Neal L. Evenhuis, editor. Barefoot on Lava: The Journals and Correspondence of Naturalist R.C.L. Perkins in Hawai`i, 1892-1901. Bishop Museum Press: Honolulu, 2007. 412 pages. Hardcover: $29.95.
“I am off on Monday to Lana`i, there is an all but extinct bird there I have not got & I much want it.”
So wrote the naturalist Robert C.L. Perkins in a letter to Charles Reed Bishop in June of 1894, shortly before Perkins set sail for Lana`i to hunt down the rare Hemignathus lanaiensis, or Lana`i `akialoa. Today, it’s shocking to think that a species’ imminent extinction would spark a race to hunt down the last individual to complete a collection of bird skins for a given museum or institution. But, as shown in Perkins’ letters and reminiscences, carefully compiled and edited by Neal Evenhuis in Barefoot on Lava, Perkins’ views were typical of his time. The extinction of many Hawaiian bird species was regarded by him and his peers as practically inevitable; the challenge they saw themselves facing, as collectors, was to make as complete a record as possible of the islands’ fauna before it was further impoverished.
Perkins, Henry Palmer, Scott Wilson, and George Munro – all were stalking and shooting Hawaiian birds in the 1890s, during the peak of what Alan Ziegler has called the “professional naturalist period” (1870-1900) in Hawaiian history. Perkins, in fact, was almost certainly not the most zealous of the bird collectors; having been trained as an entomologist, he spent much of his time in the field beating the bushes (literally) for insects.
Still, Perkins was responsible for probably a thousand or more Hawaiian bird skins (stuffed birds) being shipped back to England, thence distributed by his sponsors to museums around the world. And those represent just a fraction of the birds he killed but could not preserve for various reasons (the body was too damaged; he couldn’t locate the carcass; feral cats got to his tent and destroyed birds not yet stuffed; decomposition). “At least 25 percent of the birds I see I cannot shoot at [for fear of not being able to gather them] and the same percentage I lose,” he wrote, “although I never shoot at any bird, rare or common, unless I think I have a really good chance of picking it up.”
The numbers of birds shot by Palmer and Munro were far higher. These two men were sent to Hawai`i to collect for Lionel Walter Rothschild, of the banking Rothschild family. Rothschild had studied ornithology at Cambridge and set up a privately owned museum at his family estate. As Bill Bryson writes in A Short History of Nearly Everything, the second Baron Rothschild “was a strange and reclusive fellow. He lived his entire life in the nursery wing of his home at Tring, in Buckinghamshire, using the furniture of his childhood – even sleeping in his childhood bed, though eventually he weighed three hundred pounds.”
Rothschild, Bryson says, “became a devoted accumulator of objects. He sent hordes of trained men – as many as four hundred at a time – to every quarter of the globe to clamber over mountains and hack their way through jungles in the pursuit of new specimens – particularly things that flew.” Other collectors may have acquired even more things than Rothschild, but, says Bryson, Rothschild was “easily the most scientific collector of his age,” and also “the most regrettably lethal, for in the 1890s he became interested in Hawai`i.” Working for Rothschild, Palmer and Munro “brought back for the Tring museum a total of 1,832 skins of birds, among them 10 species new to science,” writes Evenhuis in a chapter called “Background to Collecting.”
Throughout Perkins’ time in Hawai`i, the specter of Rothschild loomed large in his thoughts and actions. Perkins’ masters, notably ornithologist Alfred Newton, who headed up the Sandwich Islands Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, “felt that Rothschild intended to monopolize the credit and glory associated with the new bird discoveries that were to be made in the Hawaiian islands and was sparing no expense to get there first.” Evenhuis describes this as an “imaginary ‘war’ of bird collecting,” but Perkins’ own writings show the competition was real enough to him and Newton.
In early 1892, as Perkins was planning his trip to Hawai`i, Newton provided a guide to the islands that was intended to direct Perkins’ research. On the island of Hawai`i, Newton wrote, “there is yet good hope that novelties may be discovered there…. It appears quite possible that Chloridops kona [the Kona grosbeak] … may occur frequently at higher elevations… and this possibility is increased by what I hear of Mr. Rothschild’s collection having gotten some 20 or 30 examples… Mr. Rothschild’s men have also found another new finch of which the male is red & the female is green or brown.”
Additional references to “Rothschild’s men” come up frequently in the letters Perkins exchanged with his sponsors in England. David Sharp of Cambridge warned Perkins in May 1892 that, in the case of birds, at least, “I presume what you have learned from Prof.r Newton [is] that discretion & knowledge [of] what to look for are of more importance than they are in the invertebrates.”
