7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Paradise lost, December 20, 2009
This review is from: Conservation Biology of Hawaiian Forest Birds: Implications for Island Avifauna (Hardcover)
Many residents of the islands have never seen a Hawaiian forest bird, except possibly an owl hunting over low shrub, because almost all the birds have been driven from the places humans live or can easily get to. The authors of "Conservation Biology of Hawaiian Forest Birds" consider that to be one of the many hindrances to obtaining support for saving - even increasing - the range and numbers of these LGBs - "little green birds," although some are (or were) red, yellow, orange or black, and a few, like the Hawaiian crow, are not little.
The birds have many enemies, ranging from avian malaria to soft-hearted (and -headed) ladies who feed colonies of unwanted cats. In the chapter on "Life History and Demography," Bethany Woodworth and Thane Pratt write, "Modeling suggests that in the absence of mammalian predation on nests and adults, many threatened populations of Hawaiian birds would attain stable or positive population growth rates."
Fat chance that the cat fanciers will get on board with that, but the overall tone of "Conservation Biology" is hopeful. In one line: The situation of the birds is dire but not finished.
Very dire. Forest birds have been driven out of the lowlands by disease, habitat destruction and novel predators until they now occupy only about 16 percent of their original range. For some species, like the Maui parrotbill, much less than that.
On the other hand, in the past 30 to 40 years, much of the remaining range of the birds has enjoyed much better management than it used to get. Fencing out goats, sheep, cows and pigs helps. In limited areas, fencing and poisoning can even reduce the depredations of rats and mongooses. Not cats, though.
The LGBs fascinate evolutionary biologists. First, although Hawaii's native plants mostly had ancestors in the south, Hawaii's native birds mostly originated in the north.
Pratt marvels at the formidable challenge facing the first bird immigrants. Few of the plants were even remotely like the ones they had depended on in the periboreal environment whence they originated.
For those who could figure out something to eat, the islands were a paradise: no vertebrate predators until other birds, like hawks and eagles, arrived; few diseases or parasites compared with the Mainland; and an equable climate.
Although most birds got here from the north, it appears that the little finch that gave rise to the honeycreepers was a rare migrant from the south. Her descendants speciated luxuriantly, until there were more than 50 species of honeycreepers. Some, like the (probably) recently extinct poouli on Maui were so different from their cousins that until DNA testing settled it, taxonomists were in some doubt whether the poouli was a honeycreeper or not.
Although there are mysteries remaining about the LGBs and the other native forest birds, "Conservation Biology" (which weighs about as much as a thousand LGBs) will answer most answerable questions. At that, it makes no attempt to address the fraught existence of the remaining native birds of the lowlands, the coot, duck and rail.
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