest Birds,” Jacobs Journal of Environmental Sciences 1, no. 2 (Aug. 2015): 7; Freed and Cann, “More Misleading Trend Analysis of Hawaiian Forest Birds,” Condor 115, no. 2 (May 2013): 442–447; Freed and Cann, “Misleading Trend Analysis and Decline of Hawaiian Forest Birds,” Condor 112, no. 2 (May 2010): 213–221; and Freed and Cann, “Negative Effects of an Introduced Bird Species on Growth and Survival in a Native Bird Community,” Current Biology 19, no. 2 (Sept. 17, 2009): 1736–1740, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.08.044, accessed Dec. 21, 2016. In support of stability in Hakalau NWR are Camp et al., “Hawaiian Forest Bird Trends: Using Log-Linear Models to Assess Long-Term Trends Is Supported by Model Diagnostics and Assumptions (Reply to Freed and Cann 2013),” Condor 116 (2014), 97–101; Richard J. Camp et al., “Population Trends of Forest Birds at Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, Hawaiʻi,” Condor 112, no. 2 (May 2010): 196–212; and Camp et al., “Passerine Bird Trends at Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, Hawaiʻi,” Hawaiʻi Comparative Studies Unit, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, Technical Report HCSU-011, Jan. 2009. Data set does not allow Freed to extrapolate: Mike Scott, pers. comm., Nov. 2, 2016. Examples of Hakalau avian abundance: Kevin W. Camp, P. Brinck, Marcos Gorresen, and Eben H. Paxton, “Evaluating Abundance and Trends in a Hawaiian Avian Community Using State-Space Analysis,” Bird Conservation International 26, no. 2 (2016): 225–242.

Epilogue 1. “Known-no-longers”: Natalie Angier, “New Creatures in an Age of Extinction,” New York Times, Jul. 25, 2009. 2. Mather, One Summer, iv. 3. The crisis is over: Stearns and Stearns, Watching, from the Edge of Extinction, 14; Robert J. Cabin, Restoring Paradise: Rethinking and Rebuilding Nature in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013), 196.

Notes to Pages 246–248

289

4. Fred Pearce, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature’s Salvation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 191. 5. Jedediah Purdy, “The New Nature,” Jan. 11, 2016, Boston Review. http://bostonreview.net/forum/jedediah-purdy-new-nature, accessed Jul. 20, 2017; “Painting the parlor”: H. Douglas Pratt and Jack Jeffrey, A Pocket Guide to Hawaiʻi’s Birds (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2013), 102; L. B. Fortini, A. E. Vorsino, F. A. Amidon, E. H. Paxton, and J. D. Jacobi, “Large-Scale Range Collapse of Hawaiian Forest Birds Under Climate Change and the Need for 21st Century Conservation Options,” PLoS ONE 10, no. 10 (2015), http:// journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0140389. Genetically modified mosquitoes: Michael Specter, “Can Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Save Hawaii’s Endangered Birds?” New Yorker, Sept. 9, 2016. 6. C. John Ralph, Steven G. Fancy, and Tim D. Male, “Demography of an Introduced Red-Billed Leiothrix Population in Hawaii.” Condor 100, no. 3 (1998): 472. 7. Wells, Certain Personal Matters, 179; “To keep every cog and wheel”: Leopold, Sand County Almanac (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 190. Also see Davis et al., “Don’t Judge Species on Their Origins,” 153–154.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. alkalinity, 20 alkaloids, 130 American Acclimatization Society, 184 American Ornithologists’ Union, 22, 101, 146 Ana, Keoni, 155 Anatidae, 17 Angier, Natalie, 11, 244 Anoectochilus sandvicensis (Hawai‘i Jewel-orchid), 227 Ant-Eating Woodpecker, 208 Anthropocene, 11, 41 anthuria, 227 ants, 144, 237 ‘A‘o (Newell’s Shearwater; Puffinus newelli), 37, 75–81, 83, 222, 231 ‘Apapane (Himatione sanguinea), 143–146, 150, 153, 214 Arista, Noelani, 5 Armillaria mellea (shoestring root rot), 57–58 Armstrong, Clarissa, 149 Ascension Island, 21, 35 Ascension Rail, 35 Asian Velvetleaf, 223 Aslan, Clare, 235–236 Atkinson, Alatau, 189 Atkinson, Carter, 116, 151, 209 Atkinson, Ian, 53 Atlantic Halibut, 180 Auk (journal), 22 Austin, Lindsley, 193

acclimatization societies (comfort societies), 183–184 Achille-Souques, Alexandre, 135 acidity, 20 Acridotheres tristis tristis (Common Myna), 91, 153, 185, 205, 216, 220–222, 223, 224, 227, 229 Ae‘o (Hawaiian Stilt), 222, 233 Agee, Hamilton P., 197, 203, 205 ‘ahinahina (Mauna Kea Silversword), 157 ahupua‘a, 46–47 Aidem, Joan, 26, 27 ‘A¯kepa, 116, 242 ‘Akialoa, 88 ‘Akiapo¯la¯‘au, 116 Akklimatisations-verein, 183 ‘Akohekohe (Crested Honeycreeper), 17 aku (bonito), 48 Alaka‘i Wilderness Preserve, 55, 65; ¯ ‘o¯ Japanese White-eye in, 179; Kauai ‘O spotted in, 53, 54, 62, 68, 88; remoteness and ruggedness of, 62–63, 69, 85, 108; vegetation in, 57, 58 ‘Alala¯ (Corvus hawaiiensis; Hawaiian Crow), 112, 138, 153, 175, 191, 233–234, 235, 241 Alaska, 36 albinism, 224 Alexander, William, 148 Alexander and Baldwin (sugar company), 194 ali‘i (high chief ), 47

