Auckland Museum marks loss of one more bird

By PHILIP ENGLISH

The extinction of a native Hawaiian bird called the Kauai O'o has been marked at the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

A single specimen of the bird comprising its empty skull, beak, skin, legs and feathers has been moved to a special cabinet reserved for extinct species of birds.

The museum bird curator, Dr Brian Gill, moved the specimen, known as a study skin, from its resting place in the main collection of thousands of other birds to the cabinet after learning of its extinction.

The cabinet contains mostly extinct New Zealand birds, including the huia, the piopio and the South Island kokako, but also others from Hawaii and some from Norfolk Island. They are not on public display.

The Kauai O'o, a honeyeater like the New Zealand tui, bellbird and stitchbird (hihi), was collected by ornithologist G. C. Munro on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in January 1893.

The brilliant yellow feathers in part of its plumage were used in the cloaks of Hawaiian nobility. Thousands of the birds were captured alive, plucked and, it is said, set free. In spite of the demand for the feathers, the bird was driven to extinction by only habitat loss after European settlement. In the 1980s the population dropped below 10.

Now it is thought the native Hawaiian plants the Kauai O'o pollinated could be bound for extinction.

Dr Gill said the Pacific had a disproportionate number of birds facing extinction because most lived on islands where they had to compete against habitat loss and introduced predators in the past 100 to 200 years.

But the present round of extinctions was the second wave of Pacific extinctions following the settlement of the region by Polynesians up to about 3000 years ago he said.

"There was a huge revelation in Hawaii where they discovered from bones that Hawaii had this enormous fauna of flightless ibises and flightless geese, all sorts of things that had hitherto been unimagined, and the bones showed these things were there until Polynesians arrived."

Dr Gill said the killing of the Kauai O'o specimen in 1893 would have had an insignificant impact on the species' survival.

"It is sad, but the way I look at it is [conservationists] are fighting the battle out in the field trying to prevent these animals from becoming extinct. My mission really is similar but different. I am there to try and preserve the remains of animals ...

"It is sad to know the bird is now extinct, but on the other hand I am pleased we have a specimen and I can give it the good care that it requires and we can hope that that specimen will be around for another couple of hundred years and can be used by people for research."