“When I first arrived in Kona,” wrote R.C.L. Perkins at the turn of the 20th century, “the Great ‘Ohi’a trees, at an elevation of 2,500 feet, were a mass of bloom and each of them was literally alive with hordes of Crimson `Apapane and Scarlet ‘I’iwi; while continually crossing from the top of one great tree to another, the ‘O’o could be seen on the wing sometimes six or eight at a time…. The ‘Amakihi was numerous in the same trees but less conspicuous and occasionally one of the long billed Hemignathus. Feeding on the fruit of the ‘Ie’ie could be seen the Hawaiian Crow commonly and the ‘O’u in great abundance. The picture of this noisy, active, and often quarrelsome assembly of birds, many of them brilliant colors, was one never to be forgotten.”1 A century later, a visitor to the same spot today might see the colorful trees and the vining ‘ie’ie. The ‘alala, or Hawaiian crow is probably extinct in the wild. The ‘o’u was last seen a quarter a century ago on Kaua’i; the last Kona sighting was well before that. Perkins was one of the last people to record spotting the ‘o’o. The Hemignathus Perkins saw – perhaps an ‘akiapola’au – is now restricted to a small area on the eastern side of the island of Hawai’i. Perhaps ‘apapane and ‘i’iwi still frequent the area, but their numbers are overshadowed by the flood of non-native birds: Japanese white-eye, various finches, canaries, cardinals, and other recent immigrants to the islands.
Across the island chain, the losses of native forest birds are staggering. The loss is more than aesthetic. The biodiversity of native forests is impoverished by the wholesale substitution of introduced birds for natives, and scientists are rapidly losing an irreplaceable living laboratory of evolution. Hawai’i’s forest birds constitute what is perhaps the world’s most astonishing display of adaptive radiation. The honeycreepers, in particular, evolved from a colonizing finch into a marvelous and varied array of species able to exploit nearly every environmental niche that was to be found in the remote Hawaiian islands. Flycatchers, thrushes, crows, hawks, and owls also arrived in the islands and, over time, developed into the species that are unique to the archipelago’s forested areas.
Many of these birds are extinct. Some died out following initial human contact centuries ago; some survived the first human colonizers only to succumb to the drastic changes – introduction of disease, alteration of habitat – that occurred following the arrival of Western traders and settlers to Hawai’i. Bird experts generally believe that of the 50 or so named species of finch-like birds that evolved in Hawai’i, 14 died out before Western contact and 10 have gone extinct since then. The actual number of native bird species is probably even higher; as the late Alan Ziegler wrote, “Additional fossil material, although too fragmentary to serve in formally naming the taxa, indicates that there are at least ten more species” in the subfamily of Hawaiian honeycreepers.
Twenty species of Hawai’i’s native forest birds appear on the federal list of endangered species, while two more are species of concern. Of those 22 total species, 11 have not been seen for more than a decade; one – the Bishop’s ‘o’o of Moloka’i – was last seen a century ago. Of the 10 species that have been seen more recently, populations of three of them are estimated to number fewer than 1,000, with the po’ouli having a known population of three individuals. The last confirmed wild sighting of an ‘alala, or Hawaiian crow, was two years ago; the known population consists entirely of about three dozen birds held in captive propagation facilities.
The plight of Hawaiian forest birds is spelled out in grim detail in two recently published volumes: the Draft Revised Recovery Plan for the ‘Alala (Corvus hawaiiensis) and the Draft Revised Recovery Plan for Hawaiian Forest Birds. Both were published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the last few months of 2003; both call for far-reaching, expensive, and long-term actions to protect what is left of Hawai’i’s rare birds. For the ‘alala, the cost of efforts intended to lead to the bird’s recovery (and eventual delisting as endangered) are pegged at nearly $12 million through 2007. The estimated recovery cost for the smaller forest birds is estimated at $3.6 billion over the next half-century; over the next few years, actions identified in the draft recovery plan will cost roughly $100 million per year to carry out.
Does the money exist to implement these plans? And even if it can be found, what is the chance that the decline in native bird populations can be reversed? Environment Hawai’i recently spoke with several key people in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Honolulu office about these issues. Participating in the conversation with editor Patricia Tummons were biologists Jeff Burgett, Eric VanderWerf, and Jay Nelson, and Barbara Maxfield, public information officer for the Pacific Island office of the service. Portions of that discussion follow:
Eric VanderWerf: For the forest bird recovery plan, although it is a very big plan, obviously, because it covers 21 species, we tried to write it in a way that makes it fairly useful and specific. We have an implementation schedule in there that has a lot of information. We also have an appendix that lists the actions that we feel are necessary, parcel by parcel. So even if someone doesn’t read the whole thing, if there’s some landowner or agency that wants to know what could be done on a particular parcel of land, they could refer to that. At least it’s a relatively brief summary of everything that is important for that particular piece of land.