291

292 Australia, 199, 207, 234, 244 Aves Hawaiienses (Wilson), 86, 100–101, 105–106, 135, 136, 150 avian malaria, 11, 45, 81, 150–151, 209, 229, 246 avian pox, 11, 45, 147, 150–151, 229 Avifauna of Laysan (Rothschild), 99, 101, 135, 146 Axis deer, 155 Baldwin, Harry, 198, 209 Baldwin, Paul H., 120–121, 137 Ballarat Fish Acclimatisation Society, 183 Ballieu, Marie, 132 Ballieu, Pierre-Étienne-Théodore, 132–134, 137, 141 banana poka, 179 bananas, 48, 49, 226 Banko, Paul, 65, 129, 131, 137–138, 151, 177 Banko, Winston, 64–65, 112, 113, 114, 137 Barber’s Point, 30 Barn Owl, 77–78, 231 bats, 13 beaks, 16, 18, 26, 33, 142 bees, 144, 180 beetles, 144, 176 belonging, 68–69, 154, 173–174, 222, 230, 233, 235, 238, 240, 244–245 Benson, Bruce, 62–63 Berenger, P., 132 Berger, Andrew, 163 Berry, Wendell, 244 Big Island, 26, 65, 74, 92, 117, 192, 209, 228; age of, 18; ahupua‘a on, 46; ‘Apapane on, 145; bird survey on, 114, 115; fire of 1901 on, 190; fossils on, 25; ¯ ‘o¯ on, 85, 86, 95, 133; Hawai‘i ‘O ¯ ‘o¯ on, Henshaw on, 102–109; Kauai ‘O 126; mongooses on, 223; mosquitoes on, 149–150, 151; nonnative species of, 121; Palila on, 3, 129–130, 139; plant diseases on, 58; sheep on, 155, 156, 194

Index biocontrol, 183 biodiversity, 4, 40–41, 248 Birchard, Bill, 117, 118 Bird-Banding (journal), 22 birdcalls, 56 Birds of Hawaii (Munro), 136 Birds of the Hawaiian Islands (Henshaw), 105 Bishop, Charles, 186 Bishop Museum, 26, 29, 66, 75, 122, 124, 135, 141, 163, 175 Black-faced Honeycreeper (Po‘o-uli), 115 Black Mamo (Drepanis funerea), 88, 123 Black-Necked Stilt, 222 Black Rat (House Rat; Rattus rattus; Roof Rat; Ship Rat), 227 Blacktail Wrasse (Thalassoma ballieui), 133 blood quantum laws, 238–240 Bloxham, Andrew, 56–57 Board of Agriculture and Forestry, 151 Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry (BCAF), 188–189, 199, 201, 225, 229; bird killing backed by, 230; expanding responsibilities of, 190–191, 192–193; false starts by, 208–209; game birds introduced by, 191–192, 242; Hui Manu backed by, 211–212; owls introduced by, 231; powerful connections of, 190, 194; survey proposal to, 120–121; tensions within, 189, 196–198, 210–211; White-eye introduced by, 178, 181, 183, 191 bones, 27, 29; clues from, 17, 19–20, 33; consumption of, 20–21; early discovery of, 23–25; of flying vs. flightless birds, 15–16; in igneous rock, 12; of rats, 39 bonito (aku), 48 Bottjer, David, 19 Bowles, John, 60, 66, 126, 179

Index Boynton, David, 61, 110 Brackenridge, Henry M., 44 Branta sandwichensis (Hawaiian Goose; Ne¯ne¯), 25, 153, 210–211, 232 Brazilian Cardinal, 215, 228 Brewster, William, 86, 95, 96, 97, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 123, 145, 153–154, 187 Brief History of the Hawaiian People (Alexander), 148 Bristle-Thighed Curlew, 147 British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), 90–91 Brodkorb, Pierce, 23 Brown, George Iʻi, 190, 196, 200, 208, 211, 212, 225–226 Browne, Thomas, 98 Brushtailed Rock Wallaby, 224 Bryan, William A., 77, 78, 112, 124 Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de, 143 Bulwer’s Petrel, 73 Bureau of Biological Survey, U.S., 182, 192, 197, 225–226 Burney, David, 18 Burr, Tim, 116 butterflies, 144, 180, 223–224 Cabanis, Jean Louis, 144 Cabin, Robert, 246 calcium carbonate, 20 Campbell, James, Estate, 82, 83 Campbell, Josephine, 211, 214 canary, 142 Cann, Rebecca, 242 Carson, Rachel, 230–231, 237, 244 Carter, Alfred W., 207 Carter, C. G., 218 Cartwright, Bruce, Jr., 200–201, 206–207 Casey, Tonnie, 115 Cassin, John, 56, 136 cassowary, 29 Castle, Ethelindo, 216

293 Castle and Cook (sugar company), 194, 213 caterpillars, 131, 207 cats, 124, 154, 228 cattle, 93, 155, 156, 172 Caum, Edward L., 197, 202–203, 207, 208, 221, 226 Caum, Mary, 197 Cayetano, Benjamin, 168 ¯ hi‘a wilt; Rapid ‘O ¯ hi‘a Ceratocystis wilt (‘O Death), 58 chachalacas, 208–209 Chamberlain, Levi, 148–149 charcoal, 20, 39 Chelonia mydas (Green Sea Turtle), 37 Chelychelynechen quassus (Turtle-Jawed Goose), 17 Chesser, Terry, 137 chickens, 37, 45, 236–237 Chinese people, 220, 224 Chinese Pheasants, 192 Chloridops kona (Kona Grosbeak), 139, 140 Christmas berry tree, 237 Christmas Shearwater, 72, 73 Cinnysis brasilianus (Van Hasselt’s Sunbird), 218 Civilian Conservation Corps, 193 Clapper rail, 180 Clarino (Slate-Colored Solitaire), 185, 231 Clark, William O., 25 climate change, 11, 131, 170–171, 246 Clinton, Bill, 7 cloning, 159 coconut palm, 144 coconuts, 48 Code of Zoological Nomenclature, 137 cohort senescence, 58 Colored Bunting, 228 comfort societies (acclimatization societies), 183–184 Common Hill Myna (Gracula religiosa), 220

