Maui Amidst the Sixth Extinction
1900: The magnate Walter Rothschild observes a Maui Nukupu’u (Himignathus affinis), a species never seen anywhere on earth except on a single island in its most remote archipelago. Like many other species endemic to the Hawaiian islands, the Maui Nukupu’u’s curved bill is designed for extracting nectar from flowering plants that grow beneath the canopy of the island’s unique tropical forests.
1902: Humans observe the last Maui Nukupu’u, just ten years after the bird was observed for the first time by white people. 36 taxidermied specimens still exist in museums.
1961: State-owned trucks haul convicts up the flanks of Haleakala volcano on the island of Maui, gears grinding as the wheels slowly ascend switchbacks. The mountain’s mid-elevation hillsides, once blanketed with a verdant forest of koa and ohi’a trees, are desolate and eroding. Without forest cover, heavy tropical rains rush off in torrents toward the ocean. The convicts plant eucalyptus and mountain ash, invasive species from two different continents, in an attempt to prevent erosion and preserve groundwater for ranchers on the island. Hawaii’s endemic bird species, such as the honeycreepers whose food sources lived under the koa and ohi’a canopy, careen toward extinction as quickly as turbid waters run off the mountainside. Two invasive species--rats and pigs--root through leaf litter once inhabited by flightless birds unique to these islands.
2017: Mosquitoes, another invasive species, rise higher up the mountainside every year as warming temperatures force endangered birds into an ever-narrowing band of habitable forest. Rising ocean temperatures are bleaching coral reefs across the world, threatening the 500 native species of fish in Hawaii that live amongst her reefs. Extinct birds of Maui include the Nukupu’u, Maui Akepa, Po’ouli, Oloma’o, and O’u. The Kiwikiu (Maui Parrotbill) and Akohekohe (Crested honeycreeper) survive, but are endangered. In the forest reserve of Makawao, trees planted by convicts a half century ago have created a new canopy. Few indigenous plants live in the nearly vacant understory, and few birds flit amongst the trees. Along one stream, there is a single native tree fern. Visitors to the six mile “forest reserve” will encounter more wayfinding signs and mountain bike jumps than species of native plants.
Prior to human contact, a new species reached and survived on the Hawaiian islands once every 10,000 to 20,000 years. The islands’ extreme isolation, thousands of miles from other land, resulted in development of extraordinary species and ecosystems. In the absence of rodents, large and small flightless birds thronged Hawaii’s forest floor and beaches. Of at least 140 bird species on Hawaii, approximately 80 were lived on the ground. 113 of the 140 species lived on the Hawaiian islands and nowhere else on earth. Since Polynesians arrived over 1,000 years ago--which is very recent compared to the duration of human habitation of North America--71 of Hawaii’s 113 endemic species have gone extinct.
The Laysan Rail was wiped out on its eponymous island after Max Schlemmer, who operated a guano company in the early 20th century, introduced rabbits and hares. Rabbits wiped out the grasses in which the Laysan Rail lived. The last observation of a Laysan Rail on the island was in 1923, and was recorded by Donald Dickey: “Schlemmer came up holding a Laysan Rail in his hand...Meanwhile I held alive and unhurt in my hand one of the two Laysan Rails we know are left on the island, noted his red iris and green basally bill and depauperate wings, developed plumage.” A smaller population survived on Midway Atoll until 1943, when rats escaped from a ship and overran the island, wiping out the few Laysan Rails that remained on earth.
