Bret Nainoa Mossman spent two weeks in the summertime of 2023 winding his method throughout Europe. On a shoestring price range, blowing by way of most of his trip time from his job, Mossman tried to make each minute rely—he knew it is perhaps his solely probability to go to these historic cities. However the 28-year-old wasn’t a typical backpacker taking in vacationer websites. Carrying a big black rifle case filled with digital camera tools, Mossman spent his days within the dimly lit recesses of museums, taking footage of extra uncommon relics: long-dead birds. From daybreak to nightfall, working mechanically because the day light, he sat alone with the preserved species that had as soon as lived in his Hawaiian homeland.
For a whole lot of years, Western explorers, collectors, and researchers gathered birds from the Hawaiian Islands and scattered them the world over. Over time, 1000’s ended up because the property of museums—beneficial for specialists who research them, however in any other case hidden away. Mossman, a Native Hawaiian, is on a mission to search out and {photograph} every one and produce them into public view. In the long term, he hopes to immediate a dialog concerning the decolonization of those analysis collections and set the desk for the return of some bodily specimens to the islands the place they originated.
The hunt might sound quixotic: a lone man, self-funded, chasing after relics. However his undertaking is in keeping with a rising motion to reckon with the historic and scientific plundering of cultural artifacts and sacred gadgets from Indigenous communities and colonized nations throughout the globe. Wildlife collections aren’t usually a part of these conversations, however Mossman believes they need to be—notably specimens from Hawai‘i, an island chain usually dubbed the chicken extinction capital of the world.
“To Westerners it’s like: They’re birds, and we love them,” Mossman says. However for Hawaiians, he says, the connection is deeper: “These birds are principally our grandparents. I’ve to do what I can to protect their dignity.”
Rising up in Utah, Mossman knew he was totally different. Curious and goal-driven, he honed his naturalist abilities as a baby. He cherished watching refrain frogs at a pond close to his dwelling and developed an intensive insect assortment. By his teenage years, he was enthralled with birds. However past a set of pursuits that didn’t at all times align with these of his classmates, Mossman additionally had a definite sense that he wasn’t the place he was purported to be. His father had moved from Hawai‘i to Utah for school, received married, and stayed. “My dad at all times talked about how he needed to go dwelling, and Utah was by no means dwelling for him,” Mossman says. “It’s at all times been Hawai‘i.”
In highschool, Mossman merged his curiosity about his heritage and avian enthusiasm. He learn something he might discover associated to Hawaiian birds, from a Nineteen Nineties pocket information to a 300-page scientific report about endangered honeycreepers. In 2017 he moved to the islands to pursue a grasp’s diploma in conservation biology at College of Hawai‘i in Hilo.
At present, the islands’ birds are, to Mossman, a single-minded focus bordering on obsession: a guiding drive in his profession, his hobbies, and his ethical compass. A biologist for the Hawai‘i Division of Land and Pure Sources, he’s one in every of comparatively few individuals of Native Hawaiian descent who work within the chicken conservation discipline. Along with serving as a board member of conservation organizations, he maintains widespread Fb, TikTok, and Instagram pages, referred to as Birds Hawai‘i Past Present, the place he advocates broadly for the preservation of native birdlife and shares pictures and movies along with his followers.
By bringing uncommon wildlife into individuals’s each day lives, Mossman goals to assist revive Hawaiians’ cultural connections to disappearing species and strengthen public help for staving off additional losses. He additionally goals to indicate birds themselves that Hawaiians nonetheless care about them. Cataloging long-dead species, he says, is all a part of that mission. However first he has to search out them.
When British explorer James Cook dinner first got here to the island of Hawai‘i in 1779, the west aspect was populated by a small, short-tailed chicken referred to as the Moho. The ashy-brown creature, whose title interprets to “small chicken that crows within the grass,” had advanced away from flight over 1000’s of years, nested on the bottom, and was so agile it might outrun canines. Later referred to as the Hawaiian Rail by Western scientists, the chicken was Hawaiians’ companion on journeys throughout lava flats and a quarry for conventional bow hunters. On January 26, 1779, Cook dinner’s touchdown occasion bought two from native taro farmers.