294 Common Myna (Acridotheres tristis tristis), 91, 153, 185, 205, 216, 220–222, 223, 224, 227, 229 Conant, Sheila, 50, 59, 60, 61, 63, 70–76, 126, 158 Condor Research Station, 120 condors, 120 conservation, 50, 84, 75; challenges of, 125; changing ethic of, 45–46; government role in, 50; modern strategies of, 86; reverence for nature distinguished from, 43; of soil and water, 94. See also extinction Conservation Council for Hawai‘i, 29 Cook, James, 9, 10, 14, 143, 231 Cooke, Amos Starr, 149 Cooke, Sam, 117, 118 Cooke, Sophie, 216 Coris ballieui (Sand Wrasse), 133 Corvus hawaiiensis (‘Alala¯; Hawaiian Crow), 112, 138, 153, 175, 191, 233–234, 235, 241 Corvus impluviatus, 30 creationism, 30–31 Crested Honeycreeper (‘Akohekohe), 17 Cuba, 228 Culex quinquefasciatus (southern house mosquito), 149 cutworm (Peridroma saucia), 207 Cuvier, Georges, 33 Cydia plicata, 131 Dark-rumped petrel (Hawaiian petrel), 80 Darwin, Charles, 1, 5, 97, 123, 225 Davies, Theo, and Co., 194 Davis, Isaac Y., 155 Daws, Gavan, 240 Dayal Thrush, 228 DDT, 105 Degener, Otto, 168 Department of Forest and Wildlife, 158

Index Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR), 158, 163, 164–166, 167, 185, 241 Dermestes maculatus (hide beetle), 176 Diamond Head, 218 Dickey, Donald, 146–147 Dillingham, Louise Olga (Gaylord), 188, 213 Dillingham, Walter F., 188, 213 Doggett, Frank, 90, 92 dogs, 78 Dole, Sanford Ballard, 100, 190 Downy Woodpecker, 208 Drepanidinae, 143 Drepanis funerea (Black Mamo), 123 drought, 38, 46, 58, 131 ducks, 3, 14, 17, 86 Dunn, Charles M., 219–220 Dwight, Joseph, 182 Dysmorodrepanis munroi (Lana‘i Hookbill), 27, 91 Earthjustice (Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund), 162, 163, 168 Easter Island, 49 Eastman Kodak Company, 215 Ecological Indian, The (Krech), 44 eggs, 105 Egler, Frank E., 237 Ehrhorn, Edward, 197–198, 202–203, 204, 208 Ehrlich, Paul, 49, 244 ‘Elepaio, 74, 145, 186, 237 Endangered Species Act (ESA; 1973), 64, 112, 160–162, 165, 166, 168, 169 Endangered Species Preservation Act (ESPA; 1966), 64, 65, 128, 162 Endangered Wildlife Research Program, 64, 137 endemism, 2–3, 7, 37–38, 204, 232–233, 238–240, 244–245 England, 207

Index English Sparrow, 216 Environmental Protection Act (1970), 161 eolianite, 34 Erickson, Ray C., 64, 88, 110, 114 Erithacus akahige (Japanese Robin; Komadori), 228 erosion, 156 Estes, Jack, 120 Eurasian Bullfinch, 142 Eurasian fruit fly, 223 European Blackbird, 207–208 Evans, Arthur, 100, 139 Evenhuis, Neal, 149 evolution, 97, 222; as cascade, 50; causes of, 10–11; convergent, 265–265n53; creationism vs., 30–31; of flightless birds, 15–16; hunting and, 170 “Exotic Birds of Hawaii, The” (Caum), 197 extinction, 31–32, 93; avian pox and malaria linked to, 45; background rate of, 11, 41; bird collection insignificant to, 107; body size linked to, 16–17; complications of, 147; frequency of, 41; generative vs. regenerative, 3, 6; human indifference to, 5–6, 42; inexorability of, 6, 48; nineteenth-century view of, 123; before Western settlement, 9–10, 38, 41, 42, 49, 52. See also conservation; evolution Farm Journal, 195–196 Farrington, Wallace R., 213–214 Faulkner, William, 10, 51 feathers, 2, 13, 28, 39, 41, 47, 75, 143, 196, 216 ferns, 13, 18 Fijian Swallow, 205 Fiji Islands, 207, 223 Filipinos, 2 fire, 20, 38, 44, 154, 167, 190 Fire Tree (Myrica faya), 179 fish, 46, 49, 133

295 Fisher, Albert K., 208 flamingoes, 228 Flaspohler, David, 173 Fleming, David T., 196, 208 flies, 199 flight, skeletal structure and, 15–16 flowers, 226–227 Folding Cliffs, The (Merwin), 177 food sources, 6; of birds, 11, 16, 18, 35, 57, 126, 129–131, 144, 152, 179, 196, 198, 199; of humans, 41; of rats, 39; of sheep, 155, 167 Formosa Crow, 202 Fowler, Warde, 101 Freed, Leonard, 242 Freeth, George D., 146 French Frigate Shoals, 69 Freycinetia arborea (‘ie‘ie), 95 frogs, 187–188 Frohawk, Frederick William, 100, 101 Fullard-Leo, Ellen, 188–189 Fullaway, David, 182–183, 198, 199, 205–206, 207 Gairdner’s Woodpecker, 208 Galápagos Islands, 204 Gallirallus storrsolsoni (Huahine Rail), 30 Gallus gallus (Red Junglefowl), 186, 236–237 game birds, 191–193 gap analysis, 119–120 Gardner Pinnacles, 69–70 Gay, Francis, 84, 96 Gaylord (Dillingham), Louise Olga, 188, 213 geese, 17 genetic drift, 10 GIS (geographic information systems), 120 goats, 155, 163, 165 Golden-Winged Woodpecker, 208 Gomes, Noah, 47–48 Gon, Sam, 224

296 Gracula religiosa (Common Hill Myna), 220 Graevemeyer, Werner von, 77 granivores, 41 grass, 172, 180–181; fire risk and, 167; sheep consumption of, 155, 167 Greater ‘Amakihi, 95–96, 186 Greater Koa Finch, 142 Great Ma¯hele, 194 Green Sea Turtle (Chelonia mydas), 37 Gregory, Fred, 149 Gregory, Herbert, 123–124 Grey-headed Bullfinch, 142 Grinnell, Joseph, 205, 223 Guamian Swiftlet, 231–232 Hagemann, Molly, 175–176 Hairy Woodpecker, 208 Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, 116–117, 171, 172–173, 242 Haleakala¯ National Park, 121 Halehaha Stream, 57, 59, 87 Hall, Edwin O., 186 Hamakua District, 190, 228, 246 Hanalei, 83 Handbook of Birds of the World, 144 Handbook of the Insects and Other Invertebrates of Hawaiian Cane Fields (Williams), 204 Harcourt’s petrel, 80 Harter, Jack, 54, 69–70, 78, 79, 89–90 Hartert, Ernst, 76–77, 96–97, 99 Hawaiian Bog orchid (Platanthera holochila), 227 Hawaiian Crow (‘Alala¯; Corvus hawaiiensis), 112, 138, 153, 175, 191, 233–234, 235, 241 Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey (HFBS), 73, 112–122, 163, 172 Hawaiian Geographical Society, 23 Hawaiian Goose (Branta sandwichensis; Ne¯ne¯), 25, 153, 210–211, 232

