Aloha, Po'ouli

New York Times
Aloha, Po'ouli: Farewell to a Hawaii Native We Will Never Meet Again

December 19, 2004
By LAWRENCE DOWNES

The people who try to save endangered species in Hawaii are
immune to despair. They have to be, to keep doing what they
do. They dangle on ropes from 3,000-foot sea cliffs on
Molokai to brush pollen on a flower whose only natural
pollinator - some unknown bird or insect - has died out.
They trudge into remote forests to play taped bird calls,
hoping that a survivor of a vanished species will reply. Or
they capture and tend one small bird, old for its kind and
missing an eye, then spend fruitless months searching for
another to be its mate.

That bird, a po'ouli, the last known member of its genus
and species, died in its cage on Maui on Nov. 26. The news,
briefly noted in the papers, was another milestone in a
long-running environmental catastrophe that is engulfing
the islands.

Hawaii does not look like an ecological disaster area. It's
too lush and sunny, too green and blue. But the state's
natural splendor masks a brutal, often desperate battle
against extinction. The islands' native animals and plants,
many found nowhere else in the world, evolved in splendid
isolation for millenniums. But in the two centuries since
Captain Cook, their numbers have plunged. Of the more than
1,200 animals and plants on the federal list of threatened
and endangered species, one-fourth - 317 - are Hawaiian.

Development, disease and predation have taken a ruinous
toll. Aggressive invaders like rats, mongooses, pigs,
mosquitoes and habitat-choking exotic plants now dominate
the lowlands. Many endemic species have retreated up the
mountains, clinging to patches of protected land - islands
within islands.

One such refugee was the po'ouli, a shy, nearly silent
brown bird with a black face that lived on the upper slopes
of the Haleakala volcano, climbing tree trunks and eating
insects and snails. The species was not discovered until
1973, when it was already in a death spiral. In 30 years
its numbers fell from a few dozen to three. The other two
are feared dead, though teams continue to trek through the
dense forest, hoping.

Wildlife biologists everywhere are accustomed to hard work
and heartbreak, of course. In many states it's a race to
save habitat from sprawl, as government agencies wage
political struggles and cut deals with private landowners
and commercial interests in rear-guard actions to spare the
marbled murrelets and spotted owls of this world from
oblivion. In Hawaii the battle is literal and immediate -
to destroy or deter invaders. Two of these are the
ecological equivalents of nuclear bombs: the brown tree
snake from Guam and the West Nile virus, either of which
could decimate native birds with appalling speed. Neither
has gained a foothold yet, thanks to luck and frantic
prevention efforts.

The po'ouli's demise is a signal that Hawaii's imperiled
species have received nowhere near the attention and money
needed to match the immensity of the problem. Teams of
biologists from federal and state agencies and private
organizations manage species-protection programs with
budgets totaling in the mere hundreds of thousands of
dollars, cobbling together grants and annual allocations
that are continually subject to being cut off, and begging
for private donations of money and time.

They make do with slivers of federal pork, and yearn for
someone in Hawaii's four-member Congressional delegation to
take up the cause more loudly. The federal Fish and
Wildlife Service, which recently cut funding for the
tree-snake interception efforts on Guam, has 49 other
states to deal with, and getting the Bush administration to
push for a major increase in the agency's budget seems
beyond hope.

Gov. Linda Lingle of Hawaii proudly points to her budget
request for $4 million to fight invasive species, noting
that this unimpressive sum is larger than any the state has
spent before. The state, in fact, has starved its
Department of Land and Natural Resources, which operates on
less than 1 percent of the state's $7.9 billion operating
budget and, according to an analysis by Environment Hawaii,
an advocacy group, recently had a grossly disproportionate
share of staff positions eliminated in a cost-cutting
drive.

For doses of optimism, it helps to talk to biologists in
the field. They point to progress in reforesting
pastureland and the surprising adaptability of some native
birds. A modest amount of money can go a long way, they
say, since Hawaiian species live in tight quarters -
wildlife refuges cover mere thousands of acres, making it a
relatively manageable job to fence out intruders.

Those who have made do with so little say they could do
much more. The captive-breeding program that tried
desperately to save the po'ouli, run by the San Diego Zoo,
has had several other successes, hatching and rearing the
'alala, or Hawaiian crow, which is extinct in the wild, and
the state bird, the nene goose. Dozens of puaiohi, small
thrushes, have been returned to the Alakai swamp on Kauai.

But the federal portion of the program's $920,000 budget
has been cut for the 2006 fiscal year, from $550,000 to
zero. Where the money might come from to keep the program
going is anybody's guess.

The po'ouli's quiet struggle to survive is over. There is
no time for silence about the struggles that remain.