That transaction, hardly noteworthy on the time, marked the start of a set drive on the Hawaiian Islands that lasted into the twentieth century. Pushed by delight and competitors in addition to a want to doc the archipelago’s astounding biodiversity, rich collectors and establishments sponsored and launched into intensive expeditions. Males like H.W. Henshaw, who later grew to become chief of the U.S. Bureau of the Organic Survey (a precursor to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), and Lord Walter Rothschild, inheritor to a banking dynasty, gathered a wealthy array of purportedly “new” and singular chicken species that had advanced on this distant place.
Though this apply wasn’t distinctive to the islands, the size was noteworthy. “Hawai‘i might be the one most excessive instance of gathering,” says Paul Banko, a U.S. Geological Survey analysis wildlife biologist on the Pacific Island Ecosystems Analysis Heart.
By the early 1900s, Hawai‘i had skilled an infinite switch of culturally important native fauna. Birds are central to Hawaiian identification, in accordance with Kekuhi Kealiʻikanakaʻole, a outstanding Hawaiian educator and cultural practitioner. They’re private deities—the little gods of the islands. They assist fishermen discover the shore, and their plumage has been utilized in ceremonies, robes, and towering feather requirements referred to as Kahili. A species of honeycreeper, the ‘Apapane, is among the many birds talked about within the Hawaiian creation chant. “A part of my accountability as somebody who lives right here is to know who they’re,” Kealiʻikanakaʻole says. “They’re the ‘chicken individuals.’”
Just like the priceless artwork, devices, and burial objects that Westerners took from Indigenous communities, many specimens landed within the care of museum curators. Within the Sixties, Banko’s father, Winston, a federal wildlife biologist trying to perceive the elements that triggered Hawaiian avian extinctions, was the primary particular person to attempt to determine the place all these specimens had gone. He mailed a survey to establishments the world over and revealed his findings. Although incomplete, they had been intensive: 7,261 Hawaiian chicken specimens in 37 museums from Christchurch to Cambridge.
“Hawai‘i might be the one most excessive instance of gathering.”
Assortment was solely a symptom of a colonial endeavor that had, by then, radically altered Hawai‘i’s society and ecology. Upon their arrival on a few of the most remoted inhabited islands on Earth, Europeans had launched new ailments that killed a whole lot of 1000’s of Native Hawaiians, virtually wiping out the Indigenous neighborhood. Missionaries discouraged cultural practices, and their affect led to the abolition of hula in public locations within the 1830s. Many years later, non-native enterprise pursuits led a coup that overthrew the Hawaiian authorities, and the brand new rulers banned the native language from being taught in faculties. In 1898, america annexed what, in 1959, grew to become the fiftieth state. Over these centuries, many Native Hawaiians left the islands—each to pursue higher alternatives and to flee more and more excessive dwelling prices. At present, greater than half of Native Hawaiians reside within the continental United States.
Predictably, native wildlife additionally fared poorly throughout this era. Invasive predators like rats, mongooses, and feral cats that arrived on colonial-era buying and selling ships devoured the Moho and different ground-nesting species. Mosquitos got here, spreading avian malaria and avian pox, which decimated forest chicken populations. Complete habitats had been cleared for sugarcane and pineapple cultivation, whereas thousands and thousands of sandalwood timber grew to become one in every of Hawaii’s first money export crops.
Lower than a century after Cook dinner bought the 2 Moho, the species was presumed extinct. The identical destiny befell the ʻUlulū, additionally referred to as the Laysan Millerbird, a honeyeater referred to as the Bishop’sʻōʻō, and a honeycreeper, the ʻUlaʻaihāwane. By 1976, practically 4,000 of the specimens that Banko had tallied in museums belonged to species already extinct or endangered. In complete, the Hawaiian Islands have misplaced roughly two-thirds of their identified chicken species since people settled there. Twenty-seven of their 38 remaining endemic species or subspecies at the moment are listed as endangered or threatened. Three haven’t been noticed within the wild in a long time.