Index Hawaiian Hawk (ʻIo; Buteo solitarius), 95, 191 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act (1921), 238, 239 Hawaiian Monk Seal (Neomonachus schauinslandi), 234–235 Hawaiian Natural History, Ecology, and Evolution (Ziegler), 36 Hawaiian Owl (Pueo), 222, 233 Hawaiian Petrel (Dark-rumped petrel), 80 Hawaiian Stilt (Ae‘o), 222, 233 Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association (HSPA), 25, 197, 201, 202, 204 Hawai‘i Audubon Society, 164, 167, 182, 219 Hawai‘i Creeper, 116 Hawai‘i Fish and Game Protective Association, 192 Hawai‘i Island Archery Club, 167 Hawai‘i Jewel-orchid (Anoectochilus sandvicensis), 227 ¯ ‘o¯ (Moho nobilis), 84–86, 95, Hawai‘i ‘O 133, 136 Hawai‘i Rifle Association, 167 Hawai‘i Sugar Planters Association, 182 Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, 151, 170 Hawai‘i Widelip orchid (Liparis hawaiensis), 227 Hawaiki, 36 Haworth, L. W., 187–188 Hecht, Anita, 229 heliconia, 227 Hemignathus lucidus Hanapepe (Kaua‘i Nukupu‘u), 60, 87 Henshaw, Henry W., 78, 90, 94–95, 112, 122, 123, 124, 126, 205, 208; ‘Apapane spotted by, 145; as autodidact, 201–202; on Big Island, 102–109, 111; coloration ¯ ‘o¯ described by, 95–96; Hawai‘i ‘O documented by, 85–86; ‘I ‘iwi spotted by, 145; introduced species viewed

Index by, 187; Newell’s Shearwater documented by, 76–77, 79; Perkins viewed by, 97; protection law drafted by, 153–154 Henson, Pamela, 28 Heraclitus, 237 herbivores, 14, 17 HFBS (Hawaiian Forest Bird Survey), 73, 112–122, 163, 172 Highland Finch, 142 Hillebrand, William, 220–221, 227 Hilo, 102–103 Hilo Gun Club, 192 Himatione fraithii (Laysan honeycreeper), 145–147, 198 Himatione sanguinea (‘Apapane), 143–146, 150, 153, 214 Hogue, Charles, 213 Honolulu Mejiro Club, 219 Horornis diphone (Japanese BushWarbler), 219, 228 Houck, Oliver, 160, 162, 169 House Finch, 153, 187, 191 House Rat (Black Rat; Rattus rattus; Roof Rat; Ship Rat), 227 House Sparrow, 153, 184, 223, 229 Huahine Rail (Gallirallus storrsolsoni), 30 Hui Manu, 7, 133, 151, 197, 207, 210, 216–220, 227–228, 247; Board of Commissioners linked to, 212; decline of, 231–232; educational initiatives of, 215, 229–230; founding of, 193, 211, 213; mainland views of, 230–231; powerful connections of, 188, 190, 194; songbirds favored by, 185, 212, 214, 216, 242; White-eye introduced by, 178–179, 183, 216 Huleia, 83 Hume, Julian, 32 hummingbirds, 219, 228 hunting, 21, 47, 154, 156–158, 166–170, 172, 191–194, 242

297 Hurricane Iniki, 56 Hwamei, 228 ibis, 26, 27, 139 Ibis (journal), 135 ‘ie‘ie (Freycinetia arborea), 95 igneous rock, 12 ‘I‘iwi, 145, 153, 186, 199, 214 ʻilima, 150 Imperial Russian Society for the Acclimatization of Animals and Plants, 184 India, 207 Indian tribes, 43–44 Indigo Bunting, 228 insects: avian control of, 7, 126, 131, 144, 152, 178, 179, 182, 184, 189, 196, 199–208; crops destroyed by, 189, 190, 191, 193–195; as disease carriers, 154; endangered, 41; Munro’s work on, 92; Perkins’s work with, 97, 98. See also individual species Institute of Biodiversity Conservation, 117 International Biological Program (IBP), 74 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 83, 180 invasive species, 241; defined, 7; humans as, 4, 42, 235, 241; as villains, 2 invertebrates, 113 ‘Iolani Palace, 188 irrigation, 46, 156, 158 Isenbeck, C., 145 Jacobi, Jim, 115, 116, 118 James, Frances C., 9 James, Helen, 17, 31–34, 41, 42, 109; Moa-nalo described by, 18–19; Pila’s Palila discovered by, 142; species documented by, 14, 20, 21, 25–26, 27, 29–30, 128 Japanese Bush-Warbler (Horornis diphone), 219, 228

298 Japanese Hill Robin, 228 Japanese people, 2 Japanese Robin (Erithacus akahige; Komadori), 228 Japanese White-eye (Zosterops japonicus, Mejiro), 3, 185, 209, 228; diet of, 179, 198; durability of, 237–238; introduction of, 178–179, 182–183, 191, 216; as pollinator, 235–236, 247; varying opinions of, 181–182, 220, 241–242 Jarves, James, 149–150 Java Plum, 199 Jeffrey, Jack, 116 Johnson, Bill, 80 Johnson, David, 213 Johnson, Oscar, 258n46 Judd, Albert F., 181, 198 Judd, Charles, 198, 199, 202, 204, 209, 212 Judd, Lawrence M., 194, 198, 213 Judd, Louise (Luquiens), 212 Kaho‘olawe, 18, 46 Kahuki, Oahu, 82 Kaiholena Valley, 91 Kalalau Trail, 110 Ka¯ma‘o, 60, 61, 191 Kamehameha I, the Great, king of the Hawaiian Islands, 152, 155 Kamehameha III, king of the Hawaiian Islands, 194 Ka Mo‘olelo Hawai‘i (Malo), 86–87 Kaneohe, 149 Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station, 34–35 kangaroo, 234 ka¯pili manu (bird hunting), 47 Kapiolani Park, 212 kapu system, 48 Kaua‘i, 26, 58, 78, 84, 108, 128, 192, 209, 228; bird survey on, 114, 115; conditions on, 68; feral chickens on, 236–237; hurricane damage to, 56;