The extinction of the Laysan Rail was atypical: More Hawaiian species perished between the arrival of Polynesians and European contact than have gone extinct since Captain Cook arrived in 1778. Polynesians made numerous trips back and forth as they settle the Hawaiian islands, bringing a wide range of new species such as bananas, breadfruit, pigs, and probably rats. They cleared massive swaths of forests, which combined with invasive mammals wiped out numerous species of flightless birds. One of the last true wildernesses on earth became more of a polyglot garden. The Polynesians’ alterations of Hawaiian ecosystems was so profound that it likely had impacts on their own mobility and trade: Sometime around the 13th century, Hawaiians stopped travelling to and from their former home in Polynesia. Though scientists are unsure of the cause, possible explanations are that deforestation eliminated all trees large enough to construct the canoe catamarans necessary for the voyage. An alternate explanation is that bird species that previously migrated back and forth, marking the multi-thousand-mile route for human travellers, had gone extinct, making navigation to and from Hawaii infeasible. Despite being effectively marooned there, Polynesians/Hawaiians prospered on the islands, growing to a population of between 400,000 and 1.5 million people by the time of Cook’s arrival. By that point, compared to Cook at least, they were Native Hawaiians.
Thus, Europeans did not find a wilderness so much as a series of cultivated islands with patches of generally higher elevation wilderness. Cook was amazed that no trees were left within four or file miles of shore. Following Western contact, modern agriculture and an acceleration in the rate of introduced species put additional stress on native species. The island of Lanai, for example, which was heavily cultivated as a pineapple plantation following theft of the land from Hawaiians, lost all but two of its endemic bird species. Climate change has added to species stress, including by expanding the population of mosquitos that carry avian malaria.
W.S. Merwin, a poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, has lived in Hawaii for the last four decades. The first stanzas of his 1967 poem, “For a Coming Extinction,” read:
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day
The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours
Merwin came to Hawaii in 1976, and eventually settled on Maui. Around his seaside home, he has nurtured a palm forest on eighteen acres of land previously denuded by a pineapple farm. According to the Merwin Conservancy, his restored palm forest, which is on the lower slopes of Haleakala volcano, is home to 400 species of palm, 125 of the 181 known genera. Of the relationship between the land and his work, Merwin said, “In gardening, as my wife and I go about it here, what are called concerns - for ecology and the environment, for example - merge inevitably with work done every day, within sight of the house, with our own hands, and the concerns remain intimate and familiar rather than far away. They do not have to be thought about, they are at home in the mind. I have never lived anywhere that was more true.”
In 2010, Merwin formed the non-profit Merwin Conservancy to continue his conservation work in the palm forest. In an article he wrote about formation of the organization (published in the Kenyon Review), Merwin described his journey to that particular location on Maui, the construction of a home, and the prolonged process of restoring a forest, starting with regeneration of the wasted soil. But before living on the coast, Merwin first rented a rough shack nearby. Here’s how he described it: “The roof was made of corrugated metal and must have been the first one the builders had ever laid, because they had set all the nails in the valleys of the already-rusted metal sheets so that when it rained, water flowed in through all the nail holes.”
Merwin’s “A Birthday” is one of the poems in Opening the Hand, which was published in 1983. Its opening lines are:
Something continues and I don't know what to call it
though the language is full of suggestions
in the way of language
but they are all anonymous
and it's almost your birthday music next to my bones
these nights we hear the horses running in the rain
it stops and the moon comes out and we are still here
the leaks in the roof go on dripping after the rain has passed
smell of ginger flowers slips through the dark house
down near the sea the slow heart of the beacon flashes
the long way to you is still tied to me but it brought me to you
I keep wanting to give you what is already yours
The rest of us may only fathom what Merwin can articulate, but that is sufficient to guide actions. Hundreds of Hawaiians--public employees with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Department of Agriculture, State of Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources; volunteers with Ducks Unlimited, Nature Conservancy, Native Hawaiian Plant Society, and Leeward Haleakala Watershed and Restoration Project; and owners and workers of Ulupalakua Ranch--are working to restore Hawaii’s native ecosystems. These activists are attempting to make Hawaii into an ark, in which the last of threatened bird species can find higher ground up the flanks of the island’s volcanoes, amidst the canopy of koa and ohi’a trees, just out of reach of the ever-rising tide of mosquitoes. Volunteers dedicate their weekends and their vacations on these projects, putting up fences to keep out marauding pigs, or planting koa trees on Mauna Kea in the Hakalau Refuge. Forest Service and Park Service employees devote their careers to the cause. Forty-two species of birds on Hawaii are endangered, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. A recently-introduced invasive fungus now afflicts the ohi’a tree, which along with the koa tree is a keystone species of this tropical forest. “Rapid Ohi’a Death” has wiped out approximately half of those trees on the Big Island. Yet Hawaiins, from poet laureates to public employees to volunteers, still toil to restore paradise. That humans make such commitments and sacrifices suggests they are essential, though we have trouble explaining why. It is an unambiguous act of love, “to keep wanting to give you what is already yours,” whether that which is already yours is a single glimpse of intact rainforest canopy or the flash of honeycreeper wings as it flits through the forest.
