Becoming Endemic

This 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. The White-eye, also known by its Japanese name Mejiro, has been a fixture in the islands since it was introduced on Oʻahu by the Hawaiʻi Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry (BCAF) in 1929, which was interested in birds primarily as a form of insect control. The White-eye's introduction was then continued by the Hui Manu, a private group founded in 1930 as an acclimatization society that introduced birds from around the world for aesthetic reasons.

Counting Extinction

This chapter looks at the Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, 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. Long after birds went extinct in prehistoric times at the hands of Polynesian settlers who had no apparent understanding of their role in extinction, a dramatic new understanding emerged, as represented in this chapter by the Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, through observation and documentation between 1966 and 1982. This period of observation also demonstrated the dramatic role the federal government could play in conservation matters in the islands. It was essential work, for it provided an enormous abundance of information previously unknown to science: the distribution, density, and presence or absence of birds in Hawaiʻi, especially forest birds; the identification of threats; and, possibly, clues to their future survival.

Introduction

This introductory chapter considers the spectrum that confounds the established scientific and cultural narrative about what “belongs” and what does not, and that the passage of time, even on a scale humans can readily make sense of, can reclassify something's belongingness. 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 Hawaiʻi, 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 thus became heroes in the twentieth, and vice versa.

Epilogue

This concluding chapter proposes that being a native in the islands—for humans as well as nonhumans—is a spectrum rather than a fixed category, not based on origin or means of arrival, but shaped and determined by an alchemical mix of time, charisma, relative scarcity, utility to others, evolutionary processes, and changing relationships with other organisms in their ecosystems. Nativeness is not the same thing as belonging—once scrutinized in this context, nativeness can be made into a fact. Belonging, on the other hand, is a judgment, and perhaps a sensation. The two also differ in this sense: once something is assigned status as a native, that status more or less becomes permanent. A sense of belonging, however, is more ephemeral, and can come and go.

Overcoming Extinction

This 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. The bird historically inhabited Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, and the Big Island, but now is found only on the latter. A nexus of collectors and publications swirled around the first descriptions of the Palila's life history and, simultaneously, around the discovery of other new Hawaiian birds in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The Palila was first named as such in an 1890 publication, but it did not live in a vacuum—rather, it was part of an ecosystem of discoveries, birds, plants, and naturalists, whose work in the last decade of the nineteenth century created a constant buzz of interest and discovery for Western science.

Sitting Ducks

This 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. It is 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. As such, the chapter asks what kinds of care the Hawaiians exercised 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.