Laura Erickson's For the Birds

What we used to call the “AOU Checklist”—the list of “countable” American birds as defined by the American Birding Association using the American Ornithologists’ Union’s checklist, used to include just North America north of the Mexican border. Now the scientific organization has become the American Ornithological Society, and their checklist covers all the species in North and Middle America, from the North Pole to the border of Panama and Colombia, including adjacent islands, and also the Hawaiian Islands. Virtually all field guides and other books about American birds follow the old tradition and don’t include any Hawaiian birds. I asked Lillian Stokes and Matt Young why they made the unusual decision to include the Hawaiian honeycreepers in their brand new Stokes Guide to Finches of the United States and Canada.

LILLIAN: On the cover of the finch book, you know, there are photos of seven finches and we include the Palila and there’s a little button that says includes the honeycreepers of Hawaii. Matt, you want to talk about why we did it?

LAURA: And how they got there in the first place?

LILLIAN: very, very important, you know, they, they kind of landed five to seven million years ago and an ancestor of today’s common rose finches just flew out across the ocean, flew and flew and flew, landed in Hawaii and then radiated that.

MATT: Yeah, so as, as Lillian just said, approximately five million years ago, the thought is, you know, rose finches landed there, radiated out to these 55 plus species. Unfortunately, and the reason why we really wanted to cover them, because there’s a conservation crisis going on in Hawaii, there’s only 16 species left of them in the wild. We just lost, lost ʻAkekeʻe in the wild. There are some in captivity. So there’s only 16 species now left. Well, big issue going on is Avian Malaria is the big issue that’s unfortunately this non native mosquito, one of bites, one of the honeycreepers, they just don’t have the defenses.

LAURA: And how does climate change figure into that? Because that is exacerbating it.

MATT: Well, yeah, so, you know, as the earth is warming these, did they’re not really cold tolerant the mosquitoes, but as the earth is warming, they’re going upslope, where a lot of these honeycreepers can be found. And as it moves upslope, it now is starting to bite some of these higher elevation species and they’re also in steep decline. So it’s, yeah, we really just wanted to bring to light this group that needs attention.

We, you know, met with the American Bird Conservancy and they’re kind of heading this initiative, the Birds Not Mosquitoes Initiative, multi-agency organizational effort to try to save the honeycreepers there. So they’re, you know, they’re, they’re basically taking a male and, you know, they’re using this Wolbachia bacteria to create this kind of incompatibility in the Wolbachia between the males and the females. So when the females, you know, lay the eggs, those won’t be fertile eggs and that way the populations hopefully will decline over time and we’ll be able to save the last species of the honeycreepers.

LILLIAN: : it’s a ongoing effort, it’s a ongoing effort. It’s basically mosquito birth control. So, you know, how to get rid of the mosquitoes and how to stop them and then save the, save a lot of the birds and of course save habitat too. And of course, you know, it’s climate change. So the more all of us can do to support organizations that are fighting climate change, the better it is.

MATT: Yeah, that means like, like Lillian said, it’s going to be an ongoing effort. This is going to take a while. This isn’t going to go away. And that’s why, you know, we’re Finch Research Networks also doing presentations to raise awareness around this group as well. So anything we can do to kind of bring more attention and hopefully raise awareness and some funding for the project, you know, we’re all behind.

That was Matt Young and Lillian Stokes, authors of the new Stokes Guide to Finches.