Nearly All Native Hawaiian Birds At Risk Of Extinction
Hawaii's native avian population is in peril, with nearly all the state's birds in danger of becoming extinct, a federal report says.
One-third of the nation's endangered birds are in Hawaii, said the report, issued Thursday by the Interior Department. Thirty-one Hawaiian bird species are listed as endangered, more than anywhere else in the country.
"That is the epicenter of extinctions and near-extinctions," said John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which helped produce the study. "Hawaii is (a) borderline ecological disaster."
Hawaii's native birds are threatened by the destruction of their habitats by invasive plant species and feral animals like pigs, goats and sheep.
Diseases, especially those borne by mosquitoes, are another killer.
One of those in trouble is the palila, a yellow-crowned songbird that lives on the upper slopes of Mauna Kea. Its population plunged by more than 60 percent from 6,600 in 2002 to 2,200 last year.
Habitat loss and predators are part of the problem, said Holly Freifeld, a vertebrate recovery coordinator with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Honolulu.
Another is that grazing feral sheep ruin mamane trees, which provide palila birds with their preferred food: mamane seed pods. The trees are also being killed by disease.
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The Fish and Wildlife Service plans to fence off an area on Mauna Kea, and remove sheep from the fenced area, to give the palila an environment where it can flourish, Freifeld said.
The restored habitat would also likely help other endangered birds which also have lived in the same forest ecosystem, she said.
Similar habitat restoration projects have worked in the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge.
