(Video) NEW RELOCATION PROJECT AIMS TO INCREASE HABITAT FOR THE KIWIKIU (VIDEO)
NEW RELOCATION PROJECT AIMS TO INCREASE HABITAT FOR THE KIWIKIU
Bringing a Native Forest & Its Native Songs Back to the Forest
(Nakula Natural Area Reserve, Maui) – Considered the most threatened among Maui’s honeycreeper family, there are fewer than 300 Kiwikiu (Maui Parrotbill) left in the wild. With its entire population restricted to high elevation, wet, rain forest on windward Maui, Kiwikiu are highly vulnerable to extinction and establishment of a second population on leeward Haleakala is considered by experts to be essential to Kiwikiu recovery. However, Kiwikiu need native forest habitat to survive and the leeward forests of Haleakala have been damaged by decades of
grazing and browsing by feral ungulates (hooved animals).
To recover Kiwikiu, the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project (a project of the Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit, University of Hawaii at Manoa) and the DLNR Division of Forestry and Wildlife (DOFAW) have been working with government and landowner partners to restore the native forests to the leeward slopes and are now preparing to release up to 20 birds this fall to begin the re-establishment of a second population in the Nakula Natural Area Reserve (NAR). Kiwikiu had been once found throughout leeward Haleakala.
Dr. Hanna Mounce is the Coordinator of the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project and on a recent visit to the relocation site in the NAR, she eagerly shows off the tremendous amount of work underway to prepare this forest for the incoming Kiwikiu. Mounce explained, “The Kiwikiu population in the native forest on the windward side of Maui is being managed in every way possible. Fences are up to keep ungulates out but introduced predators and avian diseases are still a threat and as long as the entire population is restricted to one area the species will remain vulnerable to extinction. Without a second population, it is only a matter time before we lose this critically endangered species.”
While work continues to develop landscape-level tools to control disease and predator threats, re-establishment of a second population holds the best hope for the survival of this species.
The forest restoration project on-going in the NAR began with fencing and removal of ungulates and has now planted more than 250,000 native trees like koa and ohia; 19 different species in all. It is a part of a larger effort with the Leeward Haleakala Watershed Restoration Project. Dr. Fern Duvall, Native Ecosystems manager with Maui DOFAW said, “Once we removed the feral ungulates from the reserve and began planting native trees it also became clear that there is a diverse and viable seed bank in the soil and we are now seeing vigorous natural regeneration of native forest species”. The reforestation has been remarkable. Mounce said, “It actually really blew us away. The survival rate of these out-plantings far surpassed any of our expectations.” Teams of staff and volunteers spent months placing foot-high trees into the ground, developing new and better techniques along the way to ensure survival, which has resulted in healthy trees 20-30 feet tall now. Mounce added, “By enhancing natural regeneration with evolving planting and nurturing techniques, the forest is coming back a lot faster than we anticipated.”
Some of the birds will be moved from their current forest homes in east Maui. Others were hatched and raised at the San Diego Zoo Global’s Maui Bird Conservation Center. When they’re moved it will be their first time out in the wild and teams are in high-gear preparing the birds and their new home for their arrival.
Utilizing some of the best practices developed for other successful reintroductions, the Kiwikiu relocation teams have built a series of platforms to hold small release aviaries, where the birds will spend time adjusting to their new surroundings before they’re released into the native forest. Once released, teams will carefully track and monitor their movements, feeding patterns, and behaviors to help inform and improve on possible future translocations.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) 2006 Recovery Plan called for the creation of a second population of Kiwikiu. The recovery strategy centered on protection, restoration, and management of native high elevation forests on East Maui (Haleakalā), West Maui, and East Moloka’i. This includes ungulate monitoring and control, predator control, disease monitoring and control, captive propagation, and habitat restoration. According to the USFWS recovery plan, habitat restoration and re-establishment of a population on leeward East Maui is needed to promote natural demographic and evolutionary processes. This habitat is a mesic forest that appreciates lower annual rainfall forest than the habitat in the birds’ current range. Michelle Bogardus, Maui Nui & Hawaiʻi Island Team Manager, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said, “This first reintroduction is an important step toward recovery for Kiwikiu. Collaborative conservation efforts like this are the key to success in protecting and recovering Hawaii’s native species.”
