![]() One species had a short, stout bill used to crush seeds and snails another a multi-tool beak with an upper mandible twice as long the lower-the lower used to hammer bark while the upper slipped into crevices and holes to hook insects. What’s most striking about honeycreepers is their variety of bill sizes and shapes. They came in shades of yellow, green, orange, and red, and ranged in size from four to eight inches in length. From one ancestral species of Eurasian Rose Finches, which arrived in the Islands more than seven million years ago, more than 50 new species evolved and descended. Six of the eight species belong to a family of passerines endemic to Hawaii and known as honeycreepers, recognized for their astonishing process of rapid evolution. The Kāmaʻo, a dark brown fruit-eating thrush closely related to the mainland Townsend's Solitaire, was considered extremely abundant in Kauaʻi's wet forests in the early 1900s. The Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō was the last surviving species in its family of nectar-eating songbirds the entire bird family is now extinct. “But admitting that these species are gone forever puts an even finer point on it.” ![]() “Hawaii has been in a conservation crisis for a long time,” Hanna Mounce, coordinator for the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project, says. They all were driven extinct for similar reasons: destruction of forest habitat, invasive predators, and avian malaria, a mosquito-borne disease introduced to the Islands within the last few centuries. Half of the newly extinct Hawaiian birds were once found only on Kauaʻi. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker and Bachmann’s Warbler are also extinct, according to the agency. The other seven are the Kauaʻi ʻAkialoa, Kauaʻi Nukupuʻu, Kāmaʻo or Large Kauaʻi Thrush, Maui Ākepa, Maui Nukupuʻu, Kākāwahie or Molokai Creeper, and Poʻouli. Eight of those species, including the Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, are Hawaii forest birds. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) declared 23 species across the United States extinct and proposed they lose protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). No one will ever hear it sing in the wild again. The mostly black bird with tufts of striking yellow feathers on its thighs was last seen in 1985 and last heard in 1987. Pratt was lucky to hear the Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, and was one of the last people to do so. ![]() “Their song can be described as both haunting and evocative.” The bell-like vocal clarity was unmistakable, though the bird was extremely rare the species was listed as federally endangered in 1973, with an estimated population of 36 surviving individuals. “I can still recall the hair standing up on my neck,” the retired ornithologist says. Douglas Pratt awoke in his tent pitched on Hawaii’s Alakaʻi Plateau to the song of the Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō. ![]()
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