Index Japanese White-eye introduced in, 183; Moa-nalo on, 17; mouflon sheep on, 155; Munro on, 66; Palila on, 139; parrots on, 229; Sincock on, 65, 69, 77, 79–80, 116 Kaua‘i National Wildlife Refuges, 56 Kaua‘i Nukupu‘u (Hemignathus lucidus Hanapepe), 60, 87 ¯ ‘o¯ (Moho braccatus), 3, 52, 60, 62, Kauai ‘O 84–85, 87, 110, 113, 116; extant specimens of, 122, 124; Sincock’s work with, 53–59, 63, 68–69, 88, 126, 128 Kawaihae, 155 Keahou Bird Conservation Center, 175 Kelly, Hercules, 192 Kepler, Cam, 65, 116, 118 Kepler, Kay, 73, 113 keystone species, 180 Kikuchi, Bill (Pila), 142 Kilauea Forest, 117 Kilauea Point, 222 Kı¯lauea Volcano, 103, 149–150 King, Sam, 163, 165, 167 King Kong Grosbeak, 142 Kirch, Patrick, 9, 36, 38 Klinkenborg, Verlyn, 241 Knudsen, Valdemar, 57, 65–66, 99 koa tree, 57, 172 Kohala Mountains, 228 Ko¯ke‘e Dam proposal, 88 Koko Head, 206, 228 ko¯lea (Pacific Golden-Plover; Pluvialis fulva), 13, 36–37, 193 Komadori (Erithacus akahige; Japanese Robin), 228 Kona district, 109, 133 Kona Grosbeak (Chloridops kona), 139, 142 konohini (overseers), 47 Ko‘olau range, 74 Korean peninsula, 178 Kosaka, Ernie, 70 Krakowski, Cynthia, 110

Index Krakowski, James, 110 Kramer, Raymond J., 185 Krech, Shepard, III, 43–44 Kridler, Eugene, 71, 82–90, 112, 113, 114, 122 Kridler, Paul, 112 Ku¯ka‘iau Ranch, 172 Kuroda, Nagamichi, 182–183 Lacey Act (1900), 153 Lahaina, 148 Lana‘i, 17, 18, 26, 91, 115 Lana‘i Company, 93 Lana‘i Hookbill (Dysmorodrepanis munroi), 27, 91 land clearing, 38–40, 43, 48, 231 Langton-Boyle, Elinor, 212 lantana, 179 Latham, John, 143 lava, 12, 14, 20, 172 lava tubes, 14, 34 Laysan Albatross, 69 Laysan Duck, 65 Laysan Finch, 65, 139, 142 Laysan Honeycreeper (Himatione fraithii), 145–147, 198 Laysan Islands, 69, 91–92, 101, 145–146 leafhopper, 194 Leeward Islands, 65, 69–70, 72–73, 83 Leiothrix lutea (Pekin Nightingale; Red-Billed Leiothrix), 121, 191, 204, 209, 216, 228, 236, 247 Leopold, Aldo, 128, 154, 182, 193, 248 Lesser Koa Finch, 142 Lesson, René, 57 Lewers and Dickson (lumber company), 213 Lewis, E. H., 218 lighting, 80 lightning, 20 Liliuokalani, queen of Hawaii, 85 Linduska, Joseph, 125–126 Lininger, Isobel, 64, 65

299 Liparis hawaiensis (Hawai‘i Widelip orchid), 227 lipids, 130 Lisianski Island, 146 Little, Henry, 116, 117–118 lizards, 37, 73, 92 Locey, Frank, 120–121 Lopez, Terry, 176 Lowrey, Frederick J., 188, 213 Lowrey, Maud Gregory, 188, 213, 226 Loxioides bailleui. See Palila mackerel scad (o¯pelu), 48 Majiro, 228 maka‘ainana (commoners), 47 Makaleha Mountains, 78 Makawili, 150 Makee, James, 228 ma¯lama‘a¯ina, 47 malaria, avian, 11, 45, 81, 150–151, 209, 229, 246 Malo, Davida, 86–87 ma¯mane (Sophora chrysophylla), 130–131, 151, 156, 157, 164, 166, 167, 169 mana (spirit), 5 mangoes, 226 Ma¯noa Falls, 73 Maoris, 50 Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), 161 Marsden, Joseph, 224 marsupials, 234 Martin, Paul, 44 Mather, Helen, 245 Maui, 17, 18, 26, 65, 76, 77, 78, 116, 150, 192, 209, 228; ahupua‘a on, 46; ‘Apapane on, 145; bird survey on, 115; sugar-cane cultivation on, 40 Maui Nui, 35 Maui Parrotbill, 175 Maui Rod and Gun Club, 192 Mauna Kea, 129, 139, 160, 165, 167, 168, 169, 172

300 Mauna Kea Silversword (‘ahinahina), 157 Mauritius, 223 McNeill, John, 38, 43 meadowlark, 210 Meek, John, 226 Mejiro (Japanese White-eye), 121 Merriam, Clinton Hart, 102, 103 Merwin, W. S., 177 Metrosideros polymorpha (‘o¯hi‘a lehua), 57, 144, 199 Mexico, 207, 231 mice, 231 Michener, James, 13 Miconia calvescens, 245–246 middens, 20, 34 migration, 13 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), 191 Mike the Mynah (Williams), 204–205 milkweed, 180 Miller, Alden, 205 millipedes, 237 Miloli‘i Valley, 110 Mimus polyglottos (Northern Mockingbird), 191, 224–226 Misito, 228 mites, 144 mockingbird, 191, 210, 216 ¯ ‘o¯ Moho braccatus. See Kauai ‘O Mohoidae, 53, 84 ¯ ‘o¯), 84–86, 95, Moho nobilis (Hawai‘i ‘O 133, 136 Moloka‘i, 17, 18, 26, 85, 115, 116, 126, 145, 209, 216, 228 Monarch Butterfly, 180, 223–224 Monarch Flycatcher, 74 mongoose, 12, 78, 85, 121, 124, 207, 223 Mooallem, Jon, 235 Mo‘omomi, 26 Mormons, 2 mosquitoes, 11, 12, 45, 143, 147–151, 209, 227, 246