We’re also looking at the process of writing five-year recovery work plans. And those are not meant to replace the recovery plan; they’re meant to complement it. So the recovery plan is a comprehensive list – in the case of the Hawaiian forest bird plan – of virtually everything that we think may be needed to recover these species. It’s an exhaustive list. It covers a long time frame because it will probably take many years to recover most of these species.
One thing the recovery plan doesn’t have is short-term milestones. So how are we going to judge our progress toward recovery short of down-listing or de-listing them? Because it’s such a long-term process for most of these species, it’s nice to have something you can point to on the way that says, yes, we’re making progress because we’ve done X, Y, and Z. And we have many recovery actions; we can certainly check those off as we do them. But it’s nice to have something a little more – that tells you more, that, yes, we’re making progress in the right direction. That’s what these five-year work plans will hopefully do. So they cover just a five-year period, and they have interim recovery goals. They’re not de-listing goals, but they’re places we want to get for each of these species that we think are part-way toward recovery. And they list recovery actions that we hope will get us to each of those interim recovery objectives.
Patricia Tummons: So in the interim recovery plans, the short-term milestones – does that entail a lot of monitoring activity as well?
VanderWerf: Yes, absolutely. Again, you have to know how effective your management is. If you don’t know what effect you’re having, it’s hard to know whether you’re doing any good, whether you’ve actually arrived at one of your milestones or at your recovery.
Tummons: Have you received a lot of comments on these plans? Are you on the verge of publishing a final plan?
VanderWerf: For the forest bird plan, the comment period is already over.
We received some comments – not a large number, but some. Some were relatively brief, some were more lengthy and more disruptive. We are not on the verge of publishing a final plan; that will probably take us several months to incorporate all the comments. We also have a number of things about the plan that we want to change, just based on what’s happened since we published the draft, additional information.
So it will take us a little while to put that together. But we do hope to have it done by August – I think that’s what we’re aiming for now. That’s when it leaves this office. It will be a few months after that while it gets reviewed at the regional office.
Jay Nelson: The closing date for comments on the ‘alala recovery plan is February 17. I haven’t got many comments back yet on that.
Tummons: How much money is in the federal budget for 2005 for work toward recovery of the species covered in these two plans?
Barbara Maxfield: We don’t even know what’s in this year’s budget, because the office doesn’t have our budget yet. I should point out – yes, the president’s budget does propose cuts in the endangered species program, but it also proposes almost $71 million in new partnership programs. Projects here in Hawai’i generally compete fairly well in some of those partnership – I don’t like to characterize them as competitions, but in some cases they are. And there’s a good possibility that our partners will pick up additional dollars that can be used to benefit endangered birds here.
Tummons: The plans anticipate recovery activities on lands that are not under the ownership or control of the federal government. What kind of buy-in are you getting from the state and private landowners in terms of cooperative actions mentioned in the recovery plans – fencing, removal of ungulates, weed control, reforestation, et cetera?
VanderWerf: It’s tremendously variable, as you might expect. In general, the state is certainly supportive of recovery efforts, at least on lands zoned conservation, where they have that latitude. And private landowners – some are very responsive; others we haven’t heard anything from. And there are going to be some, hopefully in the minority, who are not going to like the actions proposed.
Jeff Burgett: For the ‘alala, the on-the-ground footprint for the project is probably going to be contained in the revision of the environmental assessment that was published in 1999, where we actually scope out, compare areas for reintroduction – there will probably be more of those. The draft recovery plan talks a lot about habitat restoration as a key element in the recovery strategy. I don’t think anyone would dispute the importance of getting onto that as soon as possible.
This is obviously controversial in several aspects, we’re going to have to revise that EA to do the full NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] compliance on that.
But I think the conservation private owners – for instance, The Nature Conservancy – and the new federal acquisition of Kahuku Ranch increase the scope for ‘alala recovery actions on the Big Island in areas that we hadn’t considered before or hadn’t considered in all the possibility that we have now. There’s also habitat issues on Maui that were brought up in the planning process here that we’ll have to look at.
As federal monies change and diminish, state monies are increasing. It’s a linked process. So I think the state is going to have more financial resources to do these recovery actions than it had in the past. Beyond that, I wouldn’t characterize private landowners and the state in terms of their response in any particular direction right now.
Tummons: What are some of the recovery actions ongoing even as we speak?