Mossman’s pictures undertaking started on a whim throughout a birding journey to New York Metropolis. He utilized to go to the American Museum of Pure Historical past’s private archives to see an Oʻahu ʻōʻō, whose yellow feathers had been utilized in ceremonies earlier than it was final seen within the wild in 1837. After he was denied entry, he discovered that the Subject Museum in Chicago additionally had an Oʻahu ʻōʻō, so he bought a last-minute aircraft ticket.
There, virtually 5,000 miles from Hawai‘i, he stared at a lifeless chicken that had lengthy held nice significance to the islands. The expertise was profound but in addition disturbing; he knew many different birds had been going through the identical destiny. It left a deep impression—a bit of his heritage removed from its dwelling. “Rising up within the diaspora in Utah, it was at all times troublesome to search out my method,” Mossman says. “Seeing it occur to the birds, too, taken from the islands—that’s exhausting.”
Utilizing Banko’s analysis as his information, he reached out to museums to ask for permission to {photograph} their collections. Many curators have welcomed him, and Mossman tries to domesticate relationships (it most likely doesn’t harm that he usually brings espresso and Hawaiian cookies). His dwelling base has been Honolulu’s Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, which has given him wide-ranging entry to doc its various array of native birds. Molly Hagemann, the vertebrate zoology collections supervisor, says Mossman’s work may help advance the Bishop Museum’s mission of schooling and public outreach (although the establishment is just not a proper associate within the work).
Thus far, Mossman has taken some 14,000 pictures of about 3,000 specimens representing dozens of species, which he estimates is a couple of third of the best way to finishing his undertaking. He endeavors to deal with every chicken as a person, bringing it again to life in his thoughts’s eye—even when he’s racing to complete earlier than catching a prepare or aircraft out of city. Ultimately, he hopes to construct a public database that writers, artists, educators, and scientists can discover and use.
Mossman’s concept arrives at an opportune second. Extra museums and universities are digitizing their analysis collections, and so they’re additionally extra open to collaborations that develop entry, says John McCormack, director of the Moore Laboratory for Zoology at Occidental Faculty in California, dwelling to one of many largest collections of Mexico’s chicken specimens. “On the whole, establishments have gotten a lot much less possessive about their initiatives,” he says. His group, for instance, is creating 3D fashions of avian specimens collected way back, providing a snapshot of what the organic world appeared like earlier than local weather change and different human impacts. “After we began placing these fashions on-line, it wasn’t simply scientists who had been ,” he says. “We received main consideration from members of the general public.”
For Mossman, a digital database can be only a first step. Though the Bishop Museum has the most important single assortment of Hawaiian birds, it’s additionally lacking many native species. Finally, he hopes to someday see a minimum of one particular person of every species discover a dwelling on the islands.
Museums worldwide have developed repatriation insurance policies and are doing extra to reckon with colonial histories.
That’s one other facet of Mossman’s undertaking befitting the instances. There’s a rising dialog surrounding the rightful place of Indigenous artifacts worldwide. In america, for instance, laws finalized final 12 months goal to speed up compliance with the Native American Graves Safety and Repatriation Act. Whereas the 1990 federal legislation requires that museums defend and return human stays, funerary and sacred objects, and objects of “cultural patrimony,” its implementation had languished on account of pink tape, loopholes, and resistance from establishments.
Whether or not required or not, museums worldwide have developed repatriation insurance policies and are doing extra to reckon with colonial histories. In 2020, a New Zealand museum completely returned to the Bishop Museum an intricately woven chicken feather cloak and helmet—an ʻahu ʻula and a mahiole—given to Cook dinner. The Bishop Museum itself is reportedly investigating and discussing the potential repatriation of artifacts taken from different Pacific Islands within the early 1900s, according to information shops. Repatriations have even extended to dinosaur fossils that colonizing nations took from their unique areas.
Museum professionals say they haven’t heard many individuals increase the query of returning preserved wildlife, although there’s a minimum of one latest instance. In April, a museum in Scotland returned a 170-year-old extinct lizard to its native Jamaica the place it is going to be used for analysis and schooling—the primary time a pure specimen has been returned to the Caribbean. A College of West Indies official referred to as it “a small however important step in direction of laying the inspiration for a regional and worldwide dialogue on repatriation.”
