Photographs by Gary braasch
PRECARIOUS PERCH: On the southeast coast of Kauai, botanist Ken Wood searches for a native plant, the anaunau pepperwort, nearly driven to extinction by invasive species. Less than 200 specimens of the plant survive.
Lele au la, hokahoka wale iho
I fly away, leaving disappointment behind
-Hawaiian saying
One April morning, deep in the Alakai swamp on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, John Sincock and Jim Jacobi heard a sound that no one will ever hear again: a plaintive, flutelike oh-oh, oh-oh, drifting through the trees. Holding their breath, the two scientists crept toward a nearby ‘ohi’a tree and spotted the singer: a sharp-beaked black bird with tiny white throat feathers, an ebony-and-brown belly, and delicate yellow feathers gathered like bloomers on its upper legs.
Sincock and Jacobi knew they were seeing the rarest of the rare: a Kauai o‘o. In centuries past, Hawaiians sewed the bird’s yellow feathers into elaborate cloaks worn by chiefs. But that custom, like most of the birds, died out long ago. Sincock, a wildlife biologist about to retire from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, had located the o‘o nest about 10 years before. And now, before giving up his job in the wilderness, he had returned to share a last glimpse of it with Jacobi, now a botanist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Jacobi quietly clicked on his tape recorder before the male bird disappeared. Then he made a heart-wrenching mistake: He played the tape back, not realizing the volume was cranked to maximum. Seconds later the o‘o alighted on a nearby branch, drawn to the cadence it had long been pining for. It lingered for a while, then flew away.
TOUGH NUT: The ‘olapa is a target of feral swine, who like to uproot its seedlings in search of worms. Nevertheless, the native tree, whose only relative grows in the Marquesas Islands, has managed to stave off endangerment. |
That is not news. Hawaii has been struggling with this problem for decades. But biologists now say that the islands can be seen as a fast-forward to what the rest of the world will eventually face. Although destruction is more gradual on the continents, the same forces plundering Hawaii are likely to deprive the planet of as many as half its life-forms within just a few thousand years. “We are living right now in a mass extinction,” Cox says. That may be a conservative statement. Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, predicts Earth will lose a fourth of all its species in the next 30 years. Spurred by human activity, the crisis is occurring faster and could extinguish more species than the gigantic asteroid strike that may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. In rain forests throughout Hawaii and the rest of the world, one of every eight species is already near extinction. To Cox, each species is an irreplaceable masterpiece: “Imagine if I told you that one out of eight paintings in the National Gallery would be destroyed next year.”
BEYOND REACH? In the 1950s, the pokalakala was thought to be extinct, but today some 50 of the native trees are known to survive. In Kauai, Ken Wood gathers their pendulous fruits for planting an arboretum. |
SEED MONEY
A coalition of agencies and other organizations has aired a proposal for a $200 million, five-year program to fund everything from efforts to annihilate alien species to rare-plant rescue missions by helicopter. Now they are trying to line up sponsors to pay for it.
“We have to tie conservation to people’s core values and beliefs,” Johns says. But sometimes scientists and native Hawaiians disagree over what to protect. To scientists, for instance, feral pigs are contributing to the desturction of several species of silversword, a majestic relative of the sunflower that blooms once in a profusion of purple, then dies. But to many Hawaiians, pig hunts are a way of life. “There’s an underlying distrust between white guys and Hawaiians,” says Dan Polhemus, an entomologist with the Smithsonian Institution. “These wide gaps are very hard to bridge.”
‘Anihinihi ke ola
Life is in a precarious position
-Hawaiian saying
Steve Perlman, a botanist with the National Tropical Botanical Garden, is not one to idly watch a species wink out. He will literally risk his life if there’s a glimmer of hope of saving a rare Hawaiian plant. Even after shattering a vertebra in his neck in a surfing accident nine years ago, Perlman doesn’t hesitate to rappel down cliffs or bivouac on mountaintops in order to tend to his plant patients. Hawaii’s crumbly basalt is treacherous for climbers, and helmets “only protect your head—from small rocks,” Perlman says, laugh lines crinkling around gentle, light-blue eyes.
Late in July, in the Limahuli Valley of northwestern Kauai, Perlman and Dave Bender, a horticulturist at the Limahuli Gardens, confer over the fate of two ragged shrubs clinging to the side of a ravine. In this rugged land, graced by wispy coastal waterfalls that plunge hundreds of feet into the sea, 10 species are on the endangered list, including a native Hawaiian palm tree. The shrubs don’t look like much: They resemble scraggly office plants ignored for months on end. But even in this valley of the living dead, the shrubs—Cyanea kuhihewa—are in the worst shape of all, the last two of their kind.
“It’s depressing,” says Perlman. “We’re fighting a losing battle.” Under intermittent downpours he yanks out an alien weed crowding the cyanea. Known as Koster’s curse, or Clidemia hirta, the weed was brought to Hawaii in the 1940s as an ornamental plant. Now a helicopter flight over Limahuli reveals a landscape blighted by the plant’s furry leaves.
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Given breathing room, one cyanea offers a nice surprise. Beneath a tubular white flower with purple pinstripes—like runway lights for insects—hangs a small dark-orange fruit that may save the species. Perlman and Bender must decide whether to pick the fruit. It’s not yet ripe, so some seeds may not be viable. But at $600 an hour, helicopter rides into Limahuli are an indulgence, and the researchers may not be able to return here for several months. By then, Koster’s curse may have claimed two more victims.
After a brief discussion, Perlman and Bender decide to pluck the fruit while they have the chance and deliver it to the Lyon Arboretum in Honolulu, where the seeds can be coaxed to sprout. Perlman won’t be surprised if the comeback bid fails. “You’re dealing with terminally ill patients,” he says. “Some you’re going to lose.”
Still, he never seems to tire of playing the role of a botanical Cupid. A favorite target of his arrows is the alula, a cyanea relative found in the wild on Kauai’s cliffs. Studies have suggested that the alula, which rocks back and forth in the wind on its bulbous water-filled base, is dying out because it isn’t getting pollinated; researchers don’t know for sure, but they think the pollinator is the sphinx moth, a giant rarely seen anymore. Perlman has taken matters into his own hands. Suspended in midair, he reaches out and paints pollen from one alula onto another’s pistil. “They get filled with seed and explode,” he says.
Perlman and Ken Wood, another daredevil botanist at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, have logged more than 1,000 expeditions in the last decade to collect rare plant specimens or at least save their seeds. Paul Cox gloats over the daring duo he inherited when becoming director of the garden two years ago. “We have the best rough-trained botanists in the world,” he says. Cox wants to turn the garden into “a botanical ark” for the South Pacific, to shelter rare species with the intention of restocking native habitats someday. But if the habitats are lost, Jacobi warns, the ark could end up as little more than a high-priced collection of lost species. “We might as well just take nice pictures of them, in that case,” he says. “It’s cheaper.”
For an up-to-the-minute glimpse of Hawaii's ecological predicament, visit www.hear.org, which is run by the Hawaiian Ecosystems at Risk Project, a joint venture of the National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the University of Hawaii.