Nelson: There’s quite a few. On the Big Island, the Saddle Road realignment mitigation agreement is providing federal money for translocation of the palila from the western slope population over to the north slope. There was a recent reintroduction of captive-reared birds that was pretty successful. The translocation should be occurring this month; the reintroduction was in December. Ten birds were released; seven or eight are still surviving, so that’s a pretty good success rate. And they stayed in the area, which is something we really wanted to occur.
VanderWerf: There’s a lot of stuff going on – quite a few projects for a variety of species. For palila, there’s also a fence going up in that same area to exclude cattle and hopefully allow forest regeneration. There’s another big fencing project on Maui that the state is spearheading in conjunction with the National Park Service, to protect I forget how many thousand acres at Kahikinui and Nu’u, which is dryland and mesic forest that was probably koa-dominated in the past. We’re hoping that that’s going to be a suitable site for translocation and release of Maui parrotbills in the future.
There’s also forest restoration going on at Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, and the state has plans to revitalize their nursery at Waimea to produce mamane trees again for outplanting on Mauna Kea and other sites. There’s predator control going on for O’ahu ‘elepaio, for po’ouli and other birds at Hanawi [Maui].
Nelson: Puaiohi releases [on Kaua’i] have been ongoing; this is the sixth year. We’ve had pretty good success, with an over 50 percent survival rate, even better in some years. The birds usually breed.
VanderWerf: Again, for puaiohi, we expect to complete surveys for pretty much all of the suitable habitat on Kaua’i. That way we’ll have a pretty complete picture of the distribution and population size for that species and can being doing more research into limiting factors, looking at types of rodent control, providing rodent-proof nest boxes – see whether they’re used and whether they make a difference.
Burgett: One of the more innovative things that hasn’t yet hit the ground but will is the advertising to fill a one-year new position called for in the ‘alala recovery plan for a fund-raiser. This is pretty innovative. We have great hopes for that obviously.
We realize that both for the habitat management and for the captive propagation of ‘alala, there’s not going to be enough money in the budget to accomplish all the actions. In the past, it’s been a case in a lot of these recovery actions that we plan out what’s needed but don’t have the mechanism to fulfill that. By having it pretty well planned out and very cut-and-dried in terms of what needs to be done, and putting up the money with state and federal agencies each paying for half the salary, we’ll basically see what we can do in terms of non-traditional funding.
This person’s scope of work is going to be to develop some significant funds.
Tummons: What role does captive propagation play in these plans? It can only work if you have suitable habitat for release sites – or it can work if you have them; it can’t work if you don’t. Yet even when you have release sites, sometimes, as in the case of the ‘alala, captive propagation may not be successful in creating more than a zoo population.
Burgett: That’s not how we view it. At this point, obviously, the captive population is the only population of ‘alala that we have the potential for getting new birds out of. So it’s essential that we focus on captive propagation.
The assessment of the recovery team of ‘alala introduction to date basically shows that we went into it with the base of knowledge that we had of the species at the time – which, strangely enough, for such a large, charismatic, and obvious bird, was very poor in terms of the knowledge base, social structure, foraging habits, all that stuff. We just had to kind of work with what we had. But that said, obviously, there were some problems, probably both with the overall reintroduction plan as it existed, which we have reassessed and modified considerably, but also with the habitat. We were unaware of some of the habitat factors that turned out to be very crucial, probably because all the observations of birds in the wild in that area were adult birds that knew how to handle that. Naive, juvenile birds in that environment – that’s a different kind of fish. They didn’t have the mentorship of parents. We would have predicted higher than normal mortalities for juvenile birds in that situation. The mortality factors that we ran into kind of caught us by surprise – cat-borne diseases were unknown to that point; predation by the Hawaiian hawk was completely unknown to that point. Both of those factors were very critical. And both of those are environmental factors. Both are habitat factors that need to be dealt with early on, as an ongoing issue, at the recovery sites. But the only way to really deal with ‘io predation, we think, is to work at the habitat level, providing more cover, making forests denser.
VanderWerf: Captive propagation is certainly one of the important tools for recovering these species. There are others that I think are equally important; habitat restoration is key. As you suggested, in order to have a successful reintroduction, you have to have a place to put these birds. For some species, maybe the ‘alala, we don’t have a great place right now. We certainly hope there will be one in the future. We have to maintain the birds in captivity until that situation exists. The same may be true for the po’ouli right now.
Tummons: A lot of birds, like the po’ouli, parrotbill, akohekohe, seem to be pushed into the wet forest, though that might not be their first choice of residence.
