Belonging on an Island: Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in HawaiʻiA lively, rich natural history of Hawaiian birds that challenges existing ideas about what constitutes biocultural nativeness and belonging This natural history takes readers on a thousand-year journey as it explores the Hawaiian Islands' beautiful birds and a variety of topics including extinction, evolution, survival, conservationists and their work, and, most significantly, the concept of belonging. Author Daniel Lewis, an award-winning historian and globe-traveling amateur birder, builds this lively text around the stories of four species--the Stumbling Moa-Nalo, the Kaua'I 'O'o, the Palila, and the Japanese White-Eye. Lewis offers innovative ways to think about what it means to be native and proposes new definitions that apply to people as well as to birds. Being native, he argues, is a relative state influenced by factors including the passage of time, charisma, scarcity, utility to others, short-term evolutionary processes, and changing relationships with other organisms. This book also describes how bird conservation started in Hawai'i, and the naturalists and environmentalists who did extraordinary work. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Sitting Ducks Extinction Humans and Birds in the preEuropean Contact Era | 9 |
Counting Extinction Observing and Surveying the Kauai Ōō and Hawaiian Forest Bird Habitat | 52 |
Overcoming Extinction Collectors Stewardship and the Palila | 128 |
Becoming Endemic The Whiteeye the Territorial Government the Hui Manu and Introduced Species | 178 |
Other editions - View all
Belonging on an Island: Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in Hawai'i Daniel Lewis Limited preview - 2018 |
Common terms and phrases
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