The loss of the species is really, really hard to wrap your head around.
But there are also individuals that we know.
I guess to me the biggest fear is we do nothing at all,
Because if we do nothing at all, I'm pretty sure the birds are gone.
The Honeycreepers are a distinct Hawaiian family of birds that descended from a Eurasian rose finch
and these species diversified into more than 50 Honeycreeper species in the Hawaiian Honeycreeper
family. Avian malaria, it's a novel disease, just like the coronavirus was novel to us,
with all the devastating consequences that we have seen with the coronavirus.
Because of this, the lack of natural immunity, some of the honey species fall like flies.
It is an introduced disease carried by introduced mosquitoes, and
the whole system has only been at play for about 100 years.
Mosquitoes were introduced in the 1800s with the traffic in the whaling era, and
the birds are retreating.
The endangered species are retreating into the heart of the island
in the highest elevations.
Neither mosquitoes nor the bacteria that causes avian malaria like cold temperatures.
What we have seen and what the climate change models have predicted was that as the climate warmed,
those warmer temperatures would just keep rising up and up and up the mountain.
The birds, they would basically just be forced off the mountain by mosquitoes
and so we have been sounding alarm bells.
At one of our sites, the ʻAkikiki used to number 35 pairs in 2015,
and since 2018, we have gone down to only three males and one female at that
site. Meanwhile, we have seen mosquitoes at a level we had never, ever seen before.
The site is going to be vacant.
You know, we feel like it's like walking into a ghost town.
This place that was the core of the ʻAkikiki world, their castle, their bastion,
where we always thought that they would do the best.
You walk in and it's empty streets.
It's really it's really sad and
for my team, it's been especially heartbreaking because the birds are ringed so we we know individuals
and this year, Justin my my main guy went out and he was monitoring this pair that he knew from
last year and part way through the season, the female is just gone and the male was beside
himself. He was all over his territory, calling and singing and trying to find a mate.
Justin just could barely keep it together.
You know, it's just,
we know we're supposed to be objective scientists, but when you see not only just like the loss of the species is really, really hard to
wrap your head around, but they're also individuals that we know.
That being said, we can't be hopeless.
If we're hopeless, it's all over.
The minute we give up hope, there is no hope.
So this is where I get sad.
In North America, there's a story that I read as a kid called The Little Engine That Could.
So if you don't know the story, it's a little steam engine that is asked to do the job of a big
engine,
and it's not sure it can,
but it just believes.
So if we don't think we can, where are we?
We have to think that we're going to choose the right solution and I guess to me,
The biggest fear is we do nothing at all, because if we do nothing at all, I'm pretty sure the birds are gone.
We have to take some concrete actions and it's hard because we're not sure we're taking the right action,
but I'm pretty sure that any action is better than inaction.
I think the right choice for this moment is really working hard to accelerate the mosquito control on the
landscape, Taking big, bold steps to make that happen.
The tool we are looking at to do that is a bacteria that occurs already
in mosquitoes and other insect species throughout Hawaii.
When a male mosquito and a female mosquito breed and they have different strains of this bacteria,
Wolbachia in their guts,
the female's eggs are unviable and cannot develop.
So what we have been doing is collecting mosquitoes from the wild, bringing them into the lab,
Clear their natural Wolbachia infection from them with an antibiotic
and then we introduce a different strain of Wolbachia than the wild population is carrying,
and we release them back into the wild and so most matings end up with these inviable eggs.
So it works as mosquito birth control.
The problem is we're still probably a couple of years out,
Both on the science front and on the public approval.
Endangered species are protected.
It seems a bit ironic, but sometimes you also move more slowly to protect them.
Because you do have to make sure you're doing the exact right thing,
and it's not always obvious what that exact right thing is.
I think longer term, really what we all need to do is we need to, as a society, address climate change.
I mean, really at the end of the day, we are going to be controlling mosquitoes in perpetuity
if we can't manage global warming.
These are all stopgap measures.
The Fish and Wildlife Service officially proposed to remove 23 species,
From the endangered species list.
All the experts have had to finally admit that they are really gone and they are not coming back.
So many species on that list were from Hawaii.
There's a real commitment to make sure that we do not witness another
round of extinctions and.
So that my successor isn't reviewing 20 years from now a status document on the ʻAkikiki
and having to be like, Yeah, we're really not going to see that bird again.
Like, none of us want to be there.
But also as a scientist, I know how important they are to the whole health of the
forest. Many of the honeycreepers that are remaining are insectivores, so they're always maintaining
pest populations that would otherwise infect the trees and cause the tree's demise.
The ʻIʻiwi, one of the Honeycreepers, a bright red one with a really long beak,
is the main remaining pollinator left in the forest.
So it ensures that all these fruiting shrubs and trees can continue to spread their pollen throughout the forest.
And then the thrush, the Puaiohi, also found only on Kaua'i, is responsible for dispersing fruit.
And one of the things to understand about the Hawaiian Islands is how much rain we get.
So if we don't have a healthy forest sopping up all the rain that's pounding down on the tops of these mountain
tops, we have no water control, we have no water management, we have catastrophic flooding,
we also have no filtration of water to provide drinking water and recharging of the aquifers.
So the birds are essential to the whole proper functioning of the Hawaiian Islands.
This is a call to action.
This is depressing news.
But again, we don't have time to wallow in despair.
This just has to be like, okay, time to get going.