Nonetheless, it’s extremely unlikely that museums are on the verge of returning wildlife specimens to their native international locations en masse. The concept would increase sensible issues about secure stewardship of those scientifically beneficial collections in addition to extra philosophical questions. For instance, which nations or Indigenous cultures ought to have their animals returned? Can a tradition rightfully declare an animal as its personal?
Mossman has chosen to give attention to digitization partly to keep away from the sophisticated and at instances tense dialog that surrounds the repatriation of bodily objects. But with the rising recognition that Hawaii’s native birds and its tradition are intertwined, Hagemann says she wouldn’t be stunned if that’s the place the dialogue is headed: “It’s undoubtedly a dialogue value having.”
Native Hawaiian filmmaker and journalist Anna Keala Kelly, who has written extensively concerning the ongoing results of colonialism, says there must be no debate as as to whether the islands’ birds are thought-about equally to different cultural artifacts. For her, the lack of Hawai‘i’s native wildlife and the systematic dismantling of its individuals’s lifestyle go hand in hand. “If a chicken has a Hawaiian title, it has a spot in our world culturally, genealogically, and environmentally,” Kelly says. “We want them again.”
Mossman is aware of that giving life and reminiscence to lifeless creatures gained’t erase colonial legacies. His undertaking is a part of a broader drive to reclaim Hawaiian tradition and transfer towards ecological and cultural therapeutic—and others are additionally trying to birds in that effort.
Kealiʻikanakaʻole, for instance, belongs to a bunch working to put in writing an up to date mele, or chant, that prominently options Hawaiian birds. And Noah Gomes, an ethnographer who lives in Hilo, has spent years researching misplaced Hawaiian chicken names and advocating for his or her use by scientists and officers. At present, he says, many individuals are working to recapture and reintegrate Hawaiian language and cultural practices into fashionable ornithology and conservation.
As for Mossman, his quest is gaining extra consideration. Final November he shared a number of pictures of extinct chicken specimens, together with a Black Mamo, or ʻŌʻōnukuumū, a hanging darkish honeycreeper with a preposterously curved invoice that went extinct in 1907, and a Kākāwahie, a small pink honeycreeper that blinked out in 1963. In one other picture, eight extinct birds lay aspect by aspect. “Extinction is perpetually and it’s occurring proper in entrance of us for a few of our most vital native species,” he wrote. “We are able to’t surrender on them.”
Practically 200 individuals shared the publish. Tens of 1000’s comply with his work on-line. Native Hawaiian chicken populations proceed to undergo, however it’s clear to Mossman and Gomes that individuals care greater than ever. Is that sufficient? “The decline and revitalization of Indigenous cultures is linked to conservation,” Gomes says. “Schooling and outreach—it’s making a distinction. Is it making a distinction quick sufficient to cease these extinctions from occurring? That is still to be seen.”
To save lots of Hawaiian birds on the brink, Mossman thinks each tradition and science might want to play a job. The stakes are excessive and time is operating out. Biologists estimate that the mixed populations of the islands’ 10 most endangered chicken species quantity solely about 5,000 people. Local weather change and sea-level rise pose existential threats. In the meantime, conservationists are responding with daring efforts: moving nesting colonies to save lots of them from flooding, reintroducing birds raised in captivity to spice up dwindling wild populations, and combating avian malaria by releasing large numbers of mosquitos which are incapable of reproducing.
Conservation efforts gained’t carry again the Moho. Nobody will ever once more know what it’s prefer to trek throughout scrubland within the firm of these speedy birds. However in a way, the Moho lives on. There’s a Hawaiian proverb that roughly interprets to “Nothing can blow him astray, like a Moho within the wind.” Considerably satirically praising a flightless chicken, it lauds individuals who refuse to surrender, even towards excessive odds. And these individuals persist, generally flying the world over, lugging heavy tools, making an attempt to construct one thing new.
This story initially ran within the Fall 2024 problem as “Gone, Not Forgotten.” To obtain our print journal, change into a member by making a donation today.