In Search of Akiapolaau

This past while we went to Hawaii. Not so much to lounge by a swimming pool or to hang out at a beach ogling young bikinied women -- though the latter activity certainly has its charms. Rather, our principal objective was to see something of wild Hawai'i, the flora and fauna, particularly the native endemic birds. Many of these are now endangered, many more are gone forever. Extinct. Kaput. Hawaii is the biggest island in the Hawaiian archipelago and the youngest too, just a million years or so, an eye twitch on the geological scale. The islands are among the last places on earth to have been populated by human kind. The Polynesians arrived twelve or fifteen centuries ago, bringing chickens and pigs and some of their favourite food plants. In no time at all Hawaii's transformation was under way. With the arrival of the Europeans in the late 18th century the transformation accelerated.

We stayed at a postcard-pretty place on a lava beach not far from the Kailua-Kona airport. Lots of palms, flowering trees, colourful birds. Not one of which was native. Everything flying in the neighbourhood, everything growing there is alien: it all originated somewhere else. Mynas from India, saffron finches from South America, waxbills from Africa, java sparrows from southeast Asia, house finches from North America just like the ones that visit our bird feeder in Victoria.

In order to see Hawaii's native land birds we had to make an effort. We arranged to visit Hawaii's sole national wildlife refuge, Hakalua, on the eastern flank of Mauna Kea, Hawaii's highest point. We needed a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get there. The day we first laid eyes on it, Hakalua was beautiful: towering native trees -- chiefly ohia and koa -- tree-ferns, lush understory vegetation. Birds too. Over a period of several hours we managed to find several of the remarkable Hawaiian birds that evolved long, long ago after a common ancestor -- a Chinese purple finch, the experts think -- found its way to the archipelago. Sixty or more distinctive species evolved from that finch. Many are now extinct, largely due to human-introduced scourges, but we found several in the Hakalua canopy, all with lovely, hard-to-pronounce Hawaiian names: amakihi, iiwi, apapane.

One bird eluded us at Hakalua, the amazing akiapolaau. Though descended from that Chinese finch previously mentioned, the akiapolaau fills a niche occupied in our part of the world by woodpeckers. Its bill is extraordinary: unlike other birds, both mandibles are movable. With the shorter lower mandible the akiapolaau pecks holes in tree bits, with the hugely long, curved upper mandible the bird extracts its favourite food -- actually its only food -- the larva of a species of long-horned beetle. Akiapolaau was the bird I most wanted to see. We didn't.

We returned to the refuge a few days later, in the tender care of Jack Jeffrey. Jack was refuge biologist before retiring in 2008 and he knows everything worth knowing about Hakalua. For example this: I imagined the refuge is a remnant of the original wild Hawaii, never altered. It isn't. Instead it is an exercise in restoration, still under way. Through human management Hakalua is being restored to something like the native forest. A constant battle proceeds to remove alien invaders and to keep them out: everything from feral pigs and cattle to pestilent introduced plants -- gorse, Himalayan raspberry, firetree. Jack explained that no part of Hawaii hasn't been altered by human activity. Not a single acre.

We looked to Jack to help us see our grail bird. Thanks to him we spotted the Hawaiian creeper and the tiny nine-gram akepa that is so specialized in its niche that it ordinarily produces only a single egg every two years. Akiapolaau? No. Nada. Zip. He did show us some of the rare plants the reserve is trying to save including one, thought to be extinct, that Jack himself found in the early 1990s. But no akiapolaau.

Jack told us of another place to look for our target bird, and drew a map for us. We came back for a third try. His directions were good and his map superb. We spent two more hours looking and listening in precisely the right habitat of koa-dominated forest. Good numbers of the other endemics we'd already seen were about but not a single akiapolaau that we could see or hear.

The adventure wasn't entirely about birds. We visited Volcanoes National Park twice and saw active Kilauea in daylight and after dark as well. Saw black noddies, green turtles and spinner dolphins. We gawked at historic sites. Ate every variety of Hawaiian seafood we could get our hands on. Took a boat trip to a few top-rated snorkeling sites. Jan enjoyed the myriad colourful fish and fabulous coral reefs. I puked. In every one of the five hours we were at sea aboard the catamaran. Managed to lift my head long enough to see the monument to iconic Captain Cook where he breathed his last at Kealakekua Point in 1779.

Yes, we even went to a beach or two, including Makalawena, said to be as idyllic a beach as you will find anywhere in the islands. And yes, since bikinied young women were about, and since there were no endemic birds to see, I ogled what was on offer.

As for the akiapolaau, well, it remains unseen in its koa forest stronghold. I wish it well.