BIRD’S EYE VIEW
WITNESS Starting in this issue, our opening essay will represent a variety of views, both from within and outside of ABC.
by Sheila Conant, Ph.D.
For this piece, I was asked to write about what it feels like to have seen now-extinct bird species in the wild. Different emotions come into play: Sadness that they are gone, gratitude that I saw and heard them in the wild, despair, and oftentimes anger that, at this moment, other species are perilously close to extinction … to being gone … forever. That’s what it feels like to me. I have seen seven species that are now extinct.
I
n 1965, I began studying the O‘ahu ‘Elepaio, a species related to the Old World monarch flycatchers that is found only on its namesake island.
This was during my second year at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Back then, I could walk out our back door in Mānoa Valley and into the forest in less than five minutes to search for nests and observe the birds’ behavior. At that time, the O‘ahu ‘Elepaio was still widely distributed and fairly common in both the Wai‘anae and Ko‘olau Mountain Ranges.
Before they disappeared forever, the author saw the Maui Nukupu‘u, shown in this painting by John Gerrard Keulemans, and the ‘Ō‘ū (facing page), plus five other now-extinct Hawaiian bird species.
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B I R D CO N S E R V A TI ON | SU M M ER/ FA L L 2022