African Silverbills at Laupahoehoe and Kona

Our journeys through the Hawaiian Islands brought us to the beach park at Laupahoehoe northwest of Hilo on the Big Island. The park preserves the memories of a tragic event in 1946, a tsunami that took the lives of 20 schoolchildren and four teachers (story here). I wandered towards the beach area and saw a small flock of African Silverbills (Lonchura cantans), also known as Warbling Silverbills.

Most of the birds that one sees in the urban and coastal settings are not native to Hawai'i, and that is the case here, if you couldn't figure it out from the name. The birds seem to have arrived in the 1960s, probably as escapees from pet owners. They have spread throughout the entire island chain. I saw others on the road to Kona below Saddle Road (below).

Common Waxbills at Kona on the Big Island of Hawai'i

It's a week of ugly and tragic news. I'm not ignoring it, I'm following closely. But I'm also choosing to find some small bit of beauty in the midst of tragedy.  Common Waxbills (Estrilda astrild) are native to Africa south of the Sahara Desert, but they were introduced to the Hawaiian Islands in fairly recent time, the 1970s. They were first noted on Oahu, but showed up in the Kona area on the Big Island only in 2002 or so. They feed mainly on grass seeds.

We saw these Waxbills at Maka'eo Jogging/Walking Path at the Old Airport Park just north of Kona on the Big Island. A small bit of beauty.

Yellow-fronted Canary on the Big Island of Hawai'i

The Hawaiian Islands are host to a great many bird species, but few of those seen by island visitors are native to the islands. When humans reached the islands, they brought animals and bugs that had a devastating effect on the original ecosystem of the islands. Rats, cats, and mongoose preyed on the natives species, but even worse, introduced mosquitoes brought avian malaria to which the native birds had no resistance. So few native birds remained in the coastal cities that well-meaning people released colorful tropical birds in the islands to take up the slack.

The Yellow-fronted Canary (Serinus mozambicus) arrived on the islands in the 1960s. Also called Green Singing-Finches, they've been popular as pets, but originated in Africa in the region south of the Sahara Desert. They do well in arid woodlands, which makes them an ideal match to the Kona Coast where I got these pictures on our recent trip.

The canaries spread and by the early 2000s had reached Humu'ula, the pass between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. I saw one of them while exploring Pu'u Huluhulu, a cinder cone kipuka at the pass on my trip last month (above).

Japanese White-Eye at the Kona Farmer's Market

Bird-watching in Hawai'i can be frustrating. There are a great many colorful and easily seen birds, and there is the quandary of knowing that most all of them are introduced and invasive species. The native birds are rarely seen, as they have drastically decreased numbers, and have been driven into last stands in the high elevation forests. Many of them have gone extinct already.

Bird malaria is one of the worst causes, but there are many others. By the 1920s, so few native birds were found in the coastal towns that well-meaning people brought in tropical species to fill the void. Other birds were introduced to help control insect pests in the pervasive sugar cane fields. One can see the point of choosing non-native birds versus no birds, and one can also realize the lack of research that would have warned against introducing new species without understanding the potential negative effects.

Probably no bird illustrates the quandary so well as the Japanese White-eye or Mejiro (Zosterops japonicus). It arrived on the islands in the 1920s and 1930s for insect control purposes, and for better or worse it was a perfect fit for Hawai'i. It spread beyond the cane fields and into the montane forests, and is now the most populous land bird on the island. It is omnivorous, meaning it competes with numerous other native birds for insects and fruits. It may be a vector for bird diseases.

Who, me??

And yet...it's a beautiful bird, and fun to watch as it hangs upside down to snatch seeds.  It's said to be a beautiful singer, and there is emerging evidence that it might have become a pollinator for some native Lobelioid species whose original pollinators have gone extinct. Endangered native Hawaiian Hawks have started preying on them.

In any case, they are on the islands to stay, for better or worse. And they may be filling the environmental niche left behind by the sadly extinct native birds. And if you think about it, the most populous bird on the island could have been something far more obnoxious (I think of European Starlings on the mainland, for instance).