Scott Fretz, DOFAW Maui Branch Manager and one of the co-authors of the 2006 Recovery Plan said, “We are really excited to begin this phase of the work to recover and I cannot emphasize enough the importance of the many partners that are working with us on this – communities, governments, landowners, non-profits, and volunteers. If we are successful, and that’s still a big if, because new threats are always possible it will be because these partners have worked tirelessly to save the ecosystems on which the Kiwikiu depend.
The conservation translocation of the twenty Kiwikiu is expected to begin in October or early November.
HD video – Kiwikiu at MBCC, Na Kula NAR aerials & ground, research & planting, SOTs:
Kiwikiu Relocation Shot Sheet
April 10, 2019
00:00-01:57 Close up footage of the Kiwikiu bird in an enclosed habitat at the Maui Forest Bird Conservation Center
0:1:58-4:18 Aerial footage of the Nakula Natural Area Reserve
4:19-6:19 Chris Warren, Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project SOTS
6:20-7:46 Measuring the growth of the rows of trees in the reserve (ohia)
7:47-13:09 Hannah Mounce, Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project SOTS
13:10-16:39 Laura Berthold, Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project SOTS and preparation to plant new trees
16:40-17:44 Finding good spots to plant the new trees
17:45-19:21 Clearing areas to plant new trees and explanation of how to plant the trees
19:22-21:40 KJ Passaro SOTS and the planting of new trees
Chris Warren SOTS
4:19-4:28 Places so you have these, in really dry times it’s all this is brown and that’s green and that’s mostly because of the nitrogen. I think.
(4:39-4:45) So, I have to line ourselves up find out our starting point, but then we’re going to be measuring it.
(4:55-5:51) Plants are here, we might as well monitor at five-year intervals going forward. Survivorship in general turned out to be very uninteresting because it was just so high and so between treatments, between different plot types, survivorship really didn’t vary very much. But growth rate is interesting, that varies quite a bit and some species like ‘A’ali’i
actually, grew better under tree canopy, even though it seems to do quite well elsewhere.
But other things grew really poorly, koa I mean kind of not surprisingly when they did very badly planted under other koa and five-year-old trees are this tall. They’re not dead, they’re not really living their full life you know because a tree planted outside is now 20 feet tall and that big around.
(5:52-6:19) So, in this situation with the added koa shading, plus these and the leaf litter we could actually wind up seeing some cool natural regeneration happen underneath because that’s what we need really is that, that leaf litter on the ground everywhere if this place is going to take off by itself. We can’t plant a forest, we can just get it started you know.
Hannah Mounce SOTS
(7:47-8:40) So in this first unit of Nakula Natural Area Reserve, we are trying to re-establish enough forest to bring the native forest birds back to the spot. So as the declining native forest bird populations on the windward side of the island are already being managed in every way that we can. They’ve already been protected, the fences are up, the ungulates are out and the things that we can’t manage; our disease at the moment, our disease and predation from non-native mammals. Until we have landscape level tools to tackle those, the only thing we can do to save our native forest birds on the windward side is to bring them to new areas. High elevation areas on the leeward side, unfortunately we’re really degraded, denuded of vegetation, had a really high ungulate pressure so we chose this spot as the future release site for some critically endangered birds from the windward side and step one was to bring the forest back.
(8:41-9:31) Yes, so the success of this site has actually really blown us away, the
fence went up and the ungulates were out of here in about 2012, the final animals out and at that time we started experimental plantings as well as monitoring natural regeneration that was going on in here and the survival rates of the out plantings in this area surpassed any of our expectations. We’ve also found techniques to be able to enhance natural regeneration and the forest is coming back a lot faster than we anticipated. We don’t know at what point this forest, what point this forest needs to get to, to actually be suitable for all the bird species, but the birds aren’t here so it might be able to support certain species now that just weren’t here six, eight years ago when it was more open grassland.
(9:32-9:57) So with our experimental reforestation project to begin with, we really focused on both canopy species and then understory species that Kiwikiu or Maui parrotbill really key in on and that was nine, nine to eleven species to begin with. Since then we’ve had some help from some more species-specific nurseries and we’ve brought back 19 species in this area thus far.
(9:58-10:27) Yeah I feel like with forest restoration and landscape, you know management and conservation it’s so all intertwined, it’s like yes we need to bring the forest back because we need to bring, stabilize the soil, we need to bring the water back, we need to be collecting things from all these clouds that sit here every single day. But then also just because our project is focused on doing conservation translocations and preventing extinction, you know our core motivation is obviously to bring the birds back.
