Should We Tell Them They’re Adopted?
10 things we want to share about Hawaiʻi's introduced birds
- Migrating humans have been moving plants and animals around the world for at least 100,000 years, bringing species they thought they needed, or simply wanted, to start life in a new place.
- Southeast Asia’s Red Junglefowl were among those early transplants. As people populated Oceania (over tens of thousands of years), settlers spread the birds to Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.
- These chicken ancestors were Hawaiʻi’s first introduced birds, arriving in voyaging canoes from the Marquesas around 1000 A.D.
- Pigeons (native to Europe) and turkeys (native to North America) came next, brought to Hawaiʻi in 1788 aboard a vessel from China carrying “wild turkeys and pairs of pigeons.” Both species flourished in the Islands.
- Both before and after statehood, government agencies introduced birds to control crop pests. Among these were the Barn Owl, Common Myna, Cattle Egret, and House Finch. Successes were mixed. (The House Finch diet is 97% seeds.)
- In the late 1920s, due to the absence of native birds in gardens and parks, Oʻahu residents formed the Honolulu Mejiro Club and the Hui Manu Society with the goal of bringing colorful songbirds to Hawaiʻi.
- Club members arranged for the introductions of tens of thousands of songbirds to the Islands with numbers peaking between 1929 to 1936. To share the enjoyment of exotic birds, school children engaged in a “Buy-a-Bird” campaign, raising money to ship birds from Oʻahu to Hawaiʻi Island.
- From the 1930s to the 1970s, the Hawaiʻi Department of Fish and Game (later DLNR) introduced game birds for recreational hunting. During the late 1950s and 1960s, leaseholders of the state-owned Puʻu Waʻawaʻa Ranch imported and released 33 game bird species there.
- In the 1960s, the state became more conservation minded and restricted the importation of certain species. Non-native birds, however, continue to enter the Islands through accidental and intentional pet bird escapes and smuggling.
- Of at least 211 non-native bird species introduced to Hawaiʻi over the years, 54 have established self-sustaining breeding populations. These species, called naturalized, are valid on birders’ official checklists.
A female turkey. ©Tom Fake