Dressed in white, their graceful arms outstretched like wings, bright eyes flashing and bare feet darting, the hula dancers of Hālau Nāwehiokaipoaloha transform themselves into a lively, preening flock of koa‘e kea, the white-tailed tropicbird that nests high in volcanic cliffs and soars down to the sea to dive for fish.
“You have to be the koa‘e,” says Kumu Hula Ipolei Lindsey-Asing, founder and teacher of the hālau, or hula school. “Show what a beautiful manu (bird) you are and how important you are in our environment.” The hālau performed its hula honoring the koa‘e in October at the Hawai‘i Island Festival of Birds. After several years on hiatus and onlineonly, the event, held last year on the Big Island by the Hawai‘i Wildlife Center and the Conservation Council for Hawai‘i, convened scientists, environmental groups and the public in an opportunity to share information on the islands’ vanishing birds and efforts to save them.
Long celebrated as a hotspot of endemism, or species found nowhere else, Hawai‘i also has become known as a capital of extinction. In the nearly 250 years since Western colonization, almost half of Hawai‘i’s 73 endemic bird species and subspecies have gone or are presumed extinct, according to the North American Bird Conservation Initiative’s 2022 State of the Birds report. Threats to native wildlife and plants include habitat loss due to climate change, tourismrelated development, recreational overuse of land and other resources, avian malaria transmitted by invasive mosquitoes, competition from other introduced species and pollution. And then there’s the risk of wildfire, looming ever larger following last year’s devastating blazes in west Maui that killed at least 101 people and ravaged more than 15,000 acres.
In 2023 alone, eight species of honeycreeper—a family of small forest birds—were declared extinct. Another 12 honeycreepers, among a
