#research the kauaʻi ʻōʻō!

[queencoral123]

Save the last vaquita by clicking this link and stop illegal fishing!

Let's save them before they disappeared!!!!!

[awkwardbirdsdaily]

What about the kaua'i 'ō'ō bird? Hearing the lonely call of the last male of his kind still makes me wanna cry

aa sorry I completely forgot to reply to this!

I did the kaua'i 'ō'ō quite early on actually! put it with another bird. Agreed about its singing though, while researching birds I've come across so many cases of the last male still singing and it's painful to read every time.

[proton-wobbler]

Kaua'i O'o (Moho braccatus)

"They're extinct and have a really sad story, and I would like everyone else to hear the last male's song and be sad too." "you said to submit birds that "have changed your *life*-- okay, maybe not that deep" but this bird has LEGITIMATELY CHANGED MY LIFE. i watched this video: [posted below] (please please please watch it it's a short animated film on John Sincock's experiences in Kauai with the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō) just as i was finishing Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything', in which he chronicles the human impact on rate of human extinction--and especially birds, SINGLEHANDEDLY (or doublehandedly, since it was the combo of the animation and the book) kickstarting my obsession with extinct birds. I already really liked birds, but there's something just so tragically gorgeous about the extinct ones. I HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS ABOUT THEM AND NONE OF THEM ARE COHERENT ENOUGH FOR WORDS."

Hey so I cried so much over this video and I already knew about the story of the Kaua'i O'o. Hawaiian birds are facing extinction at an alarming rate and really need all of the help they can get. Many other native bird species are struggling right now with habitat loss, invasive species, and mosquito borne illness threatening the last of their populations.

As for Kaua'i O'o, this is a bird we can never get back. There is no possible hope hiding on another island, because that's not how island birds work. The family this bird belongs to, Mohoidae or Hawaiian honeycreepers, is an entirely extinct family of birds, and the only avian family that has gone entirely extinct in modern times.

If the story of this bird impacts you, please hold that impact close to your heart. Fighting against habitat degradation is hard enough already, but it is possible to save what we have left.

Sources:

While not bird specific, this organization works with all kinds of Hawaiian wildlife. I wanted to include something at the end of this, as it can be too easy to fall into the doom-and-gloom cycle and forget that we can do things to help impact our world.

[carpmatthew]

The last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird was a male, and its song was recorded for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Bioacoustics Research Program. The male was recorded singing a mating call, to a female that would never come. It died in 1987.