ABOVE: The endemic Hawaiian crow (with an antenna for a GPS tracker) is gaining a talonhold on Maui.
Back in 1890, ornithologist George Munro recorded flocks of Hawaiian crows soaring above Kona, on Hawaii Island. Within a century, alala were extinct in the wild, but two dozen survived in captivity. For decades the Hawaii Endangered Bird Conservation Program and the San Diego Zoo have been fighting to revive the species. The breeding program proved successful, but the reintroduction not so much: Several attempts to release alala into their native habitat met frustrating, almost ironic ends. The Hawaiian hawk, or io, picked off the naive, captive-bred crows one by one. After the last release failed in 2020, the crows' caretakers looked to Maui.
There are no io on Maui. But did alala ever live there? Biologists don't know. Fossil records reveal that in ancient times, five corvid species soared above the Hawaiian archipelago. But by the time humans arrived, only the alala remained and only on Hawaii Island. Early Hawaiians kept them as pets, recognized them as aumakua (family guardians) and mimicked their spectacular calls. Like ravens, alala are highly intelligent; unlike ravens, they are strictly forest dwellers. They are the only Hawaiian bird large enough to disperse certain native seeds. Without the alala the Hawaiian forest is incomplete.
Until last year, efforts to reintroduce captive-bred alala into the wild had failed on Hawaii Island.
Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project manager Hanna Mounce lobbied for the crow's translocation. She's an out-of-the-box conservationist who built a forest from scratch for the Maui parrotbill and released sterile mosquitoes to suppress avian malaria. Her Hawaii Island colleagues agreed to let her try releasing alala on Maui.
Since crows hadn't inhabited the island in living memory, they were considered a new species. Mounce's crew spent almost two years researching the birds' potential impact on Hawaiian tree snails or other rare species. Identifying a release site within Maui's limited terrain was a challenge. The chosen spot, Kipahulu Forest Reserve, is accessible only by helicopter. The team flew in supplies, built aviaries and installed sophisticated feeders that could dispense food and weigh and photograph the birds.
On November 11, 2024, five alala took wing. "It's gone as well as we could have expected," says Mounce. Her crew logs seven-day shifts in the remote field camp. Their job: Watch the crows' every move. Hearing them shriek from the canopy and watching them fly farther afield is a thrill, says Mounce. Soon the birds' eyes will turn from sapphire to brown—an indication of maturity. Any day now they will pair off, claim their own patches of forest and mate. When the first wild alala chick hatches, the entire forest will rejoice.
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