(10:28-11:45) Yeah, so Kiwikiu or Maui parrotbill has a declining population on the windward slope. They survive in about 35 square kilometers and there’s as few as a hundred, a maximum 300 individuals left. That population is already protected, that forest is already being managed to the best of our abilities and they’re still declining due to non-native mammal predation disease and possibly just unsuitable habitat because they’re on the wettest part of the island. It’s probably not their ideal location, but that was the forest that was left. So, we’re going to be bringing them back to this spot in about ten month’s time from now, October/November 2019 and we’re going to do, kind of an experimental release where we only bring in twenty birds. About half of those birds are going to be captive raised individuals, paired with wild individuals and they’re going to be very closely monitored. They’re going to be supported with supplemental food, they are going to have radio transmitters on them and we really want to know how they use this landscape, how they use the trees that are already here if there are things that are missing that they would need or maybe in best-case scenario they’re going to do fabulously and then we’ll be able to bring additional birds in on subsequent years.
(11:46-12:21) This area right here, this small fenced area that we’re in might only support twelve to fifteen pairs, but it’s just the first location in the vision for the entire leeward slope. So, you know with all the partners were working with and all the different state agencies that are working on the leeward slope of Haleakala, we could have a population of several hundred individual birds once all those other areas of land are also restored. So, we’re thinking that this is really going to be like the core where the birds are then going to seed out to the properties both east and west of here.
(12:22-12:55) All these species were thriving in the native forests we have before even if we can’t always quantify the roles that they were playing, you know bringing back the forest as in much of an intact state as we can, you know before we’ve had our human impacts is obviously beneficial. We also hope that these birds are going to do actually better than they’re doing on the windward slope in a koa dominated forest historical observations had Kiwikui and koa dominated areas, so they could do really well and actually survive at higher densities on this side than they do on the windward side.
(12:56-13:09) So Maui nui Kiwikiu is definitely a Maui nui endemic but isolated to Maui island for all the recent history and there, we only have six native forest birds left on Maui, three of which are Maui endemics.
Laura Berthold SOTS
(13:10-13:18) With this and then plant the carnivore in and make sure it’s all like nice and padded in with the soil and it’s going to be in the ferns.
(13:22-13:34) Because the Kiwikiu in its current range uses this plant a lot, there’s berries that the Kiwikiu will like dig their bills into and clip and there’s larvae in there that they eat.
(13:39-13:58) We had ones that survived a full year. They’re not drought tolerant, so we have had some periods of drought out here and some of them have died, but there’s, we’re over 500 of these planted and they’re a really slow growing species. So, it’s good to have them out here now.
(16:12-16:27) Almost 700, a little over 700 yeah, yeah and we’ve been planting them for like a year and a half. We’ve had one’s that survive the full year.
(16:28-16:39) That once they get in the ground, they do kind of have a mini growth spurt, so they’ll grow like a couple inches in just like a short amount of time.
KJ Passaro SOTS
(19:22-20:17) So yeah, we have like, we talked about the canopy versus the smaller canopy trees or sub canopy trees. When we’re planting, we have like, they come in these plastics. They’re like a dibble. We want to be really careful and try not to like break the tree while we’re taking them out. So usually I just give them a little squeeze with the plastic and you just kind of gently pull them out, they come out pretty easy. Plants at home, we don’t mess with the root mass at all. You want to keep it intact, you’re going to kind of like test the size of your hole, it’s like a little deep right? The goal is to have this be uniform with the rest of the dirt, the rot. So, I’m just going to keep like filling in the hole a little, till like you know that looks pretty good. Put a little more dirt in, I usually just put it to one side and I just start packing the earth.
(20:21-20:33) …And we’re not too worried about like compaction here because the soils are so like light and fluffy and aerated already, so really you want to, just your focus should be getting it in.
(20:34-20:52) We don’t want any air pockets in that hole that we dug, otherwise the roots will just die, so just like that. If you can pull it out again, that means it’s, it’s no good, you got to redo it. Then at the very end, we just put a little nest around it and that’s going to.
(20:53-21:00) …And overtaking it and it’s going to help it like collect moisture and survive so you guys are good to go.
Photographs – Kiwikiu at Maui Bird Conservation Center:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/209vezh4nnphw1h/AABSuU0pW-u4k3H2B4GzbQ_Ka?dl=0
Photographs – Na Kula Natural Area Reserve, reforestation work:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mhxdmcvk9vtyjlw/AABp6bP1GHxLAR6w-LHL4nHta?dl=0
