Last Chance

Banko froze on lava. “Listen,” he intoned when the rubble stopped rolling. From a mamane grove 100 yards upslope I could just make out a palila’s whistled bedeleeep. The bird kept calling and moving from tree to tree, but at length we homed in on it. It was about the size of a robin, with a thick, hooked beak, gray back and underparts, and a striking yellow head and breast. Banko picked up a yellow mamane flower it had dropped. While palilas depend on mamane seeds, they eat other parts of the tree, too—buds, leaves, pollen, nectar, even immature seedpods. The stamens’ pollen-bearing sections were intact, which meant our bird had bitten through the flower and fed on nectar.

Bands—pink over white on the left leg and pink over aluminum on the right—told us this was one of two survivors, both males, from 21 birds reared in captivity and hacked to the wild by the Zoological Society of San Diego. These, together with 9 to 15 wild palilas (all that remain from 188 caught in mist nets on the west slope) comprise the total north-slope population, not sustainable but a start if habitat recovers. The Zoological Society, which is trying to learn how to better condition birds to the wild, will have released an additional seven captives by the time you read this.

The higher we climbed, the more hideous the sheep damage. Browse lines were stark; smaller trees were ragged, sickly, or dead. Mouflon mongrels like to stay high, and they’ve learned to avoid parts of the mountain easily accessed by sport hunters. The court has required the Division of Forestry and Wildlife (DFW) to conduct helicopter shoots twice a year for the past decade. So there has been some forest recovery. But because the division has dilly-dallied in construction of a mongrel-proof fence around palila critical habitat, mongrels keep filtering back in. It’s like trying to bail a screen-bottomed boat.

Next day we ascended the west slope, having driven out of the montane forest, where it was raining, and up into the subalpine forest, where the sky was blue save for the trade wind inversion and “vog”—volcanic smog from lava and gases venting from the Kilauea volcano on the island’s southeast coast. Alien fireweed spilled through mamane stands in yellow stains, competing with it for scarce moisture and drastically increasing its vulnerability to fire. The state’s consistent argument that sheep serve the ecosystem by removing the fire hazard of alien grasses was never a good one, but now, with fireweed displacing other aliens, it’s not even an argument. Sheep won’t touch the stuff. Many trees were dead or moribund, victims of mouflon mongrels, fireweed, or alien root fungus (possibly brought in with alien plum trees), or all three.

Banko plucked a mamane pod and cut open the seeds with his thumbnail. In one we found a cydia caterpillar, important sustenance for juvenile palilas. But cydias are being eaten by the larvae of alien wasps brought in to control pests of alien sugarcane in the days when biocontrol was guesswork. The drought had rendered most of the seedpods brown and useless to palilas. No year is a good year for these birds, but 2009 will be horrible.

Near the summit, inside a more or less mongrel-proof fence, we found endangered silverswords—shaped like pineapple tops and as metallic as aluminum Christmas trees. Mauna Kea means “white mountain,” a name that more likely derives from its once prolific silverswords than its snow. Old Hawaiians say that from the city of Hilo, 25 miles east, you could see the moonlight flashing on them.

Lower on the mountain, in the heart of critical habitat, we heard palilas all around us. In one tree we found three. Suddenly they dipped from high boughs, sculled east in tight formation, then circled back over our heads, backlit by the noonday sun—a vision from a younger, better, uninvaded Hawaii. 

Even half a century ago, when the state was conserving feral domestic sheep as game, anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of ecology could see what was happening. The March-April 1960 issue of Pacific Discovery ran a piece entitled “A Forest Dies on Mauna Kea,” in which Richard Warner, later a National Audubon consultant, wrote: “Continued neglect of the present situation can have only one outcome: the ultimate and complete destruction of the habitat. . . . The mountain will then no longer support either sheep or native plants or birds.” And in 1971 the state’s own biologists warned that Mauna Kea’s subalpine forest was “deteriorating, largely as a result of the accumulated impact of browsing by feral sheep and goats.”

Leading the charge to save bird and forest was vertebrate zoologist Alan Ziegler of Honolulu’s Bishop Museum. The Hawaii Endangered Species Act directs the state to “ ‘formulate programs for the conservation, management, and protection of indigenous birds and mammals,’ ” he noted in 1975 testimony to the Hawaii House of Representatives. “[But] not a single specific program has yet been formulated—or even publicly suggested. . . . Instead, each year [managers] spend thousands of dollars of state tax money to manage and maintain the Mauna Kea feral sheep herds, which continue to destroy the mountain.”

Six weeks earlier National Audubon’s executive vice president, Charles Callison, had complained in writing to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which had been helping fund the sustained management of feral ungulates, about the “absurdity of having this bird done in by a flock of sheep.” He received a boilerplate brush-off advising him that “the situation may not be as critical as some would have us believe” and instructing him to go talk to the division, which “we feel . . . is making a sincere effort to resolve the conflict.”