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

By Daniel Lewis

A lively, rich natural history of Hawaiian birds that challenges existing ideas about what constitutes biocultural nativeness and belonging

This natural history takes readers on a thousand-year journey as it explores the Hawaiian Islands’ beautiful birds and a variety of topics including extinction, evolution, survival, conservationists and their work, and, most significantly, the concept of belonging. Author Daniel Lewis, an award-winning historian and globe-traveling amateur birder, builds this lively text around the stories of four species—the Stumbling Moa-Nalo, the Kaua‘I ‘O‘o, the Palila, and the Japanese White-Eye.

Lewis offers innovative ways to think about what it means to be native and proposes new definitions that apply to people as well as to birds. Being native, he argues, is a relative state influenced by factors including the passage of time, charisma, scarcity, utility to others, short-term evolutionary processes, and changing relationships with other organisms. This book also describes how bird conservation started in Hawai‘i, and the naturalists and environmentalists who did extraordinary work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9780300235463

Daniel Lewis

Daniel Lewis is the Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in Southern California, and a writer, college professor, and environmental historian. He writes about the biological sciences and their intersections with extinction, policy, culture, history, politics, law, and literature. Lewis holds the PhD in history and has held post-doctoral fellowships at Oxford, the Smithsonian, the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, and elsewhere. Lewis also serves on the faculty at Caltech, where he teaches environmental humanities courses, as well as at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He is also currently serving a five-year term on the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission, as a Bird Red List Authority member. His previous books include Belonging on an Island: Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in Hawai’i and The Feathery Tribe: Robert Ridgway and the Modern Study of Birds.

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Lewis

Belonging on an Island

LewisLewis

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 [e-mail] (U.S. office) or [e-mail] (U.K. office).

Frontis: Kaua‘i ‘Ō‘ō, July 1975 (Pencil sketch by H. Douglas Pratt; courtesy of Rob 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).

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For my daughter

Iris Palila Lewis

Me ke aloha kūmau kēia no Palila,

no ku‘u wahi manu hiwahiwa e hi‘ipoli mau ai.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

ONE

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

TWO

Counting Extinction: Observing and Surveying the Kaua‘i ‘Ō‘ō and Hawaiian Forest Bird Habitat

THREE

Overcoming Extinction: Collectors, Stewardship, and the Palila

FOUR

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

Epilogue

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

INDEX

Acknowledgments

I HAVE MANY DEBTS, BOTH OLD and new, for the kōkua 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 Hawai‘i: at the Bishop Museum, mahalo for assistance from Leah Pualaha‘ole Caldeira, Neal Evenhuis, and Molly Hagemann. Lynn Davis at UH Mānoa 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 Keawe‘ehu 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 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 Hawai‘i 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 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 Hawai‘i, 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 ‘ohana in Hawai‘i 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.

Belonging on an Island

Introduction

The death of a species is a more remarkable event than the end of an imperial dynasty.

—James Orton, The American Naturalist, 1869

ISLANDS ARE SPECIAL, AND BECAUSE 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 Hawai‘i—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 Hawai‘i—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 entangles ecological, political, economic, cultural, and philosophical challenges to the survival of endangered species.

Many people have claimed to be of Hawai‘i. 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 Hawai‘i—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 Hawai‘i, 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 Hawai‘i’s birdlife; there are others much better qualified, and I’m a historian, not a conservation biologist. But in the course of 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 Hawai‘i. 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 second chapter looks at the Kaua‘i ‘Ō‘ō, Moho braccatus—a member of a 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 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 Hawai‘i—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 Hawai‘i 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 Hawai‘i 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 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 ‘āina (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 Hawai‘i, 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 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 Hawai‘i 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 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 Hawai‘i, 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 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.

ONE

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

COUNTLESS WORDS HAVE BEEN 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 Hawai‘i? 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 Hawai‘i 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 Kaua‘i. 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 Hawai‘i are indelible. Famously put another way by William Faulkner, The past is never dead. It’s not even past.¹

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 Hawai‘i.²

But it was not just a problem in Hawai‘i. 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’ ability to reproduce successfully, evolutionary processes blossomed. In Hawai‘i, 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 Hawai‘i. 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 record in Hawai‘i, 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 Hawai‘i: 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 Hawai‘i 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

Hawai‘i 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 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 Hawai‘i. The Kōlea, 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 Hawai‘i 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.