VanderWerf: It’s possible, but we can’t say that with certainty. The parrotbill was known to inhabit drier forest than it does now, but it also is doing quite well in wet forests, such as at Hanawi. But it might be true for po’ouli. It’s very speculative. We don’t know all that much about the distribution of these species 200 years ago. We know they did inhabit drier forest than many of them inhabit today. We don’t know if those populations were stable or were supported by populations in other sections of the forest.
Burgett: What you’ve got is an original population that might have extended from the shore to almost the treeline, for some species. And now you have the edge of the population left that’s up at the higher elevation. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they were pushed into an area they didn’t like. It just means that’s the part of the range that they still inhabit.
It’s like grizzly bears. They’re native to Glacier National Park, but they’re also native to Marin County. But the fact that they’re now in Glacier doesn’t mean they were pushed there. Nor does it mean it’s really, really horrible for them to be there. If it’s adequate, it was always part of their range.
Tummons: When you have limited resources and a vast array of implementation actions that are all equally important, each as urgent and pressing as the next, how do you decide which to undertake? A lot of people say that in such circumstances, you should clearly leave behind those species that have the least chance of recovery, such as the po’ouli, or you should just drop out of the whole plan all those that haven’t been seen for the last 50 years. How do you make those choices? Or do you even have to make them, since so many of the actions you have included benefit multiple species?
VanderWerf: I think that’s an important point. Many of the actions that we take or try to help facilitate are not directed at just one species; they’re directed at a site or a whole ecosystem that will benefit many species, and not just birds but plants as well. In some cases, where we have a choice between a project that will affect one site versus another, it’s often difficult when you evaluate which species are present. More often than not, it probably comes down to whether there is a cooperator that is interested in that site and has the funding for it, and we can work together with them.
Burgett: It’s targets of opportunity. The idea of triage – if we were operating in that mode, we wouldn’t be doing anything for the po’ouli. So we aren’t operating in that way.
VanderWerf: We haven’t given up on anything.
Nelson: I think that of the various species, if there’s a recovery action that really has to be taken to extend the survival of that species, we would take that, rather than letting it drop off.
Burgett: But I think that more and more, we realize that we get the most bang for the buck with cooperators that lend in-kind services or especially land areas that have a larger area to play with rather than smaller, that benefit multiple species – not even just birds, but plants. This isn’t rocket science that we need to conserve as much intact area as we can as habitat for the most things. That’s the biggest bang for the buck.
VanderWerf: Getting back to the po’ouli – that’s often touted as an example of a basket-case species that we’re wasting money on. That’s not how I would characterize it. I think that’s unfair and I don’t think we should give up on it yet.
Almost all the actions that have been taken for that species have not been taken only for that species. They’re directed at the habitat within Hanawi – fencing, predator control, general mist-netting. Almost everything that the staff of the Maui forest bird recovery project does benefits other species, too. So actually there’s probably a lot less money than people think directed at the po’ouli alone. Most of it is directed at a whole suite of species.
Tummons: Many of the parcels you identify are owned by the state. Some of them that are called out in the plan involve lands that are leased for grazing by the Department of Land and Natural Resources or the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. These are marginal pasture lands already; have you received any thumbs-up from the state when it comes to plans to pull these lands out of pasture use and develop an aggressive restoration program for them, and so forth?
Nelson: DHHL is working with our partners program to develop a management plan for the Kanakaleonui bird corridor. That’s been ongoing for a while. There seems to be progress there in removing those lands from leased ranching and moving toward conservation.
Tummons: What about DLNR? Among the parcels you identify as candidates for potential habitat restoration are areas leased out for pasture purposes.
VanderWerf: Certainly there are biologists in the state that recognize the importance of those parcels and are very supportive of trying to restore them. But the state has a broad mandate. You talk to other people in different programs and you get a different response.
Tummons: Has there been any discussion with the state about converting some of these marginal pasture areas that could be great habitat?
Burgett: This has to happen at the level of the Board of Land and Natural Resources.
Tummons: Has anyone approached, say, Peter Young, DLNR director?
Nelson: It could be a recovery action that we haven’t really articulated.
Tummons: Could you talk about the need to include in the Forest Bird recovery plan species that have not been seen for decades? Can’t we assume that some birds are extinct, such as the Bishop’s ‘o’o, last seen in 1904?
VanderWerf: Or possibly in 1981.
Tummons: But that’s still 23 years ago – a long time to go without a sighting.
VanderWerf: There’s no official length of time after which you can say a species is extinct. What we have to go by is, if it’s officially listed, then it needs a recovery plan. We did not spend a lot of time devising recovery criteria for Bishop’s ‘o’o, or the oloma’o, or other species that are probably extinct. But they have to be in there, because it’s required to have a plan for them.