The corals of Honolua Bay on west Maui rise in great symmetrical towers from the sea floor, countless generations of polyps turned to coral. They are unimaginable until you have seen them, with shapes, colors, and lifeforms that exist nowhere else on earth, in a more vibrant and hypnotizing display than human technology could ever simulate. Coral are necessary to or rather an inextricable part of the 500 species of native fish that subsist on and around them. And not just fish: Moray eels, sea turtles, anemones, sharks. This is a garden in a deified sense, creation in which that term demands to be capitalized. We are the last generation that will swim in it, that will remember it firsthand.
Memory is recorded in coral, and glaciers, and lava flows intruding into the ocean that slowly are colonized with rainforest. It is memorialized in words. Merwin wrote that “bewilderment will diminish like an echo, unheard by us.” For our children, Honolua Bay will still exist in the sense that azure water will lap its shores. Hawaii will have some sort of trees, certainly weeds from distant continents, but the survival of ohi’a and koa are far less certain. Without radical action to address climate change, the corals beneath Honolua Bay will be a bleached graveyard. With their food sources gone, Maui’s coral fish species will not likely survive. Their palette--neon orange and yellows of the Kikakapu, trailing dorsal fin and imperious snout of the Kihikihi, night-red body and coal-black eye of the U’u--are so improbable, extravagant, otherworldly, that they will not be possible to imagine. The pictures, letters, names left behind will be anonymous. Only the kihikihi, the corals, the honeycreeper, the ohi’a themselves can convey the depth and mystery of a sentient land and seascape that we push ever closer to extinction.
1902: Humans observe the last Maui Nukupu’u, just ten years after the bird was observed for the first time by white people. 36 taxidermied specimens still exist in museums.
1961: State-owned trucks haul convicts up the flanks of Haleakala volcano on the island of Maui, gears grinding as the wheels slowly ascend switchbacks. The mountain’s mid-elevation hillsides, once blanketed with a verdant forest of koa and ohi’a trees, are desolate and eroding. Without forest cover, heavy tropical rains rush off in torrents toward the ocean. The convicts plant eucalyptus and mountain ash, invasive species from two different continents, in an attempt to prevent erosion and preserve groundwater for ranchers on the island. Hawaii’s endemic bird species, such as the honeycreepers whose food sources lived under the koa and ohi’a canopy, careen toward extinction as quickly as turbid waters run off the mountainside. Two invasive species--rats and pigs--root through leaf litter once inhabited by flightless birds unique to these islands.
 |
| Hala (Screwpine) |
2017: Mosquitoes, another invasive species, rise higher up the mountainside every year as warming temperatures force endangered birds into an ever-narrowing band of habitable forest. Rising ocean temperatures are bleaching coral reefs across the world, threatening the 500 native species of fish in Hawaii that live amongst her reefs. Extinct birds of Maui include the Nukupu’u, Maui Akepa, Po’ouli, Oloma’o, and O’u. The Kiwikiu (Maui Parrotbill) and Akohekohe (Crested honeycreeper) survive, but are endangered. In the forest reserve of Makawao, trees planted by convicts a half century ago have created a new canopy. Few indigenous plants live in the nearly vacant understory, and few birds flit amongst the trees. Along one stream, there is a single native tree fern. Visitors to the six mile “forest reserve” will encounter more wayfinding signs and mountain bike jumps than species of native plants.
