 and welcome back to The Creative Life, a creative collaboration between the American Creativity Association, Austin, and Think Tech, Hawaii. Today we're going to be talking about the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project with Hunter Craft. And hopefully as you begin to watch our episodes or as you continue to watch our episodes, you'll see that we tend to bring in people to tell us about how they're living a very creative life. So today we're going to go to the rainforest in Maui, where Hunter is coming to us, and he'll be talking to us about how he has, his life has changed over time, and he's taken on a strong commitment to this creative project of his. Hunter, welcome to The Creative Life on Think Tech, Hawaii. Glad to have you with us today, and perhaps the best way for us to start is to ask you, you were at Yale, and you had a strong interest in anthropology and still do, and somehow you found a magical way to synthesize anthropology with environmental issues. Why and how? Thanks for the question, Darlene. It's great to be here with you. Yes, so I began my academic studies in anthropology, which is the study of human cultures and languages and societies. And I had always been also interested in the environment, especially birds. As a young boy, I attended local summer camps where I grew up, run by the Audubon Society, and was always really, really enamored with the natural world and with birds. But that wasn't exactly what I thought I would end up studying. It was more of a hobby for me. But while I was at Yale studying anthropology, I met all sorts of researchers and graduate students who were interested in what they called the environmental humanities. And they were studying the environment, but through this lens of how human culture and society relates to the environment. So how are people thinking about the land around them? How do people make use of natural resources? What cultural connections do people have to wildlife that they might encounter? And when I saw these people doing this kind of research, I was really inspired because it seemed to me that these two things that I was really interested in, human society and human language and culture, and then birds and wildlife and the environment, were actually maybe more related than I thought. And so that kind of led to me developing several research projects that wanted to explore those connections. So tell us a little bit about the Mali Forest Bird Recovery Project. Perhaps it's mission and how did you find them or how did they find you? Absolutely. So Mali Forest Bird Recovery Project is a project that is affiliated with the University of Hawaii. And I got in touch with them after receiving a grant from Yale University when I graduated. It was the Robert C. Bates Postgraduate Research Fellowship to continue a research project that I had started as an undergraduate. And my research project was about how people who were involved in conservation of wildlife kind of perceived their role in the environment and why were they so invested in this? And what kind of meaningful things did they get from this? Not just in terms of the science of how we protect wildlife, but also how we as people drive meaning from those kinds of activities. And I decided I wanted to do this research project in Hawaii for a number of reasons. One was just because there's so many environmental issues that are affecting Hawaii today. Hawaii is known by many as the extinction capital of the world. It's a really sad title, but there's a good reason for it. Many of the wild animals and plants that are here are extinct because of human interventions in the environment, negative human impacts. So it's a really isolated group of islands, right? It's in the middle of the Pacific. So a lot of the plants and animals that live here have been isolated for millions of years. They're very sensitive to disturbance. And so we have really, really high rates of extinction. And there's also a lot of cultural connections to these plants and animals here, especially the birds, whether that's through native Hawaiian culture, which has really valued the environment and also has deep cultural connections to birds and beautiful, beautiful feather artwork that was traditionally produced from bird feathers or from a sort of more international scientific community standpoint where a lot of these birds were important in developing evolutionary theory. So these birds have a really tight human connection, but they're also facing unprecedented levels of environmental loss and destruction. So it was really a perfect place to investigate these questions that I had about why, how the environment intersected with human society because there's so much at stake in both the cultural and scientific connections to these birds, but also in the threats that they face. So when I thought about studying this in Hawaii, I began researching what organizations were doing work in this area. And I got in touch with my force for recovery project and basically asked if I could come and shadow them, essentially work as a volunteer, helping them with their projects, being basically free labor in exchange for the ability to write and research alongside of them. And that's how I got my start. And now I'm a regular team member. So I'm no longer sort of embedded researcher with them, but I'm one of their part of their team, their field team that actually goes out into the forest and monitors these birds. So Hunter, if I understand correctly, it's not just the birds that are in danger, but the forest as well. So is it a matter of save the birds, save the forest or vice versa? It is. They're really connected. And that's really Maui Forest Birds mission is to save the birds and save the forest. And they're connected. So the forests here in Hawaii are really important for not just the birds, but for human life and