Requiem for a Little Bird We Hardly Knew

Mourning the loss of the last known Poouli

By John W. Fitzpatrick

We mourn no tragedy more painfully than the death of a young child. It is not just losing the pure heart of youth that makes such a loss hurt so much. We ache because there was so much life left to live, so much more to have learned and loved. Dear child, we hardly knew you.

A Poouli on a branch of an ohia tree, photographed on Maui in 1997.

Photo by Paul Baker, Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project

With this very sense of loss we mourn today the quiet disappearance of a little bird, on November 26, 2004, barely 30 years after the species was discovered by a group of University of Hawaii college students. The individual that died was a male Poouli (Melamprosops phaeosoma), quite possibly the last of his kind in the world. This bird was old, and was missing one eye. Although he died in captivity, he had lived quietly, by himself, for seven or eight years in the dense, foggy, moss-draped understory of stunted ohia forests on the northeast slope of Haleakela Volcano on the island of Maui. Because he was growing old, and apparently doomed to a life without a mate, biologists and conservationists decided last year to capture him. With luck the one or two other solitary individuals known to remain might also be captured, thus giving the species a chance to breed—and survive—in captivity. Capturing the male required 14 tries and nearly a year of effort. During this same period, despite arduous searching, nobody ever saw the other two individuals. They are feared dead. No others are known to exist. This is probably the end of the Poouli, a peculiar species with no close relatives remaining on earth. And we hardly knew it.

Discovery of the Poouli in 1973 made huge news in the ornithological world. A member of the Hawaiian Honeycreeper family, it represented a mysterious genus new to science. Studies over the ensuing 20 years showed the species to be hanging on precariously close to extinction, limited to a small area of extraordinarily steep terrain and high rainfall, between 1,800 and 2,100 meters elevation. The birds fed mainly on small tree snails and arthropod larvae, which they probed out of billowy mosses and lichens in the understory and occasionally even on the ground within the very densest portions of the native forest. Alarmingly, the population was not just tiny, but it was also crashing.

Between its initial discovery and the 1990s, the population dropped from more than a hundred individuals down to just a handful. Importantly, studies showed the Poouli to exist only in the few areas remaining in the Maui rainforest where the density of introduced pigs was lowest. Feral pigs destroy both the structure and composition of native forests all over the world, and nowhere is this more evident—or more deadly—than on the Hawaiian Islands. On Maui, pig excavations also permitted the spread of the introduced garlic snail (Oxychilus aliarius), further reducing populations of the native snails on which Poouli depended. Introduced black rats preyed on their nests, and Poouli no doubt succumbed to malaria and avian pox carried by mosquitoes introduced to Hawaii in the 1800s.

Our misdeeds to the earth are nowhere more apparent than on tropical islands. Evolution on these tiny, isolated paradises produced specialists marvelously but innocently adapted to local conditions. Many exquisite examples were destroyed with the first wave of human settlement across the Pacific a thousand years ago, and we know them only from fossils. Others disappeared as sailors arrived and industry took hold, and these we know from early tales and from specimens. Still others hang in the balance today, and we struggle to keep them alive while we labor to restore their places and their balance. Alas, Poouli, you we hardly ever saw, and only barely knew. Will our tears be dry before the next Hawaiian bird follows? Although we found you too late to save you, at least you showed us what went wrong. We vow to undo what we?ve done to your home.

John W. Fitzpatrick is director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu