"Frantic conservation efforts couldn’t save the tiny, intricately colored songbird, whose obit is the first in our new series of memorials for species that have gone extinct in living memory"
"The last po’ouli died in an unusual nest. Too weak to perch, the brownish-greyish songbird rested in a small towel twisted into a ring. He was the last of his species, the last in fact of an entire group of finches, and occurred nowhere on Earth outside its native Hawaii. For weeks, as scientists tried to find him a mate, he had been getting sicker. The only remaining po’ouli had just one eye. Alone in the towel, alone in all the world, he closed it.
He was born, like all po’ouli (pronounced po-oh-oo-lee), in Maui’s Hana rainforest, on the slopes of Mount Haleakalā – “house of the sun” – where it rains all the time. Also known as the blackfaced honeycreeper, his species was discovered in 1973. Then, researchers estimated the total population at 200 birds.
Scholar Mary Kawena Pukui gave the bird its name, meaning “black head”. Her book of Hawaiian proverbs includes this one: Hāhai nō ka ua i ka ululāʻau, “the rain follows the forest”. The phrase has a double meaning: it is a hint and warning. To find water, look for forests. But also: should one element of an ecosystem be destroyed, others will surely follow.
By 1997, just five po’ouli remained. That year, on an unusually bright day, researchers caught one for the first time. It had taken Paul Baker, a British ecologist a long way from home, half of every month for two years. Climbing up and down Mount Haleakalā’s muddy hills meant that at just 33, he would soon need a knee operation. But it was worth it."
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