Posted on 12/18/2004 1:58:48 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
The people who try to save endangered species in Hawaii are immune to despair. They have to be, to keep doing what they do. They dangle on ropes from 3,000-foot sea cliffs on Molokai to brush pollen on a flower whose only natural pollinator - some unknown bird or insect - has died out. They trudge into remote forests to play taped bird calls, hoping that a survivor of a vanished species will reply. Or they capture and tend one small bird, old for its kind and missing an eye, then spend fruitless months searching for another to be its mate.
That bird, a po'ouli, the last known member of its genus and species, died in its cage on Maui on Nov. 26. The news, briefly noted in the papers, was another milestone in a long-running environmental catastrophe that is engulfing the islands.
Hawaii does not look like an ecological disaster area. It's too lush and sunny, too green and blue. But the state's natural splendor masks a brutal, often desperate battle against extinction. The islands' native animals and plants, many found nowhere else in the world, evolved in splendid isolation for millenniums. But in the two centuries since Captain Cook, their numbers have plunged. Of the more than 1,200 animals and plants on the federal list of threatened and endangered species, one-fourth - 317 - are Hawaiian.
Development, disease and predation have taken a ruinous toll. Aggressive invaders like rats, mongooses, pigs, mosquitoes and habitat-choking exotic plants now dominate the lowlands. Many endemic species have retreated up the mountains, clinging to patches of protected land - islands within islands.
One such refugee was the po'ouli, a shy, nearly silent brown bird with a black face that lived on the upper slopes of the Haleakala volcano, climbing tree trunks and eating insects and snails. The species was not discovered until 1973, when it was already in a death spiral. In 30 years its numbers fell from a few dozen to three. The other two are feared dead, though teams continue to trek through the dense forest, hoping.
Wildlife biologists everywhere are accustomed to hard work and heartbreak, of course. In many states it's a race to save habitat from sprawl, as government agencies wage political struggles and cut deals with private landowners and commercial interests in rear-guard actions to spare the marbled murrelets and spotted owls of this world from oblivion. In Hawaii the battle is literal and immediate - to destroy or deter invaders. Two of these are the ecological equivalents of nuclear bombs: the brown tree snake from Guam and the West Nile virus, either of which could decimate native birds with appalling speed. Neither has gained a foothold yet, thanks to luck and frantic prevention efforts.
The po'ouli's demise is a signal that Hawaii's imperiled species have received nowhere near the attention and money needed to match the immensity of the problem. Teams of biologists from federal and state agencies and private organizations manage species-protection programs with budgets totaling in the mere hundreds of thousands of dollars, cobbling together grants and annual allocations that are continually subject to being cut off, and begging for private donations of money and time.
They make do with slivers of federal pork, and yearn for someone in Hawaii's four-member Congressional delegation to take up the cause more loudly. The federal Fish and Wildlife Service, which recently cut funding for the tree-snake interception efforts on Guam, has 49 other states to deal with, and getting the Bush administration to push for a major increase in the agency's budget seems beyond hope.
Gov. Linda Lingle of Hawaii proudly points to her budget request for $4 million to fight invasive species, noting that this unimpressive sum is larger than any the state has spent before. The state, in fact, has starved its Department of Land and Natural Resources, which operates on less than 1 percent of the state's $7.9 billion operating budget and, according to an analysis by Environment Hawaii, an advocacy group, recently had a grossly disproportionate share of staff positions eliminated in a cost-cutting drive.
For doses of optimism, it helps to talk to biologists in the field. They point to progress in reforesting pastureland and the surprising adaptability of some native birds. A modest amount of money can go a long way, they say, since Hawaiian species live in tight quarters - wildlife refuges cover mere thousands of acres, making it a relatively manageable job to fence out intruders.
Those who have made do with so little say they could do much more. The captive-breeding program that tried desperately to save the po'ouli, run by the San Diego Zoo, has had several other successes, hatching and rearing the 'alala, or Hawaiian crow, which is extinct in the wild, and the state bird, the nene goose. Dozens of puaiohi, small thrushes, have been returned to the Alakai swamp on Kauai.
But the federal portion of the program's $920,000 budget has been cut for the 2006 fiscal year, from $550,000 to zero. Where the money might come from to keep the program going is anybody's guess.
The po'ouli's quiet struggle to survive is over. There is no time for silence about the struggles that remain.
I could have sworn a few species on Earth died before the eeeeeeeeevil USA existed. Yet now if any species dies for any reason...
You know the rest.
Much of Hawaii's land is military. It seems like they
could foot the bill for a few conservation efforts. When
I lived there the military decided to put in a road right
through an ancient burial park that had exquisite trees and plants. It didn't matter what anyone else thought about it so the road went in.
was another milestone in a long-running environmental catastrophe
Almost as bad as the Exon Valdez? Give me a break. This is only a catastrophe in an environmentalist eyes. In my eyes it the state of a decomposing earth which will one day be completely destroyed. Now that will be a catastrophe in the eyes of unbelievers.
The Hawaiians themselves wiped out bird species they hunted for feathers for royalty cloaks. Introduced cats and mongeese wiped out a bunch though. Extinctions occur naturally, but some things we've done have really sped it up.
The worst thing for the Hawaiian environment is wild pigs, which dig up a lot of near extinct plants. Every time a new golf course goes up the reef off the coast dies from runoff also, really sad. What happened to Kaneohe bay was really disgusting.
We KNOW he can afford it, LOL.
Just bought an acre in Hawaii (closed last week). Seems to have a lot of beautiful birdlife. The coquii frogs are proliferating, though, and they are noisy. No one likes them.
"These extinctions mark some of the great transitions in life, when new groups of species got the opportunity to take over the niches of old ones. Mammals, for example, only dominated the land after giant dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. We humans, in other words, are the children of extinctions." - Georges Cuvier, statement made somewhere around 1800
So the NT Times(Slimes) is now an expert in HI things huh?! East Coast condescention(sp?) at it's best!
They want to have more power in Congress, so they vote in a bunch of democrats and complain that no one listens to them. Seems foolish to me. If I were looking to get someone's attention, I wouldn't send a representative of the minority party. I would find someone in the majority party and send them. The new governor is a Republican, and the Congress is so excited to discover a new species (Hawaiian Republican) they'll probably give her anything she wants just to be sure the species thrives and grows.
No worries; a new species will evolve, any day now, and replace the one that's been lost. and it will be very exotic and exciting, too. These things all even out ...
Hawaiian: Po'o = Head and Uli = dark color.(dark headed)
Those frogs are as annoying as hell! Just be thankfull that the cane toad never made it to Hawaii!
I doubt this guy was talking aboout "Darwinian" topics in 1800, unless he had a time machine.
There will always be extinctions as certain species can't cut it under current conditions. Freezing this moment in time is what environmentalists would like to do, both in species management and global climate, but fail to recognize what a weird aberration that would be in history.
True. I guess the statement is a later paraphrase (with embellishment) of Cuvier's idea of mass extinction.
What a pathetic cry for, yes once again, more money. If environmentalists can't make a decent living, perhaps they should get another job instead of creating these "whoa is the earth" myths in order to pick our pockets.
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