Tummons: So many of the problems that are identified are the same for all species; every bird faces the same problems – predation, loss of habitat.
VanderWerf: You’re right. And that was one of the reasons why we decided to do one plan to cover all these species rather than make individual plans for each one, or by island. Because in many cases they do face the same set of threats; the relative importance of the threats varies among species and over the landscape, but in general, they face the same set of threats.
Tummons: How large a threat is global warming to Hawaiian birds?
VanderWerf: It certainly could be large. The effect of temperature on the distribution of mosquitoes is probably the most important component of that. If temperatures continue to increase, then the elevation at which you might find mosquitoes will go up. So places that right now are mosquito-free and refugia for these birds may not be that way in the future.
Benning, Vitousek, and Dennis [LaPointe] had a lot of good data, actually.2 It’s a good paper. It’s relatively short, yet the single idea that it presents is very important.
Burgett: That’s a concern that we haven’t factored into a lot of things in the past, but there are a lot of other landscape change issues that are occurring at the same time and we don’t have a good handle on them. The other issue with Hawai’i is that, except for this particular modeling exercise in the paper, there’s really not a lot of consensus as to what global climate change will mean. On the mainland, it’s pretty easy, you got distribution limits and model the trees moving back and forth. Here our stuff is dominated by elevational effects, the level of the inversion layer, and whether El Nino becomes a permanent situation. All of those are completely different in terms of their effects.
I think we probably would put a lot more in here – planning for recovery and conservation in general in Hawai’i – if we had better information, better models. The larger problem now is predators. The idea of reducing predation on these species as a recovery priority is throughout these documents. We have no good long-term mechanism for large-scale predator reduction – rats, cats, mongoose.
Some of the most promising and effective technologies are expensive: predator-proof fencing. You can’t carve off a chunk of the island and make it an offshore island, so if you really want to keep animals out of an area, that’s a big deal. A fence is probably the most efficient way of doing this because it’s non-selective. Any of these predator baiting or trapping programs are species specific. In New Zealand, they take a very aggressive stand in terms of toxicants and fencing. But that all takes money.
Tummons: I saw the mammal-proof fence at Honomalino.
Burgett: It’s expensive initially and you have to have somebody maintain it. You put the investment in and maintain it, and the rewards inside that fence – people here have no idea! We were planning on doing that in the Kona forest. But the cost to do the upper third of the Kona forest refuge was $600,000 or something. And that’s the physical fence. But you could do that and then just have to monitor.
Of course, you can’t do it in forests like Hanawi that you don’t want to touch, or where you have a lot of tree fall. You have to be able to drive along it. But it’s a technology that has yet to really be tried. We’re working on one on a limited scale on Lana’i for rat control, as part of snail recovery.
But the combined fence that does it all, like the one at Honomalino, it keeps out everything from mouflon to mice. That’s a technology we can go for, and it’s off the shelf.
- 1. Cited in J.M. Scott, S. Conant, and C. van Riper III, “Introduction,” to Scott, Conant, and van Riper, eds., Evolution, Ecology, Conservation, and Management of Hawaiian Birds: A Vanishing Avifauna, published as Studies in Avian Biology 22 (2001) by the Cooper Ornithological Society.
2. Tracy L. Benning, Dennis LaPointe, Carter T. Atkinson, and Peter M. Vitousek, “Interactions of climate change with biological invasions and land use in the Hawaiian Islands: Modeling the fate of endemic birds using a geographic information system,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (October 29, 2002). They argue that global warming, combined with past land-use changes and biological invasions, will probably drive several species of birds to extinction, especially on the islands of Kaua’i and Hawai’i.
For Further Reading
J.M. Scott, S. Conant, and C. van Riper III, eds., Evolution, Ecology, Conservation, and Management of Hawaiian Birds: A Vanishing Avifauna, published as Studies in Avian Biology 22 (2001) by the Cooper Ornithological Society.
H. Douglas Pratt, Hawai’i’s Beautiful Birds, with photographs by Jack Jeffrey and Pratt (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 1996).
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Draft Revised Recovery Plan for the ‘Alala (Corvus hawaiiensis), December 2003.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Draft Revised Recovery Plan for Hawaiian Forest Birds, August 2003.
Alan C. Ziegler, Hawaiian Natural History, Ecology, and Evolution (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002). At page 251, Ziegler provides a table of families of all birds (including seabirds and ground-nesting birds) known to have existed in Hawai’i. Of the 104 endemic species of birds in Hawai’i (species found nowhere else), 47 became extinct before Western contact; 20 in the last two centuries.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 14, Number 9 March 2004
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