Helen Baker is a researcher at the Olinda Endangered Species Facility who has been working for the last two years on nene and on a multi-year project whose eventual outcome was to have been the introduction to the wild of endangered species of forest birds, hatched from eggs produced by captive pairs. At the end of June, her support from the state runs out. She spoke recently with Environment Hawai`i about her work:
Maybe I should just describe the forest bird work we’ve been doing. We’ve been doing this project now for two years. It’s basically a surrogate project for endangered species, which is why you see in the aviaries here more common things. The idea is to develop techniques for collection, hand-rearing, maintenance, and breeding and release back into the wild of hand-reared common species, so we can apply those techniques to endangered species.
Two years ago, we began collecting Maui creepers, which is one of our major common species. It is an insectivore, and some of the most critically endangered species are insectivores. So, that was our common model or surrogate for things like po`ouli, akepa, nukupu`u, Maui parrotbill — that kind of thing. And we also last year took some amakihi nestlings and some apapane nestlings to develop techniques for nectarvorous species as well.
However, our main emphasis has been on Maui creepers. Two years ago, when we started this work, we also started doing research on them in the wild. They are a species that nobody knew anything about. Previous to us doing this, I think there had been two nests recorded for this species. Considering it’s such a common species, it’s amazing that we knew nothing about it when we embarked on this whole surrogate work two years ago.
So we combined being in the field and the captive approach to try to get an overview of what to expect of this species and how that can help with the captive situation. When we started two years ago banding a wild population around the Hosmer Grove area of the [Haleakala National] park, we quickly began to discover there were some interesting things going on with Maui creepers. And one of those, one of the most interesting things, is that they have a very complex social set-up. What happens is that a pair remain territorial all year round, but they have helpers at the nest, and those helpers are their offspring from the previous year.
And the helpers, the offspring, help out by feeding the female and the nestlings, and stick around the whole time the nesting process is going around, even after the chicks from the nests have fledged. Sometime after that, they become independent. We think it’s around December, January of the following year. They move away, form their own territories, do their own thing.
So, you’ve got this very complex set-up that no one had ever described or even knew about before. It was interesting from the captive point of view, because here we had a species that we didn’t really know anything about. We thought if we collect them and rear them, maybe the following spring we would expect to see some kind of breeding behavior going on. But then, from the wild situation, we thought: maybe no, we shouldn’t expect that.
So, our approach with them has been to let the ones that you can see now make it into their second year, and now we’ve started introducing males to females, to see if they’ll pair up and mate and breed in captivity.
One of the implications that the whole two-year cycle has is, just now, at this moment in time, we’re starting to do exciting things like introduce birds to each other and try to get them to breed. If they do breed, it will be a major achievement, because hand-reared Hawaiian honeycreepers have never bred in captivity before. And if they do it now, they’re doing it when they normally would do it in the wild.
I don’t know if you know any history about the Hawaiian honey creepers’ breeding programs at the Mainland zoos, but they started by going out and collecting fully grown wild birds. I think it took five or six years before any of those birds went through the process of nesting.
Our approach is totally different because we’re taking nestlings and we’re hand-rearing them, so, effectively, they’ve always been captive birds. If they go through the process more quickly, it’s a good sign that captive propagation will work if we approach it from a slightly different angle.
So, it’s a very exciting period now. I suppose that’s one of the things that worries me most: that this kind of thing — it takes a lot of time to do this; these birds need to be watched three or four times a day for periods of from half an hour to an hour to make sure they’re okay — that kind of time devotion may just not be available to The Peregrine Fund and they may not do this. To me, it’s rather sad that we’ve put in two years’ effort into our surrogate program that may not — that may be put on hold for a long, long time while The Peregrine Fund get settled in. And to me this is the most exciting time because the birds are at an age where they ought to be breeding, so we should be trying our best to get them into a situation where they will breed.
EH: What about your work with the nene?
From March 1 to June 30, I’ll still be working on the wild population of the nene, but as far as the facility residents [nene at Olinda], I won’t have any involvement. The nene work that we’ve been doing is more biased toward the wild population than here. But what we’ve been finding out at Haleakala Crater is that not only are eggs being destroyed at a rapid rate, but goslings aren’t surviving, either. We talked about the reasons why that is, and it was agreed at the last nene recovery action team meeting that we would do a salvage operation this year. Basically, that meant that we would go into the crater, target the birds we knew had a good history of producing eggs, find the nests, collect the eggs, and bring them to the facility.
And that’s what we did. We collected 42 live eggs from Haleakala Crater, brought them here, they were artificially incubated, and most of the goslings that are here are from those wild collected eggs. We had very good hatchability; we have 34 wild parentage goslings on the site here.