human livelihood. So these islands don't have any sources of fresh water that come up from the rock, from deep within. All of the water here originally fell as rain. And it may have percolated into the soil, but where you can then access it from underground, but originally it came as rainfall. And without the forest, when you receive rain, the water just runs right off the mountain into the ocean, and it doesn't sustain any life. So the forest acts as a sponge. It traps the water and then collects it and allows it to slowly percolate into the ground so that it can sustain human enterprise, human agriculture, human life, but also wildlife. And so the birds play a really essential role in maintaining a healthy forest by pollinating their flowers. A lot of the birds here in Hawaii drink nectar, kind of like hummingbirds on the mainland, except a lot of these birds are bigger and are not related to hummingbirds. And they also spread the seeds of the fruit. So they're sort of like replanting the forest as they go about their business. And they also the ones that eat insects free the trees of pests that might otherwise really harm the forest. So in order to protect the forest, we also have to protect the birds. And in order to protect the birds, we have to protect their home, the forest. And so this really ties not just to valuing these birds for their wonderful cultural connections, or their natural beauty, or simply because we value them as fellow organisms living on earth, but it also serves us in a very practical way of protecting human livelihood in Hawaii. So it's safe to assume then that the birds and the forest are co-dependent? Yes, yes. The birds and the forest really rely on each other. Yes. The main tree in Hawaiian rainforest is called the Ohi'alehua. It's beautiful, beautiful tree, grows really tall in the rainforest and has these bright, often red or orange or yellow flowers that kind of look like maybe if you're familiar with like a bottle brush or that kind of tree that's used in landscaping more commonly. And these trees are really essential. They're the backbone of the ecosystem, but the birds pollinate them. And so the birds help them produce seeds, and then in turn they provide food for the birds. So yes, there is this sort of co-dependence and reliance that the forest has with the birds here in the Hawaiian Islands. Does the rain follow the forest? The rain, yes. The forest, it helps trap the moisture and it also, as the clouds are pushed up the mountain by the trade winds that blow across the ocean and then hit the islands, the trade winds push the moisture up the mountain where it condenses into clouds and then the leaves of the trees catch this moisture. So in a sense, yes, the watershed is really tied to the forest. We take so much for granted. We just assume that the rain comes through and everything will be just fine. How often does it rain? Is it the daily experience or constant? It can be. One of the really unique things about the geography and climate of the Hawaiian Islands is that even though by sort of this area that they have, there are not a lot of actually surface area, but within that small area there are so many different kinds of climate. So here on Maui, our tallest mountain is Haleakala and it's 10,000 feet in elevation. So at the top, it's very high and can be very cold. We received some snow earlier around New Year's and late last year up at the top. So you have like almost an alpine, very cold, sort of dry, almost desert-like environment up at the top of the mountain. You have rain forests on the windward side where the moist air from the trade winds hits and then on the leeward side, it's much drier and so you can have areas on the same island that receive 300 inches of rain a year or areas on the same island that receive 10 inches of rain a year. So there's an enormous amount of variation. But generally in the areas where we work in the rainforest, there is frequently daily precipitation or maybe every other day kind of depending on the time of year. So it is, it can be quite wet where we work. Do the birds that you work with or whatever procedure you want to call it, live and work with, do they stay or do they migrate to the other Hawaiian islands? Yeah, so why would you want to leave? It sounds so wonderful. I know. So most of the birds that we work with are non-migratory. So they sort of stay put. They have their home range where they're living in the rainforest and they might move up and down the slope of the mountain seasonally. Maybe as the flowers bloom on one side of the mountain, they move to that area to follow the flowers blooming or as it gets colder, they may move a little bit lower down. But generally, they kind of stay put. They're not doing these big, there are birds that migrate across the ocean to Hawaii, but not the ones that we really are focused on with our project. So these migrations though, if they move up and down the mountain, that normally has been a really wonderful part of their life cycle. But today is creating some really interesting problems because of mosquitoes, which are not native to Hawaii and represent the main threat to these birds. So the main threat to Hawaii's native forest birds is avian malaria, which is a disease that has spread my mosquitoes, and these birds don't have any resistance to it. So they're living high on the mountain where it's cold and there are no mosquitoes. But if they move lower down the mountain where it is warmer and there are mosquitoes, there's a high risk that they'll get sick and die. And so that's kind of what we're up against is this disease that was not here originally, but was brought here on accident by people. How can you cope with that without harming the birds? You just can't come have something come through and wipe out the mosquitoes I would set without harming the birds. So how do you