Fossil birds from the Hawaiian Islands: evidence for wholesale extinction by man before western contact

“First, and just as Olson and James (1982a) argued, they show that tests of certain kinds of biogeographic theory are not likely to produce trustworthy results if deeper history is not taken into account, a point also made by the translocation literature (Blondel and Vigne, 1993; Flannery and White,…”

“The magnitude of prehistoric human-caused vertebrate extinctions on islands came as a surprise when it first began to be described in detail by such scientists as Storrs Olson, Helen James, and David Steadman during the 1980s [73–75,81,84].”

“The only other fossil record of Hawaiian Hawk (Olson and James 1997) on Kaua‘i is a coracoid from the nearby Makawehi Dunes.”

“A summary of known parasites and diseases from the avifauna of the Hawaiian Islands.”

“…consumption is a conservation issue, because it can lead to population declines of target species (Bennett, 2000; Peres, 2000a,b; Steadman & Stokes, 2002), to local extirpations (Peres, 2000b) and even to global extinctions (e.g. Olson & James, 1982; Holdaway & Jacomb, 2000; Oates et al., 2000).”

“…was dealt a serious blow by the discovery of fossils showing that oceanic islands had harboured many more species only a few centuries ago (e.g. Olson & James, 1982a, b, 1984; Steadman, 1989, 1995), before aboriginal colonists initiated a wave of extinction that has continued right up to the…”

“…faunal extinction and habitat degradation have been recurrent consequences of early human colonization throughout the Pacific region, where an estimated 2000 bird species have gone extinct (Kirch, 1982; Olson & James, 1982, 1984; Cassells, 1984; Steadman, 1989, 1995; Milberg & Tyrberg, 1993).”

“Charred bones of extinct birds are often found in prehistoric human middens in the Hawaiian Islands and elsewhere providing plentiful evidence that the ancient Polynesians used birds for food (Olson & James, 1982b; Steadman et al ., 2002).”

“An example is Hawaii, where the first extinction wave occurred with the arrival of the Polynesians 1600 years ago, and a second with European contact in the 18th century, each with a different causal mechanism (OLSON & JAMES 1982, BOYER 2008).”

“…and present dispersal agents and distances may be very different from pre-historic ones, as a result of the extinction of many large bird species (Olson & James, 1982;T a b le 3 C u rr en t st at u s o f b io ge o gr ap h ic al , ge o lo gi ca l an d m o le cu la r su p p o rt fo r th e va ri o…”

“First, impacts associated with human arrival other than hunting, including habitat destruction and the introduction of mammalian predators, could account for bird losses on most Pacific islands (Olson & James 1982; Cassells 1984; Steadman 1995).”

“The first human colonizations caused extensive extinctions (Olson & James 1982).”

“Extinctions of birds on oceanic islands such as New Zealand have been directly linked to human-induced habitat destruction and the introduction of predatory mammals [2–4,14–16].”

“Islands are characterized by inherently low species diversity compared with continents (MacArthur 1965; Whittaker and FernándezPalacios 2007), and they have been disproportionately further depleted by human-mediated extinctions (e.g. Olson and James 1982; Steadman et al. 1991; Steadman 2006).”

“Its subfossil bones, however, are abundant and widespread on the extensive `Ewa Plain of southwest Oahu, to near sea level; they also occur near sea level in the dunes of West Molokai, and in lava caves of East Maui, documenting a former breeding range down slope as far as 808 m above sea level (asl) at Lua Lepo Cave…”

“Most radiometrically dated fossil deposits included here are Holocene in age, with a few sites dating to the late Pleistocene (Olson & James 1982b; Steadman 2006); thus, the fossil data represent the ancient avifauna of each island immediately prior to human contact.”

“Overexploitation was almost certainly responsible for the historical extinctions of the elephant birds and giant lemurs of Madagascar, the giant kangaroos of Australia, the moas of New Zealand, and the megaherbivores of North and South America (Olson & James 1982; Martin & Klein 1984).”

“Large-scale extinction and endangerment of native Hawaiian bird species (Olson and James 1982, Steadman 1995, Boyer 2008) is likely to have fundamentally altered bird–plant mutualisms in Hawai‘i (Pau et al. 2009).”

“Olson, S. L. & James, H. F. 1984.”

“Islands provide us with some of the most dramatic examples of eco‐ logical and evolutionary phenomena including adaptive radiations (Gavrilets & Losos, 2009), community assembly (Thornton, 1997), species invasions (Sax & Gaines, 2003) and catastrophic extinc‐ tions (Olson & James, 1982).”