So, again, the sort of things that we’ve been doing in the wild have come into contact with the captive propagation work. But it does mean that now there are a lot of goslings on the site, and that’s a major amount of work for us here, to maintain them.
As far as the connection between here and Haleakala National Park, we’ve developed quite a good relationship over the last two years with our research there. And we’ve shown how this facility can support what we were doing and what they were doing in the park by providing somewhere where we could bring eggs or goslings. That link, I think — in the short term at least — will be severed. I don’t think there’ll be any plan to do any salvages or any further work with Haleakala National Park out of the facility, because I think The Peregrine Fund will be concerned mainly with the breeding flock at the captive facility.
One of the other things that we’ve also been doing while we’ve been doing the surrogate program is taking the opportunity to do a lot of disease research on the population of honey creepers in the Hosmer Grove area. It’s a high elevation area, 6800 feet, so we chose to do disease work there to compare with the disease work that’s been going on elsewhere, a lot of it at lower elevations. So it was an opportunity to do some comparative work at different elevations.
We just began to develop some work on disease on Maui at that elevation — and that will come to an end because we won’t be here to continue to do that. And it was something we were doing hand in hand with the surrogate program, and we would still go on to do it with the endangered species. So that will definitely stop.
EH: Could you explain why that disease work is important for the task of reintroduction of birds to the wild?
It’s really important for a variety of reasons. For a long time now, malaria and pox have been blamed for reductions in bird distribution, in population size, and so on. And there’s been a lot of very interesting work going on in Hawaii Volcanoes [National Park] on malaria distribution, pox distribution, and how it impacts the population. Some species are very susceptible.
So, they began to do some work on trying to monitor populations to see just what kind of impact the diseases were having, where they were coming from, what the elevational diseases in prevalence were, and a whole slew of things that would lead to a better understanding of how these diseases operate, and, eventually, to development of better treatment for these diseases. What’s really interesting is — especially for the `alala reintroductions on the Big Island — a lot of the birds that have been released over there have later developed disease problems. A lot of the `alala have developed pox lesions, some of them have come down with malaria, and so they need supportive treatment before they’re finally released into the wild.
And so any of the disease work that we’re doing ultimately can give us not only a better capability of looking after birds in captivity, but also looking after birds that are earmarked for release, because we can give them — we can monitor them and give them supportive care before they go out for release in the wild.
All of these experiences are a learning process for us, because if we start releasing, say, po`ouli, we have to know what to expect. All of the disease work that’s going on now will make it much easier for us to deal with these problems in the future.
One of the interesting things is, we did a release of common amakihi and a release of Maui creepers this year in the Hosmer Grove area. They were all hand-reared birds that we took up, put into hacking aviaries at that elevation. And we had one instance where one of our common amakihi developed pox, and we had no other disease problems.
In contrast, the P Fund did a release of common amakihi at a lower elevation site — I think between 3500 and 4000 feet — and they had big problems with malaria. A lot of amakihis became infected with malaria. So just in this initial phase of trying to release hand-reared birds, it’s very obvious that disease is a big problem for us. And if we can get a better handle on that to deal with that, it’s going to make all the effort that goes into producing the birds and releasing them much more worthwhile, if we can guarantee that there’s going to be survival in the wild once we release them.
All the disease work is central to how successful this whole captive propagation approach is going to be.
EH: And that’s coming to an end.
Here, it’s coming to an end. There’s a lot of work going on on the Big Island, with Carter Atkinson in Hawaii Volcanoes. But all the work that we’ve been doing will come to an end. That will just go.
I don’t know what the Peregrine Fund’s official line on continuing research is, but I don’t think they have the expertise to continue disease research with the group of people they have now. So a lot of the very valuable work Gregg [Massey, the full-time veterinarian at Olinda] has been doing on disease will come to an end.
Gregg has developed proposals for the coming years to continue this research. One of the projects we were going to do, and we may still get an opportunity to do part of that, was to actually do drug trials for malaria treatment. We were going to start to do some experimental work with Japanese white-eye, to work out dosages for malaria treatment. We have to compromise what we do now, because we don’t have the time to do it. Hopefully, we’ll still be able to go ahead and do some of that in March, but beyond that, we won’t be able to do any more of that drug trial research — which is an integral part again, of disease research, of starting to work out how to deal with these diseases through drugs.
You know, we had plans. Our plans went on for years. All of a sudden, we’re not doing some of the things that this time last year we said we were going to do now. It’s frustrating, from that point of view. And it means that our interests have to change.
I think the state, as far as I’m concerned, aren’t going to be getting as much value for their money, since I’m not going to be doing the things I’m supposed to be doing because of the changes. One of the main emphases in my work now was to be out there, trying to locate endangered species nests for the endangered species propagation of forest birds. That’s not going to happen.
Volume 6, Number 9 March 1996
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