For the past few weeks, Kauila and Kinohi have been receiving some rather special treatment. Both birds are ‘alala, or Hawaiian crows, a species that is so critically threatened that it has become extinct in the wild. Fortunately, captive populations reside at the San Diego Zoo’s Keauhou and Maui Bird Conservation Centers in Hawaii, where every possible effort is being made to improve the future for the species.
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It’s that time of year again! The flowers are blooming, the bees are buzzing, and the birds are…well, the birds are busy making BABIES!!! On the afternoon of April 20, 2006, the Hawaii Endangered Bird Conservation Program celebrated the hatching of its 200th puaiohi (pu-ai-o-he), pictured here.
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Many people equate this time of the year with ” spring cleaning.” It’s the time to sweep the cobwebs out of the corners, open windows to air out rooms, and dust all of those hard-to-reach areas. For the biologists of the Hawaii Endangered Bird Conservation Program, spring cleaning is when we prepare for the season’s eggs and chicks, and it involves a lot more then dusting for cobwebs!
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It has been the goal of the Puaiohi Release Program to establish this rare thrush in every corner of the Alakai Wilderness Area on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Over the past 7 years we have released 94 birds in the Halepaakai and the Kawaikoi River drainages. But, we still aspire to establish puaiohi in the most remote corners of the Alakai.
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At the Maui Bird Conservation Center (MBCC) the air is filled with the patter of little webbed feet and shrill peeps from downy chicks only days old. The onset of winter means two things to biologists working on Maui: afternoon rain showers and goslings galore. This season is no different as the first goslings began hatching during the middle of a wet November, culminating with four goslings hatching on Thanksgiving Day. MBCC manages four nene breeding pairs. Their first clutches collectively produced 18 goslings from 18 fertile eggs–100% hatchability!
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One of the most effective ways of helping students of all ages connect to conservation is through art, in all of its forms. In Hawaii this is especially true. Hawaiian tradition celebrates many art forms that are often lacking in western cultures. Such art exists in dance (hula), oral traditions (chants), basket making, wood carving, lei making, gourd scribing, pictographs and petroglyphs, and of course, painting.
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On November 26, 2004, a little brown bird with a little black mask quietly died. About the size of a sparrow, he was very likely the very last of his kind. Carefully packed in ” blue ice,” he was shipped from Maui to the Pathology Division of CRES at the San Diego Zoo. Dr. Bruce Rideout came in to work on a quiet, dry Sunday to do a necropsy””a postmortem exam similar to an autopsy. His goal? To try to find out why exactly the bird had died.
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Since the inception of the Hawaii Endangered Bird Conservation Program in 1994, a key component has been the Intern Program. This program provides the opportunity for young professionals to work in a conservation program for three to six months, learning the details of what it takes to operate a propagation facility. |inline

We are often asked how we developed the techniques that have proven to be so successful in the propagation of the endangered species of Hawaii. The answer is we began to develop our procedures and protocols with the more common, non-endangered native Hawaiian species in order to discover what challenges to expect when faced with incubating the eggs and hand-rearing the chicks of Hawaii’s endangered species, some of the rarest and most threatened species in the world. From 1993 to 1999 we ” practiced” our art on what we call the ” surrogate species”–the more common `apapane, `i`iwi, `elepaio, `amakihi, and `oma`o in preparation for the arrival of the first eggs from the endangered palila, creeper, `akepa, puaiohi, Maui parrotbill, and akohekohe. |inline

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