Newton continued to goad Perkins to match or more than match the specimens that Rothschild reported his collectors to have taken. In 1893, he provided Perkins with a list of “this year’s discoveries” by Rothschild’s men, concluding with the Bishop’s `o`o. “Pray don’t neglect to get it,” Newton exhorted Perkins.
Just a few weeks later, Perkins reported success. “I am most pleased with my Moloka`i collecting. I got both birds discovered by Rothschild’s collectors – the beautiful Moloka`i `o`o – a finer thing than the Hawaiian one as it has long yellow feathers about its ears as well as under the wings… Also the other fine thing, the crested bird – Palmeria mirabilis. But the best of all was a fine new all black bird, a connecting link between the old ‘mamo’ of Hawai`i & the `Akialoas & therefore of particular interest. It was a great score for me to get this after Rothschild’s collectors had overrun the island for 3 months just before” (p. 183). (The “new all black bird,” the black mamo, was later named Drepanis funerea at Newton’s suggestion, in recognition “not only [of] its somber colouring, but in allusion to the sad fate that probably awaits it,” he wrote to Perkins [p. 188].)
By the 1890s, many native bird species were already rare, and others suspected of having become extinct. Take, for example, the Lana`i akialoa that was the object of Perkins’ vain search in 1894. Perkins writes that he had seen a lone `akialoa, in full breeding plumage, while on Lana`i just six months earlier. That individual may have been the sole survivor of a shooting frenzy by Edward Wolstenholme, an assistant to Palmer. In 1893, Wolstenholme told Perkins that “he killed all the few Hemignathus on Lana`i, when he was alone… He killed all these either in one day or else in one bush” (p. 132).
The profligacy with which birds were killed by Perkins and his contemporaries makes Evenhuis’ book difficult reading at times. For example, in an early trip to South Kona (July-August 1892), the birds killed by Perkins included two dozen Kona grosbeaks, 16 greater koa finches (Rhodacanthis palmeri), and at least one `alala (Corvus hawaiiensis). (Today a captive population of `alala continues to produce a few young each year; the other species are extinct.)
On O`ahu, the story was much the same. Perkins was feeling pressure from Newton to “obtain some of the old O`ahu birds, which no one had collected for many years,” he later wrote. One such “old bird” was the O`ahu `akialoa (Hemignathus o. ellisianus). Going the extra mile to see if any of these birds could be found in the Nu`uanu Valley area, Perkins ascended the valley sides. “On one occasion,” he wrote, “I saw what I had no doubt was a pair of Hemignathus.”
- This was on one of the two occasions when I stayed all night on the ridge, hoping that either towards evening or early in the morning birds might show up in greater numbers. That night there was a very heavy thunderstorm and much rain and I started to go still higher up the ridge as soon as it began to get light… On a very narrow part of the ridge a pair of green birds flew across in front of me one just behind and in pursuit of the other, which squeaked as it flew…. I had no doubt at the time that this was the rare `Akialoa of O`ahu and when I shot, feathers were blown back towards me as the bird fell over the very steep side of the ridge… I spent hours in searching for this bird amongst the thick brush, but without success… On a number of days afterwards I hunted around Waolani, and once more I spent a night in the open on the ridge, but never again saw anything that could be mistaken for a Hemignathus.
Before this, the last confirmed sighting of an O`ahu `akialoa occurred in 1837. After Perkins, it was never reliably reported to be seen again.
Perkins recounts another occasion that involved one of the last known sightings of another by-then rare bird, the O`ahu `akepa (Loxops c. rufus). At the time (April 1893), Perkins was sharing a cabin with Palmer and Wolstonholme in the Kawailoa area. “I stayed with them some time in their tent and was present with Wolstenholme when he shot the male Loxops rufa, which had not been obtained since Lord Byron’s visit in 1825. There was a second specimen in company with this, probably a female, but though we heard it, we did not get a sight of it nor any other specimen. … Palmer and his colleague again camped for some time where the Loxops occurred, but failed to find another.” Perkins writes that some 10 years later, when he was collecting insects with Albert Koebele, he came across a pair of Loxops “far back in the forest in the Wahiawa district, but I had no gun with me at the time” (p. 110).
The question inevitably arises: could the enthusiastic collectors, both amateur and professional, of the time have caused the extinctions?
A list of Hawai`i’s extinct species found on the Bishop Museum’s website shows that of 24 birds known to have become extinct since western contact, 9 of them were last seen in the 1890s (10, if you count Perkins’ sighting of the O`ahu `akialoa). It is possible, of course, that this is simply coincidence. Tremendous changes in Hawai`i’s landscape had occurred during the 1800s. Shortly after his arrival to the islands, Perkins lamented the infestation of koa trees by ants, which had driven out native beetles (p. 111). He also observed “great herds of wild pigs,” which “may sometimes be seen crossing the flats between the gulches” (p. 111). On Lana`i, as he searched for the `akialoa, Perkins found “the clump of Clermontia bushes, on which I strongly suspected the Hemignathus had been got, had been gnawed by goats since my last visit and were dead or dying” (p. 236).