“Oceanic islands tend to be hotspots of avian extirpation and introduction (Olson & James, 1982; Steadman, 1995; Case, 1996; Blackburn & Duncan, 2001; Curnutt & Pimm, 2001; Cassey, 2003; Blackburn & Gaston, 2005), and for this reason we may suspect that these assemblages have a high tendency to…”

“It would clearly be useful to the testing of hypotheses for a human role in late prehistoric extinctions in the Hawaiian Islands (Olson and James 1982) to know more certainly when Polynesian settlement began in the mid-Pacific.”

“This is especially true of the Hawaiian Islands, where, in the last 200 years, more than 39 species of birds have become extinct, and many others exist on only a subset of the islands they once inhabited (Olson & James, 1982).”

“…turnover due to their clear borders, which facilitate documentation of species addition and loss, and also because they have good historical and sometimes fossil records of biotic change since human colonization (Olson and James 1982, Flenley et al. 1991, Steadman 2006, Sax and Gaines 2008).”

“…for pre-anthropogenic extinctions, which suggests that lower rates occurred compared with the period characterized by human impact (e.g. Alcover et al., 1999; Burney, 1999; Holdaway, 1999; Martin and Steadman, 1999; Olson, 1989; Olson and Hearty, 2003; Olson and James, 1992; Steadman, 1995, 2006).”

“…moa-nalos, the giant flightless New Caledonian Sylviornis, and the elephant birds of Madagascar, and the giant tortoises from the Galápagos Islands and the Indian Ocean archipelagos (Dawson, 1966; Arnold, 1979; Olson & James, 1982; Atkinson & Greenwood, 1989; Balouet & Olson, 1989; Livezey, 1993).”

“Defense against herbivory arose in at least 10 native Hawaiian plant species (Olson and James 1982, Givnish et al. 1994).”

“…Size Although Hawaiian petrel populations may not have declined to the brink of extinction, the distribution of subfossil bones suggest that they were much more abundant in the past and that colonies were more widely distributed than they are today (Olson and James 1982b; Athens et al. 1991).”

“The remains of birds in caves in lava tubes (and other such places) provide an unusually detailed record of the islands' faunas (Olson and James, 1982, 1991; James and Olson, 1991).”

“Many Hawaiian birds specialized to pollinate or disperse native plants have become extinct or have been extirpated to higher elevation forests (Olson and James 1982, 1984; van Riper et al. 1986; Steadman 1995; Benning et al. 2002).”

“For example, over 30% of the Hawaiian non-marine bird and mollusc fauna went extinct within the span of prehistoric human tenure (Kirch 1982; Olsen and James 1982).”

“Polynesians settled Hawaii 1,500 years ago (Gray & Jordan, 2000), clearing lowland forest, introducing rats, pigs and other animals, and wiping out many species of birds, begin- – 115 – ning with the largest (Olson & James, 1982; Burney et al., 2001).”

“By contrast, in regions where human settlement occurred during the relative climatic stability of the Holocene, it seems clear that anthropogenic factors do indeed explain major extinction events [8,9].”

“Most seabirds were extirpated from the main Hawaiian Islands 800 years ago (Olson & James 1982).”

“Many species of birds, particularly those restricted entirely to such lowland dry forest, were apparently pushed to extinction by the loss of this distinct lowland dry forest habitat (Olson and James, 1982b; Athens et al., 2002).”

“These changes, along with the extinction of untold numbers of birds and other animals in the past few thousands of years (e.g., Olson and James, 1982; Steadman, 1995; Steadman et al., 2002), have changed the ecology of these islands greatly.”

“prehistoric extinction of Hawaiian birds, and many additional agents of extinction, such as introduction of avian pox and avian malaria [72], are implicated in historic times [40,73].”

“Webb, T., Stanfield, B. J. & Jensen, M. L. (1999) Effects of topography Steadman, D. W. & Freifeld, H. B. (1999) The food habits of Polynesian on rainforest tree community structure and diversity in American pigeons and doves: a systematic and biogeographic review.”

“Additional mammalian predators that accompanied Europeans, such as domestic cats, Black Rats and Norway Rats R. norvegicus, accelerated the declime of HP.”

“Although not widely appreciated until the 1980s (e.g., Olson & James, 1982), the scale of human transformation of insular faunas by Polynesians, as well as other groups that reached islands before European arrival, has been large and profound with respect to both species introductions and…”