 |
| Pritchardia: The palm genus endemic to Hawaii. |
 |
| Haleakala Crater, Haleakala National Park |
The Laysan Rail was wiped out on its eponymous island after Max Schlemmer, who operated a guano company in the early 20th century, introduced rabbits and hares. Rabbits wiped out the grasses in which the Laysan Rail lived. The last observation of a Laysan Rail on the island was in 1923, and was recorded by Donald Dickey: “Schlemmer came up holding a Laysan Rail in his hand...Meanwhile I held alive and unhurt in my hand one of the two Laysan Rails we know are left on the island, noted his red iris and green basally bill and depauperate wings, developed plumage.” A smaller population survived on Midway Atoll until 1943, when rats escaped from a ship and overran the island, wiping out the few Laysan Rails that remained on earth.
 |
| Silversword in Haleakala National Park, elevation approximately 9,000 feet |
The extinction of the Laysan Rail was atypical: More Hawaiian species perished between the arrival of Polynesians and European contact than have gone extinct since Captain Cook arrived in 1778. Polynesians made numerous trips back and forth as they settle the Hawaiian islands, bringing a wide range of new species such as bananas, breadfruit, pigs, and probably rats. They cleared massive swaths of forests, which combined with invasive mammals wiped out numerous species of flightless birds. One of the last true wildernesses on earth became more of a polyglot garden. The Polynesians’ alterations of Hawaiian ecosystems was so profound that it likely had impacts on their own mobility and trade: Sometime around the 13th century, Hawaiians stopped travelling to and from their former home in Polynesia. Though scientists are unsure of the cause, possible explanations are that deforestation eliminated all trees large enough to construct the canoe catamarans necessary for the voyage. An alternate explanation is that bird species that previously migrated back and forth, marking the multi-thousand-mile route for human travellers, had gone extinct, making navigation to and from Hawaii infeasible. Despite being effectively marooned there, Polynesians/Hawaiians prospered on the islands, growing to a population of between 400,000 and 1.5 million people by the time of Cook’s arrival. By that point, compared to Cook at least, they were Native Hawaiians.
 |
| Invasive forest of mountain ash and eucalyptus, planted by convicts in the 1960s. Makawao Forest Reserve. |
Thus, Europeans did not find a wilderness so much as a series of cultivated islands with patches of generally higher elevation wilderness. Cook was amazed that no trees were left within four or file miles of shore. Following Western contact, modern agriculture and an acceleration in the rate of introduced species put additional stress on native species. The island of Lanai, for example, which was heavily cultivated as a pineapple plantation following theft of the land from Hawaiians, lost all but two of its endemic bird species. Climate change has added to species stress, including by expanding the population of mosquitos that carry avian malaria.
W.S. Merwin, a poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, has lived in Hawaii for the last four decades. The first stanzas of his 1967 poem, “For a Coming Extinction,” read:
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day
The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours
Merwin came to Hawaii in 1976, and eventually settled on Maui. Around his seaside home, he has nurtured a palm forest on eighteen acres of land previously denuded by a pineapple farm. According to the Merwin Conservancy, his restored palm forest, which is on the lower slopes of Haleakala volcano, is home to 400 species of palm, 125 of the 181 known genera. Of the relationship between the land and his work, Merwin said, “In gardening, as my wife and I go about it here, what are called concerns - for ecology and the environment, for example - merge inevitably with work done every day, within sight of the house, with our own hands, and the concerns remain intimate and familiar rather than far away. They do not have to be thought about, they are at home in the mind. I have never lived anywhere that was more true.”