Perkins was concerned about the effects of introduced species on native insects as well. He wrote Charles Reed Bishop, “with regard to the insects I may tell you that they are probably disappearing even quicker than the birds indeed the whole native insect fauna of the lower forests has entirely finished through an introduced ant” (p. 239). Native insects could only be found above the elevation of the ants’ incursion, he wrote, and “it is obviously still working upwards until the forest gets dried up from the incursion & destruction of cattle goats sheep &c” (p. 239).
And then there were the rats: “I should think the rats which were eating up all the land shell creatures in some parts of Moloka`i in 1896 would have exterminated the rails!” Perkins wrote to Munro (p. 321).
Obviously, Perkins saw no connection between his own actions and extinctions, which he attributed to other causes: “Of the insects of these Islands probably 1/3 of the original fauna are extinct now & 20 years hence may clean out many of those left, as also of the birds,” he wrote in a letter to Bishop. “The first four birds of O`ahu (got 40 years ago) are now utterly extinct & between the mongoose (which swarms there) cats & mynah birds, not to mention the wholesale clearing which is taking place for coffee planting, those on Hawai`i must follow before many years” (p. 306).
Yet it is worth noting that apart from the specimens taken by the professional naturalists, amateurs were also taking birds, insects, and shells by the thousands for their personal collections. While on Maui, Perkins encountered “two young collectors who were traveling around the world. And paying their way by collecting birds or taking temporary jobs” (p. 202).
Local families as well developed huge collections. One of the largest was that of the family of R.W. Meyer of Moloka`i. Perkins mentions Meyer’s sons’ collection of Drepanis funereal, which stirred up some debate as to whether they should sell the skins or donate them to the Bishop Museum. (Meyer’s collection was more recently in the news when, in 2002, Don Medcalf of Hawaiian Islands Stamp & Coin Co. was charged with violating the state’s endangered species law when he attempted to sell 52 bird skins that once belonged to the Meyer family. The stuffed birds, Medcalf said, all dated back to the 1890s and among the dozen or so different species represented was, he said, the Bishop’s `o`o, or D. funereal. The charges against him were dropped when a judge ruled that the law applied to “living things,” Medcalf said, “not to owning things more than a hundred years old.”)
Perkins, his sponsors, and his colleagues were keenly aware of the decline of Hawai`i’s native birds, but, if anything, this renewed their enthusiasm for the hunt. At no time do they seem to make a connection between dwindling numbers of live birds and the increasing numbers of bird skins being added to collections worldwide. So avid was the collecting, in fact, that institutions would barter with one another to round out their collections, or would even resort to selling duplicate specimens on the private market.
No opprobrium attached to this. Perkins himself, apparently tiring of the life of a
poorly paid field worker, wrote to one of his sponsors: “After this I may give up zoology, or if I continue it will be to go to S. America as a pure collector & collect special rarities in butterflies & birds for sale, without doing anything scientific in any way. My friend Koebele in California is very anxious to do this for 5 or 6 years, if we can stand it, there being much money in the business, if you collect the right things & let everything else alone” (p. 341).
On the same theme, a short while later, he writes: “A good collector … can today easily clear a couple of thousand pounds a year… I have seen box after box of a single species of butterfly sold at Stevens auction room in Covent Garden at two to five pounds a single specimen… Probably I should make the whole lot up into typical collections as illustrating the fauna of the H.I. [Hawaiian Islands] & dispose of them on the continent & to private people” (p. 358).
By 1900, the rampant killing of birds and other wildlife across the country – by haberdashers, by collectors, by sportsmen – led to the passage of the Lacey Act, which
prohibited the interstate commerce in wildlife. In 1913, poachers of albatross on Laysan Island were prosecuted under this act, after a protest was lodged by a zoology professor at the College of Honolulu. Until then, however, it was open season on Hawaiian birds, and collectors continued to kill rare birds with what can only be described as gusto.
One of the most notorious incidents, in fact, occurred seven years after passage of the Lacey Act when William Alanson Bryan, later to become a director of the Bishop Museum, spotted a Drepanis funerea in Moloka`i. In what was the last confirmed sighting ever made of the bird, Bryan saw three – and fired away. “To my joy I found the mangled remains hanging in the tree in a thick bunch of leaves, six feet or more beyond where it had been sitting,” Bryan later wrote. “It was, as I feared, very badly mutilated. However, it was made into a very fair cabinet skin.”
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 18, Number 4 October 2007
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