Index moths, 131, 144 mouflon sheep (Ovis orientalis orientalis), 155–159, 163, 166, 168, 169, 174 Mount Waialeale, 62, 69, 84 Muir, Frederick, 200, 202, 203–204, 205 multiple land use, 163, 167–168 Munden, Tom, 241 Munro, Annie, 93 Munro, George Campbell, 24, 66, 96, 101, 103, 105, 107–108, 122, 123, 227; Common Myna described by, 221; extinctions witnessed by, 93; Hawai‘i ¯ ‘o¯ and, 95; Kauai ‘O ¯ ‘o¯ and, 54, 84, ‘O 85; Kona Grosbeak described by, 140–141; lesions noted by, 150–151; Palila described by, 129, 136, 139; Palmer and, 90–93, 98, 109; Perkins and, 98–99; reputation of, 91–92, 112; water and soil conservation studied by, 94 Munro, James, 93 Munro, Jean, 93 Munro, Ruby, 93 muskrat, 223 ¯ ma‘o), 191, 227 Myadestes obscurus (‘O Myanmar, 178 Myrica faya (Fire Tree), 179 myth, 5 Na Pali, 110 Narcissus Flycatcher, 228 National Audubon Society, 164, 167, 193, 232 National Environmental Policy Act (1969), 161 National Geographic, 28, 30, 54 nativeness, 2–3, 7, 37–38, 204, 232–233, 238–240, 244–245 Nature (journal), 30 Nature Conservancy (TNC), 52, 59–60, 116–119, 166 Necker Island, 73

Index Nelson, Edward W., 192 Ne¯ne¯ (Hawaiian Goose; Branta sandwichensis), 25, 153, 210–211, 232 Neomonachus schauinslandi (Hawaiian Monk Seal), 234–235 neoteny, 35–36 nests, 105, 174 Newell, Matthias, 77 Newell’s Shearwater (‘A‘o; Puffinus newelli), 37, 75–81, 83, 222, 231 Newton, Alfred, 86, 92, 140, 184, 187, 221–222, 227; anti-Semitism of, 98; as Darwinian, 97; extinction viewed by, 42, 52; mongooses decried by, 223; Perkins and, 104, 109, 123, 136; Wilson and, 100–101 New Zealand, 184 Nihoa Finch (Telespiza ultima), 65, 139, 142 Nihoa Island, 69, 71 Nihoa Millerbird, 65, 76 Ni‘ihau, 46, 84, 93 Niniko (Lowrey estate), 213 Niu Valley, 231 Nixon, Richard, 161 nomenclature, 25, 137, 228 Northern Cardinal, 191, 216, 228 Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos), 191, 224–226 Northern Spotted Owl, 162 Northwood, John D’Arcy, 182, 220 Nuttall Club of Ornithology, 101 Nuttall’s Woodpecker, 208 Nu‘uanu Valley, 213, 218 Oahu, 26, 30, 32, 65, 121, 192, 209, 218, 226, 228; ahupusa‘a on, 46; Moa-nalo ¯ ‘o¯ on, on, 17, 18; mosquitoes on, 149; ‘O 85, 126; Palila on, 139; Shallenberger’s survey of, 115, 116; sinkholes on, 34 O‘ahu ‘Elepaio, 74 O‘ahu Sugar Company, 188

301 Obama, Barack, 83 ‘o¯hi‘a lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha), 57, 144, 199 ‘o¯hi‘a tree, 56, 57–58, 126, 145 ¯ hi‘a wilt (Ceratocystis wilt; Rapid ‘O ¯ hi‘a ‘O Death), 58 Okinawa, 223 Olinda, 229 Oloma‘o, 191 Olson, Storrs Lovejoy, 17, 19, 24, 34, 35, 109, 138, 147, 245; academic background of, 22–23; bird names and, 25, 27, 30; extinction viewed by, 31–32, 41, 49; outspokenness of, 28; Pila’s Palila discovered by, 142; species documented by, 14, 20, 21, 22, 25–26, 27, 30, 128; Ziegler and, 28–29 ¯ ma‘o (Myadestes obscurus), 191, 227 ‘O One Summer in Hawaii (Mather), 245 Ono, Susumu, 164, 168–169 o¯pelu (mackerel scad), 48 Orange-breasted Bunting (Passerina leclancherii), 228 orchids, 227 Orton, James, 1 ¯ ‘u¯ (Psittirostra psittacea), 57, 58, 60, ‘O 134, 135, 141–142, 186 Oustalet, Émile, 133, 134–135, 137, 141 Outdoor Circle, 188–189, 211–212 Ovis orientalis orientalis (mouflon sheep), 155–159, 163, 166, 168, 169, 174 owls, 77–78, 162, 222, 231, 233 Pacific Golden-Plover (ko¯lea; pluvialis fulva), 13, 36–37, 193 Pahala (town), 25 pa¯hoehoe lava, 14 Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris), 218 Pale-Headed Rosella (Platycerus adscitus), 228–229 paleoenvironmental coring research, 39 paleontology, 19–20

302 Palila (Loxioides bailleui), 3, 65, 113, 114, 125, 159, 164, 194; Ballieu and, 133, 134, 135; on Big Island, 145; call of, 131; diet of, 129–131, 199; diseases of, 147–151; eggs and nest of, 136; Endangered Species Act and, 160–161; extensive knowledge of, 128; legal status of, 152–159, 161–175; life span of, 131; misidentification of, 140–142; naming and classification of, 129, 134–137; outlook for, 177; population of, 129; prehistoric range of, 139; restoration project for, 138; song of, 141 Palila v. Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources (1981), 161–162 Palmer, Henry C., 77, 105, 122, 135; Munro and, 90–93, 98, 109; natives viewed by, 96–97; Palila and, 139; suicide of, 99 palynology, 20 Papaha¯naumokua¯kea Marine National Monument, 83 Paradise of the Pacific (magazine), 212 parasitic wasps, 131, 138 Parker Ranch, 207 parrots, 229 Parus varius (Varied Tit), 229 Passenger Pigeon, 179–180, 244 Passerina leclancherii (Orange-breasted Bunting), 228 passerines, 66, 134, 151, 191, 192 Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, 53, 54, 61, 64, 65, 68, 109 Pearl Harbor, 83 Pekin Nightingale (Leiothrix lutea; Red-Billed Leiothrix), 121, 191, 204, 209, 216, 228, 236, 247 Pemberton, Cyril, 205 Penal Code of the Hawaiian Kingdom (1859), 152 Penukahi, T. N., 186–187 Percina tanasi (snail darter), 166

