Oct 1, 2026 · 53 min · 11 segments
Lisa “Cali” Crampton, Program Manager of the Kauaʻi Forest Bird Recovery Project gives the big-picture story of Kauaʻi’s forest birds: their evolution in isolation, their loss of defenses against…
So you mentioned before, when we go back 5 million years ago, that the songbirds made their way here.
I mean, how did they get there? They were
So when we talk about Hawaiian evolution, we talk about the three W's, the three factors that allowed colonization to occur.
And so starting with the wind, the wind would blow smaller birds and propagules of plants like seeds or maybe spiders that make those silk balloons.
And then the water is, of course, the thing that surrounds most of the Hawaiian islands.
And so that would be anything that is a strong swimmer or a rafter, like a coconut can raft, could colonize via the water.
Our green sea turtles, for example, our Hawaiian monk seals can colonize by the water.
on a wrapped in coconut or something like that and then the final one is wings and so we of course have a whole bunch of strong flyers that colonize the hawaiian islands like geese and sheer waters and species that can raft or get stuck in the tail feathers or in the claws of those species so more insects more seeds could arrive that way But we suspect that the small species that songbirds that colonize the Hawaiian Islands were not strong enough flyers to make it here on their own.
So that would be wind.
The
Right.
Okay.
And I'm thinking too about in the Polynesian era, and we had the, you know, the canoes coming over and the canoe plants and so forth.
Was there any relationship between what the Polynesians were bringing here and the songbirds? Yes.
So first off, the Polynesians and the stowaways that they brought were the first mammals to arrive in the Hawaiian Islands.
So the Polynesians themselves, being humans, were the first mammals, and then they brought with them rats.
They brought a Polynesian rat that was very devastating to a lot of the ground nesting birds.
And they brought probably also a small pig, a pot-bellied pig, that we really, really do not understand the consequences of those smaller pigs.
So you mentioned before, when we go back 5 million years ago, that the songbirds made their way here.
I mean, how did they get there? They were
So when we talk about Hawaiian evolution, we talk about the three W's, the three factors that allowed colonization to occur.
And so starting with the wind, the wind would blow smaller birds and propagules of plants like seeds or maybe spiders that make those silk balloons.
And then the water is, of course, the thing that surrounds most of the Hawaiian islands.
And so that would be anything that is a strong swimmer or a rafter, like a coconut can raft, could colonize via the water.
Our green sea turtles, for example, our Hawaiian monk seals can colonize by the water.
on a wrapped in coconut or something like that and then the final one is wings and so we of course have a whole bunch of strong flyers that colonize the hawaiian islands like geese and sheer waters and species that can raft or get stuck in the tail feathers or in the claws of those species so more insects more seeds could arrive that way But we suspect that the small species that songbirds that colonize the Hawaiian Islands were not strong enough flyers to make it here on their own.
So that would be wind.
The
Right.
Okay.
And I'm thinking too about in the Polynesian era, and we had the, you know, the canoes coming over and the canoe plants and so forth.
Was there any relationship between what the Polynesians were bringing here and the songbirds? Yes.
So first off, the Polynesians and the stowaways that they brought were the first mammals to arrive in the Hawaiian Islands.
So the Polynesians themselves, being humans, were the first mammals, and then they brought with them rats.
They brought a Polynesian rat that was very devastating to a lot of the ground nesting birds.
And they brought probably also a small pig, a pot-bellied pig, that we really, really do not understand the consequences of those smaller pigs.
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