A Thousand Years of Extinctions on the Islands of Hawaii

A review by Daniel Lewis

Extinct Birds of Hawai’i, by Michael Walther

Mutual Publishing, 2016

238 pages, hardcover

ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14693

Most of Hawai‘i’s endemic birds are endangered, some critically, as are many other animals and plants there. Before human settlement, the islands’ life forms had become almost freakishly abundant and diverse—“endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” as Darwin described evolution’s workings. Then humans arrived, and kept arriving, and their actions, both intentional and accidental, have reduced the biota to a fraction of its original extent. People bring complications, and their presence creates a tangle of ecological, political, economic, cultural, and philosophical challenges to the survival of endangered species. Much has been lost, and much more will probably be lost in the coming years.

Extinction as a phenomenon has been stubbornly ignored for most of the last 150 years. The British scientist Alfred Newton noted in an 1892 letter to R.C.L. Perkins, the legendary Hawaii-based bird and insect collector, “I know from experience that the belief in the continued existence of an extinct species dies very hard—people can’t understand why things cease to exist and therefore think that they go on.” To a degree, his words remain true today: People still have a difficult time accepting that birds can go extinct. More insidiously, we have had a difficult time understanding why it would matter in our own lives. Part of the equation is our lack of understanding of the species at risk: what they are, what their roles have been in nature’s tangled skein, and what is lost when they are gone.

Michael Walther and the illustrator Julian Hume’s concise but compulsively readable account, a welcome addition to the literature on Hawaiian birds, goes a long way to rectifying this lack of understanding. Its premise is simple: to list every known extinct bird from Hawai‘i, from species known only as fossils to those only relatively recently extinct. The book is modeled somewhat on Walther and Hume’s 2012 Extinct Birds, a text-heavy (and physically heavy!) summation of every known extinct bird. The Hawaiian work itemizes a total of 77 species and subspecies, and is leavened by wonderful color illustrations by Hume and by many images drawn from classic works on Hawaiian birds: Scott B. Wilson and Arthur H. Evans’s Aves Hawaiienses, issued in eight parts between 1890 and 1899 and illustrated by Frederick Frohawk; and Walter Rothschild’s Avifauna of Laysan, issued in three parts between 1893 and 1900, illustrated by Frohawk and John G. Keulemans. The latter covers not just the birds of tiny Laysan Island, far up the northwestern chain of Hawaiian islands, but the avifauna of the main seven islands as well.

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