Index peregrine falcons, 105 Peridroma saucia (cutworm), 207 Perkins, Robert Cyril Layton, 42, 77, 86, 92, 105, 109, 112, 122, 123, 136, 187, 189, 208, 221, 223, 227; Henshaw recalled by, 103–104; insect pests viewed by, 196; leafhopper identified by, 194; mockingbirds described by, 224–225; Moloka‘i recalled by, 97; Munro and, 98–99; Palila misidentified by, 139–140; protection laws viewed by, 153–154; Sandwich Islands Committee work of, 90–91; Sincock likened to, 63; Wilson and, 100–101 Perkinsiella saccharicida (sugar cane leafhopper), 189–190 pesticides, 105 Peterson, E. W., 219 Peterson, Roger Tory, 60 petrels, 72–73, 80 petroglyphs, 45 Pfluger, C. F., 224 Philippines, 207 phosphate, 146 pigs, 37, 45, 234, 241 Pila’s Palila, 128, 142 Pimm, Stuart, 11 pineapples, 226 Pitman, Benjamin, 150 Pitman House (Volcano House), 150 plant life, 113, 133, 226–227, 248 Plasmodiae, 147 Plasmodium relictum, 151 Platanthera holochila (Hawaiian Bog orchid), 227 Platycerus adscitus (Pale-Headed Rosella), 228–229 plumeria, 227 pluvialis fulva (Pacific Golden-Plover; ko¯lea), 13, 36–37, 193 Pohakuloa Training Area, 160–161 Pollan, Michael, 233

Index pollen, pollination, 7, 20, 39, 144, 179, 235–236 Polynesian (newspaper), 149–150 Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans), 38–40, 227, 231 Polynesians, 2, 3, 10, 13, 16, 19; migrating birds followed by, 36; as navigators, 37; species imported by, 24, 37–39, 45, 186, 226, 236 Po‘o-uli (Black-faced Honeycreeper), 115 Pope Cardinal, 228 Portuguese people, 2 Pratt, Doug, 59, 60–61, 63, 83, 144, 246 “Preliminary Diagnoses of Two Extraordinary New Genera” (Olson and Wetmore), 27 pronghorn, 155 ¯ ‘u¯), 57, 58, 60, 134, Psittirostra psittacea (‘O 135, 141–142, 186 Ptaiochen pau (Stumbling Moa-nalo), 3, 11–19, 21–27, 34, 35, 45, 244 Pueo (Hawaiian Owl, 222, 233 Puffinus newelli (‘A‘o; Newell’s Shearwater), 37, 75–81, 83, 222, 231 Pukihae Stream, 7–8 Punahou School, 119 Purdy, Jedediah, 246 Purple Finch, 142 Pyle, Peter, 116, 140 rabbits, 146, 184 racism, 96 Rainbow Bunting, 216, 218, 228 rain forests, 107, 108–109 Ramsey, Fred, 113 ¯ hi‘a Death (Ceratocystis wilt; Rapid ‘O ¯ ‘Ohi‘a wilt), 58 Ratcliffe, Derek, 105 rats, 38–39, 45, 124, 154, 207, 231, 241 Rattus exulans (Polynesian rat), 38 Rattus rattus (Black Rat; House Rat; Roof Rat; Ship Rat), 227

303 Ray, Clayton E., 23 Red-billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea; Pekin Nightingale), 121, 191, 204, 209, 216, 228, 236, 247 Red-Crested Cardinal, 185 Red-Headed Woodpecker, 208 Redington, Paul, 182, 206–207, 210, 226 Red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus), 186, 236–237 reptiles, 41 Rhipidura tricolor (Shepherd’s Companion; Willie’s Wagtail), 199, 206, 228 Rice Birds, 153 Richards, William, 148, 149 Richardson, Frank, 60, 66, 126, 179 Ridgway, Robert, 22–23, 107, 126, 145 Ripley, Sidney Dillon, II, 23, 31 robins, 216, 228 Robinson family, 93 Robison, Ansel, 218–219 Rock, Joseph F., 112 Roof Rat (Black Rat; Rattus rattus; Ship Rat), 227 Rothschild, Walter, 95–96, 105, 106, 109, 145–146; Knudsen and, 65–66; Newton’s dislike of, 98; as private collector, 76–77, 90–91, 98, 99 Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society, 152, 184 Royal Hawaiian Native Agricultural Society, 152 Safe Water Drinking Act (1974), 161 Saint Helena, 22 Saint Helena crake, 22 Saint Helena hoopoe, 22 Saltmarsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora), 180–181 Sandwich Islands Committee, 90, 109 Sand Wrasse (Coris ballieui), 133 sap suckers, 194

304 Sardinia, 158–159 Sarkar, Sahotra, 4 Schieffelin, Eugene, 184 Schlemmer, Max, 146, 147 Sclater, Philip L., 135 Scorpaena ballieui, 133 scorpionfish, 133 Scott, Mike, 65, 71, 88, 111–112, 122, 172, 242; bird survey and, 113–118; gap analysis developed by, 119–120; Kauai ¯ ‘o¯ spotted by, 54, 56, 59; Kridler ‘O viewed by, 83–84; Sincock recalled by, 61, 67, 89 Scott, Sharon, 120 seabirds, 5, 11, 33, 48–49, 86 Seale, Alvin, 77, 107 seals, 234 sexually transmitted diseases, 11 sexual selection, 10 Shallenberger, Rob, 59–61, 63, 82–83, 115 Shama Thrush, 216, 218, 228 Shapiro, Arthur, 246 Shark Going Inland Is My Chief, A (Kirch), 36 Sharpe, Richard, 78, 124 sheep, 155–159, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 174, 194 Shepherd’s Companion (Rhipidura tricolor; Willie’s Wagtail), 199, 206, 228 Sherwood, Michael, 160, 162–163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169 Ship Rat (Black Rat; House Rat; Rattus rattus; Roof Rat), 227 shoestring root rot (Armillaria mellea), 57–58 Short-Eared Owl, 222 Siberia, 36 Sierra Club, 164, 166, 167; Legal Defense Fund of (Earthjustice), 162, 163, 168 Silent Spring (Carson), 237 silky flycatcher, 84 Simberloff, Daniel, 242