In 2010, Merwin formed the non-profit Merwin Conservancy to continue his conservation work in the palm forest. In an article he wrote about formation of the organization (published in the Kenyon Review), Merwin described his journey to that particular location on Maui, the construction of a home, and the prolonged process of restoring a forest, starting with regeneration of the wasted soil. But before living on the coast, Merwin first rented a rough shack nearby. Here’s how he described it: “The roof was made of corrugated metal and must have been the first one the builders had ever laid, because they had set all the nails in the valleys of the already-rusted metal sheets so that when it rained, water flowed in through all the nail holes.”
Merwin’s “A Birthday” is one of the poems in Opening the Hand, which was published in 1983. Its opening lines are:
Something continues and I don't know what to call it
though the language is full of suggestions
in the way of language
but they are all anonymous
and it's almost your birthday music next to my bones
these nights we hear the horses running in the rain
it stops and the moon comes out and we are still here
the leaks in the roof go on dripping after the rain has passed
smell of ginger flowers slips through the dark house
down near the sea the slow heart of the beacon flashes
the long way to you is still tied to me but it brought me to you
I keep wanting to give you what is already yours
The rest of us may only fathom what Merwin can articulate, but that is sufficient to guide actions. Hundreds of Hawaiians--public employees with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Department of Agriculture, State of Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources; volunteers with Ducks Unlimited, Nature Conservancy, Native Hawaiian Plant Society, and Leeward Haleakala Watershed and Restoration Project; and owners and workers of Ulupalakua Ranch--are working to restore Hawaii’s native ecosystems. These activists are attempting to make Hawaii into an ark, in which the last of threatened bird species can find higher ground up the flanks of the island’s volcanoes, amidst the canopy of koa and ohi’a trees, just out of reach of the ever-rising tide of mosquitoes. Volunteers dedicate their weekends and their vacations on these projects, putting up fences to keep out marauding pigs, or planting koa trees on Mauna Kea in the Hakalau Refuge. Forest Service and Park Service employees devote their careers to the cause. Forty-two species of birds on Hawaii are endangered, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. A recently-introduced invasive fungus now afflicts the ohi’a tree, which along with the koa tree is a keystone species of this tropical forest. “Rapid Ohi’a Death” has wiped out approximately half of those trees on the Big Island. Yet Hawaiins, from poet laureates to public employees to volunteers, still toil to restore paradise. That humans make such commitments and sacrifices suggests they are essential, though we have trouble explaining why. It is an unambiguous act of love, “to keep wanting to give you what is already yours,” whether that which is already yours is a single glimpse of intact rainforest canopy or the flash of honeycreeper wings as it flits through the forest.
The corals of Honolua Bay on west Maui rise in great symmetrical towers from the sea floor, countless generations of polyps turned to coral. They are unimaginable until you have seen them, with shapes, colors, and lifeforms that exist nowhere else on earth, in a more vibrant and hypnotizing display than human technology could ever simulate. Coral are necessary to or rather an inextricable part of the 500 species of native fish that subsist on and around them. And not just fish: Moray eels, sea turtles, anemones, sharks. This is a garden in a deified sense, creation in which that term demands to be capitalized. We are the last generation that will swim in it, that will remember it firsthand.
Memory is recorded in coral, and glaciers, and lava flows intruding into the ocean that slowly are colonized with rainforest. It is memorialized in words. Merwin wrote that “bewilderment will diminish like an echo, unheard by us.” For our children, Honolua Bay will still exist in the sense that azure water will lap its shores. Hawaii will have some sort of trees, certainly weeds from distant continents, but the survival of ohi’a and koa are far less certain. Without radical action to address climate change, the corals beneath Honolua Bay will be a bleached graveyard. With their food sources gone, Maui’s coral fish species will not likely survive. Their palette--neon orange and yellows of the Kikakapu, trailing dorsal fin and imperious snout of the Kihikihi, night-red body and coal-black eye of the U’u--are so improbable, extravagant, otherworldly, that they will not be possible to imagine. The pictures, letters, names left behind will be anonymous. Only the kihikihi, the corals, the honeycreeper, the ohi’a themselves can convey the depth and mystery of a sentient land and seascape that we push ever closer to extinction.
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