design that or deal with that? Absolutely. So mosquitoes, we've known for decades that this has been the main problem facing birds in Hawaii is mosquitoes, or one of the main problems facing forest birds is these mosquitoes, which they were brought about 200 years ago on accident, probably on accident, we can't be sure, in water barrels that were dumped basically by whaling ships that were resupplying with new freshwater. They dumped their old water and then refilled their old water had mosquito larvae in it and then the mosquitoes have spread. And so for a long time, we didn't really have any sort of plan for how we would address the mosquitoes because there really wasn't an available technology or solution. It was just kind of viewed as something that we had to cope with, we had to protect the birds where they were, but there wasn't really any hope for having the birds move back down to these lower parts of the mountain. But that's changing today thanks to some new technological breakthroughs with forms of mosquito suppression where we actually can do things that will lower the mosquito population across the island. So there's a few different ways to do this, but the way that we're really pursuing right now is called Wolbachia incompatible insect technique. It's kind of a long name, but essentially what it is is the most insects across the world have a bacteria that lives inside of them called Wolbachia. And this bacteria has a kind of complicated relationship with these insects, but it basically it lives inside of them naturally. And this bacteria has different strains and each insect has its own strain of the bacteria. And some scientists a while back discovered kind of an accident that if you have a female insect with one strain that mates with a male insect of a different strain, she will lay sterile eggs. So the eggs that she lays will not hatch. And so the plan is to release male mosquitoes which don't bite. So the male it's only the females that bite. So the male mosquitoes that are going to be released don't pose a threat to the birds. But if we release these males that have a different strain of the Wolbachia bacteria than the females, then they'll mate with the wild females and then they'll lay sterile eggs and the mosquito population will go down. And so we're going to do this using a strain of this bacteria that is also here in Hawaii but is found in a different insect here. So we're taking mosquitoes that are here already and we're taking a bacteria that's here already but we're just kind of mixing them so that the bacteria is in a different insect than it is right now. So this technique is used all over the world actually for humans. So to prevent human malaria from spreading. So people use this in cities in tropical parts of the world where they'll drive like a van down the road and they'll release male mosquitoes that once again don't bite. The males only feed on nectar. And so these male mosquitoes though will then mate with the wild females and then the mosquito population will go down because they won't have any eggs that hatch. And so what's really new and innovative about our project is that we've never done this really out in the rainforest before and we've never done it for birds. It's always been done for for human health and concerns about human safety and public health. So we're taking that technology and we're going to apply it to a completely new situation. Instead of doing it in an urban area we're going to do it in remote rainforest and we're going to do it for the benefit of endangered species instead of people. So that leads to all kinds of interesting problems and things about how we're going to implement this. And so there's a lot of creative thinking and collaboration happening in Hawaii right now to come up with solutions for that. We've been talking about some fascinating dimensions and things perhaps that certainly myself and probably most of our viewers have never considered or some new surprises and some new information. We haven't talked about your favorite birds. So what are some of the Hawaiian forest birds that you work with? Absolutely. So they're incredibly beautiful. Yes. So here on Maui we have six remaining forest birds. Originally we had many many more species. There are many more species of native forest birds but unfortunately most of them are extinct. So we think that 70 percent of the birds in Hawaii are already extinct and that's a pretty sobering fact to really come to terms with. The remaining ones are incredibly beautiful and are really worth protecting. So my personal favorite which is the one of the ones that we spend most of our time thinking about is called the Kiwi Q. It's also been called the Maui Parrot Bill and it is a bright yellow bird with a green back and a yellow breast and chest and a beautiful very vibrant yellow eyebrow. It's very striking and it has a large very hooked bill. It's curved kind of like a parrot although it is not actually a parrot. There are no native parrots to Hawaii and it uses that hooked bill to excavate insects from insect larvae from tree wood. So a woodpecker might drill a hole in a tree to get a bug out but the Kiwi Q will use this hook to sort of pry the bark and pry open the wood to take grubs out. There's still a lot we don't know about these birds because they're so rare they're very hard to study. We think that the Kiwi Q there's only 130, 150 birds left. That's it and they only live on Maui. So they're an incredibly rare bird with a very small range where they can be found. One of the things that really breaks my heart about these birds is that they're incredibly beautiful. They're from here, they're unique to Maui and yet because they're so rare and because they only live in these remote mosquito-free areas so many people who live here never have the opportunity to see them and to have that personal