Index Simpson, George Gaylord, 254–255n7 Sincock, Cindy, 65 Sincock, Isobel (née Lininger), 64, 65 Sincock, John Lloyd, 55, 85, 70, 87, 111, 122, 179; background of, 63–64; bird survey and, 113, 114–115, 116; botanical work of, 66; bureaucratic frustrations of, 109–110; death of, 67; fortitude of, ¯ ‘o¯ and, 61–63, 67, 69–70; Kauai ‘O 53–59, 63, 68–69, 88, 126; Newell’s Shearwater and, 76–82; personal life of, 65, 89–90 Sincock, Renate, 53–54, 63, 65, 67, 79, 89–90 slash-and-burn agriculture, 39 Slate-Colored Solitaire (Clarino), 185, 231 Sloggett, H. D., 228 Small, Larry, 28 Smithsonian Institution, 22–23, 25, 27, 28, 31, 109 snail darter (Percina tanasi), 166 snails, 13, 37, 49, 73, 126, 237 Société Zoologique d’Acclimatation, 183, 189 Society for the Acclimatization of Animals, Birds, Fishes, Insects, and Vegetables, 183 songbirds, 185, 187, 212, 214, 216 Sooty Storm Petrels, 72 Sophora chrysophylla (ma¯mane), 130–131, 151, 156, 157, 164, 166, 167, 169 Southern mockingbird, 216 Spartina alterniflora (Saltmarsh cordgrass), 180–181 specimen collecting, 124 spiders, 144 squid, 49 starlings, 184 Stearns, Beverly, 41 Stearns, Stephen, 41 Stejneger, Leonhard, 57 Storria olsoni, 30

Index Straw-necked Ibis, 207 Structured Decision Making (SDM), 170–171 study skins, 83, 175 Stumbling Moa-nalo (Ptaiochen pau), 3, 11–19, 21–27, 34, 35, 45, 244 sugar cane, 24, 40, 189–190, 191, 194, 231 sugar cane leafhopper (Perkinsiella saccharicida), 189–190 Sunbirds, 228 Survey of the Birds of Kauai, Hawaii, A (Richardson and Bowles), 66 Sutton, George, 185 Swart, Sandra, 122 Swedberg, Gerry, 78 sweepstakes dispersal, 13 sweet potato, 46, 49 Swezey, Otto, 200 syringeal bulla, 17 Systematic Zoology (journal), 28 taboos, 43 Taketa, Kelvin, 66, 116, 117, 118–119 Tanager Expedition, 146, 198 taphonomy, 17 taro, 46, 49 Tasmanian Tiger, 244 taxation, 46, 47 Telespiza ultima (Nihoa Finch), 65, 139, 142 Telfer, Tom, 79, 89, 125 Tellico Dam, 166 Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill (1978), 166 Tern Island, 69 Terry, Frank, 200 Thailand, 178 Thalassoma ballieui (Blacktail Wrasse), 133 Thambetochen chauliodous, 17, 27 Thambetochen xanion, 17 Thrum’s Annual, 105

305 translocation, 71, 81–82, 84, 183–184, 209, 247 Trapdoor Spider, 73 Turtle-Jawed Goose (Chelychelynechen quassus), 17 Uguisu, 228 Ulupau Head, O‘ahu, 32 ungulates, 125, 173, 194; declining population of, 152, 156, 163, 164, 169–170; fire risk and, 167 U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, 182, 192, 197, 225–226 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 22, 53, 82, 113, 116, 161, 163, 166, 172, 180–181 U.S. Geological Survey, 168 Urton, Gary, 230 vaka moana, 37 Vancouver, George, 155, 226 VanderWerf, Eric, 237 Van Dine, D. L., 148 Van Dooren, Thom, 241 Van Hasselt’s Sunbird (Cinnysis brasilianus), 218 van Riper, Charles, III, 114, 116, 174 Varied Tit (Parus varius), 229 Vietnam, 178 volcanism, 11 Volcanoes National Park, 74, 90 Volcano House (Pitman House), 150 Wahi Grosbeak, 142 Waikiki Beach, 222 Wailuku River, 95 Waimea River, 69 wallabies, 224, 234 Walsworth, Edward, 186 Ward, J. E., 199 Warner, Richard, 162 Warren, Julianne Lutz, 126 wasps, 131, 138, 144

306 water supply, 46, 158 weather, 10, 11, 35, 62, 110–111 Wedge-Tailed Shearwater, 72, 73, 75, 81, 222 weeds, 125 Wells, H. G., 5–6, 247–248 Western Meadowlark, 209–210, 228 Wetmore, Alexander, 22, 25, 26–27, 201, 204, 205, 208, 210 White-eye. See Japanese White-eye Whiteley, Peter, 178 Whooping Crane, 64 Wilder, A. H., 232 Wiliwilinui Trail, 74 Williams, Francis X., 200, 204–205 Williams, Louisa Clark, 205 Willie’s Wagtail (Rhipidura tricolor; Shepherd’s Companion), 199, 206, 228

Index Wilson, Michel, 168 Wilson, Scott Barchard, 77, 92, 105, 122, ¯ ‘o¯ 135–136, 139, 141, 150, 221; Hawai‘i ‘O described by, 86; Newton and, 100–101; Perkins and, 100–101 wind, 58, 150, 156 Wolstenholme, Edward “Ted,” 92–93 Wood, Casey, 223 woodpeckers, 208 Woodside, David, 114 Yamagara, 228 Zeillemaker, Fred, 54, 56 Zevon, Warren, 6 Ziegler, Alan, 26, 28–29, 36, 162, 164, 167 Ziegler, Marjorie, 29 Zootaxa (journal), 137 Zosterops japonicus. See Japanese White-eye