New book commemorates isles’ extinct birds

“Extinct Birds of Hawai‘i”

Michael Walther; illustrations by Julian P. Hume

Mutual Publishing, $21.95

In Hawaii forests the air is enlivened by the songs of birds, a treat that’s easy to take for granted until it’s gone. Such is the case on Guam, where, due to the predations of the brown tree snake, native birds have gone extinct and left the forests silent.

The good news: While alien species take a grave toll on native Hawaiian birds, we don’t have brown tree snakes — yet.

The bad news: We’ve been serving up a potent bird-extinction cocktail with multiple ingredients.

Our islands, where 77 bird species and subspecies have become extinct, are “the setting of an ongoing bird catastrophe,” Michael Walther writes in “Extinct Birds of Hawai‘i,” a book whose beautiful contemporary illustrations by Julian P. Hume, along with historical art by Frederick W. Frohawk and Johannes G. Keulemans, make the loss all the more poignant.

The book is well organized, with birds pictured by type — crakes, crows, finches, honeycreepers, rails — along with each one’s description, measurements, geographic range, time of first and last observation, and notes by naturalists. It produces something of the nostalgia of leafing through dinosaur books as a child, except that most of these extinctions took place over the past few centuries, not millions of years.

Hawaii’s endemic birds had few predators until humans arrived. The book quotes naturalist H.W. Henshaw’s 1902 observation of the oo, whose yellow wing feathers were coveted for helmets, capes and lei:

“When feeding … and with their young, the calls of the o-o [sic] are almost incessant … which has led to the easy destruction of the species. The poor bird has yet to learn that its appreciation of the joyousness of existence and its love for its mate and young can be expressed only at the cost of its very life.”

In addition to colorful honeycreepers like the oo, the islands once had singing thrushes; these plain brown birds weren’t hunted for their feathers, but perished from diseases transmitted by introduced mosquitoes and poultry as towns such as Lanai City grew, observed George C. Munro in 1944.

“When singing the head is always thrown well back, the throat full and free. … Once heard its character will live in the memory for years,” wrote William A. Bryan of the Molokai thrush in 1908. By 1944, Munro noted, it was gone.

Walther lists the factors decimating Hawaii’s native birds: “Predation by introduced rats, mongoose and feral house cats; competition with non-native bird species; destruction of forests by introduced cattle, sheep, goats and pigs; collection of bird feathers for making feather capes … mosquitoes spreading avian malaria … shooting of rare species by museum collectors between 1890-1910; and non-native vegetation displacing native vegetation.”

A concluding chapter focuses on our remaining birds, with photos by Walther, who worked with Hawaii native bird survey teams in the 1990s and now operates O‘ahu Nature Tours. Twenty-four Hawaii bird species are on the federal endangered species list, and some “have less than 150 individuals remaining,” he notes.

Perhaps the World Conservation Congress, to be held in Honolulu in September, will help us save what we’ve got so our children’s children might see and hear these winged barometers of our forests’ health.