relationship with these birds. So one of the sort of dreams you know we're probably quite a few years away from this because a lot of this these techniques for eliminating or reducing mosquito populations they're really new but one of the long-term dreams is that these birds will recover enough where people can begin seeing them where they live that these birds can spread not just from these high elevation rainforests but can actually resettle in areas that they probably used to live but have now disappeared from. And so that's really one of one of my personal dreams is that someone you know in in their backyard could see this bird once again which now never happens. People just can't see them because they're just so so rare and only live in such a remote place. How could that dream come to fruition when they have to be transported? It certainly would be a... Yeah so there's a lot there's a lot we don't know. A lot of what we've been working on is been just really trying to mitigate the threats as they come. Their decline has been so steep and so dramatic that in some ways it's hard to even envision that future because we're just kind of doing the sort of triage where we're just working to to mitigate the loss. However I think that as we begin to see real results with our mosquito control we can hope for this and the way I would kind of envision it would be that a lot of these birds from areas that maybe they live above where people live. People live down on the coast and these birds live higher up on the mountain. As these areas below the birds range become free of mosquitoes I would guess that some would begin to a young birds maybe that are looking for their own home territory would begin moving into these areas but it is possible that we would need to help move some of them and and translocate them. Translocations are things we've tried in the past where we've tried to move these birds from one area of the mountain to another where we were hoping that you know they would have another safe haven for mosquitoes. Unfortunately when we tried this in 2019 it didn't work. The mosquitoes that had previously not been on that side of the mountain had spread. In the meantime they had spread to the area where we moved them and the birds ended up they ended up passing away from avian malaria so any sort of moving the birds to a new area would really have to happen after we really get a hold on the mosquito problem. So how many are on your team Hunter besides yourself? Right now I want to say there's about 12 of us, 12 or 13 and we're growing. As we get ready to implement this new project to suppress mosquitoes we're getting ready to grow our team because we're going to have a lot of work cut out for us in the future. So yeah there's about 12 there's people who work in the office and do data management. There are people who help write grants and do the sort of administrative stuff and then there's people who are out in the forest looking for the birds, studying them, studying the mosquito populations and really sort of boots on the ground kind of thing. Very interesting. As we're winding down our conversation perhaps we would be remiss if we didn't address them. You hinted in this in the beginning that there is a history in Hawaiian culture in the dealing of birds and traditions. So does that still continue? Certainly probably not as much as historically in the past but what's the status of those kinds of activities? It does continue. There is a lot of the story of Hawaii. It's one of loss as these birds have gone extinct as native Hawaiian culture has been suppressed or challenged in the face of sort of colonial history but it's also one of resilience as people have learned to cope and learn to keep their traditions alive. Obviously I'm not a native Hawaiian person so I can't speak to it from that sort of personal lens but I can say that there are definitely people who still value these birds as important parts of their culture and heritage. In a lot of ways there are so many reasons for protecting these birds but one of them is because they have this really special part in Hawaiian culture and in Hawaiian history of being significant visual symbols of playing a role in the visual arts of native Hawaiian people, of being featured in traditional proverbs and idioms that reference these birds in poetry and song and it would be really sad if we have these traditional songs and chants from Hawaiian culture that reference these birds but the bird isn't there. If the song is still there but the bird isn't there, something is kind of lost and maybe our ability to understand what that song or chant really meant and so that is one reason why we want to protect these birds and one reason why they're so valuable to these islands. Well I'm so glad that you were able to join us today and I hope that your conversation has contributed to the value of this project in Hawaii and extended beyond and before we say goodbye to our viewers. What's your plans because you will not be able to understand to continue? Yes so my plan right now is to begin a PhD back at Yale University in the fall in the anthropology department. So I'll be back there studying the anthropology of the environment and specifically of these birds and all of the issues that relate to them. So I won't be living in Hawaii full-time anymore but I will be doing my dissertation work here about this kind of journey that I've started with these birds. It is a journey you have started in a very productive one so my thanks to you and the thanks from our viewers that you've taken the time to be with us today. To our viewers you have been watching The Creative Life on Think Tech Away with our guest Hunter Kraft and we have been discussing the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project. Join us in two weeks for another episode of The Creative Life until then aloha.