LOST

(Devil in the Details series)

LOST

Drawings by guest artist Stanton Chan

(IG: @stantonchantonart)

1.

You,
The Kiwikiu—
Your name is new,
The original LOST,
You had become so few.

In 2000 I first learned about you,
Then known as Maui Parrotbill,
But I never saw you,
Though I fell in love with your habitat
And other Hawaiian honeycreepers,
Got a job at the national park
And led hikes into a cloud forest
Once every couple weeks or so.

I left the island in 2003, 
Returned in 2008.
In the meantime, we LOST 
Another species of honeycreeper on Maui,
The Po’ouli.

Later, my best friend 
Told me how her boyfriend,
A biologist,
Worked on the project to try to save
The Po’ouli
When only three remained.
But they LOST 
The race against extinction, in 2004.
And she knew she couldn’t keep his baby,
Or keep him from the opportunity
To go to grad school far away,
The love of her life LOST,
Like two-thirds of all the Hawaiian
Honeycreeper species,
Thirty-seven out of fifty-four.
You survive among the seventeen,
Barely,
The koa trees of your habitat LOST
To cattle pastures,
Greed for that gorgeous wood,
Your lowland flocks LOST
To avian malaria, avian pox,
Carried by alien mosquitoes,
While you carry no immunity
To their infections,
Isolated as you were,

Like the first people who came,
So many of whom also died from
Alien diseases—the flu, measles, 
Smallpox—
Their immunity LOST
In the years of isolation,
Their sovereignty LOST 
To an alien culture,
The symbols of their sovereignty,
The royal feather cloaks worn
By the chiefs of war,
The feathered kahili standards
From days gone by
Now kept in the Bishop Museum,
Along with the skins of the birds
From whom those bright feathers came,
The songs of some species now forever
LOST.

2.

The first time I saw you,
You were in captivity
At the Maui Bird Conservation Center,
A program of the San Diego Zoo,
Only open to visitors two weekends a year.
I peered through a window slit in the door,
And you flew right up in my face.
Love at first sight.

I saw you only once in the wild,
Many years ago now,
When I was training to lead hikes again.
Park rangers could no longer take people
Into your forest, for fear of visitors
Spreading Rapid ‘Ōhi’a Death,
The fungi killing our other canopy tree,
So many ‘ōhi’a on the Big Island LOST.
So I volunteered for the organization
In charge of your forest’s preservation.
I took the classes again
And then took a solo journey
Back into that forest,
But I got LOST.

My father never got LOST.
He was president 
Of the Institute of Navigation, in 2001,
Was to be the first speaker
At their conference on September 11,
Canceled because of what happened then,
So many American lives LOST.
He wrote equations to use satellites
To pinpoint our place on Earth,
To make Global Positioning System
More and more accurate.

My mother often got LOST.
My father complained to me that every time
They came out of a mall store,
She turned the wrong direction.
“Guess whose sense of direction
I inherited, Dad?”
She carried a Thomas Bros. mapbook
Always as she drove on the freeways
Of Los Angeles County,
Where I grew up.

I didn’t have a mapbook
Or any GPS that day in the forest.
I was relying on my memory,
Like my mother in the mall,
And it failed me just as reliably.
And I found myself waiting
By an old-growth koa tree
Covered with lichens,
Marked by a tiny round aluminum tag
With a number
That I had reported in my last call out
Before my cell phone died,
And then I saw you,
Your thick shape and parrot bill
Unmistakeable,
Working the lichen for insects
Before the last
Of the daylight was LOST.
And I thought perhaps my life
Would be LOST,
But at least
I had checked one more thing 
Off my bucket list.
I had seen you.
At last I heard a dog bark
In the dark.
I blew my whistle and was found.
But my chance to lead hikes there again?
Ha!
Pretty much LOST.

3.

The Maui Bird Conservation Center almost
Got LOST
In the fires of August 8, 2023—
Before the famous fire
That took the town of Lahaina,
Over one hundred lives LOST
To the flames—
The pastures of Olinda caught fire,
The dry grass and eucalyptus trees
Burning fast and bright,
Caused by power lines
Downed by seventy-mile-an-hour winds
Blowing kona, not normal northeast trades.
Jennifer, the Director
Of the Maui Bird Conservation Center,
Woke up onsite in the middle of the night
And spent forty-five minutes
Spraying water on the grounds
Before firefighters arrived.
The ground across the street
Got blackened bare.
She saved you.
She saved half of the last
Remaining Hawaiian crows,
The other half
In captivity on the Big Island.
That day so many lives were LOST
But no more species,
On that day, at least.

In 2019 
The center released thirteen 
Of you 
In a new koa forest
I had given money to help plant.
But not long after you first flew free,
Ten of you were found
Dead, our hope for the habitat LOST.
For the cause of death we found
Avian malaria.

Now we are trying again
With a mosquito-reducing program,
A birth control based on bacteria,
“BIRDS NOT MOSQUITOES”
We cry.
Only one hundred fifty of you are left
On Maui, in the whole world,
Max.
This feels like the last
Chance, the last
Hope, the last-
Ditch effort.

I have a close friend I almost LOST
Over this.
She thinks we need more research
Before we try this
In the wild, where we can’t take it back.
I know we have already used it
To fight human malaria.
I know that we saved
Wiliwili trees 
With small wasps I got to see released,
That we fought the spread 
Of cacti and fireweed, too,
With tiny warriors we chose.
I also know there are always risks
Of evolution we don’t expect.
But it still feels like the last
Chance, the last
Hope, the last-
Ditch effort.

And I don’t want to lose you.
I love you.
I have loved you
From the moment I met you.
Even when I thought I might die,
To see you once, even once, in the wild
Made it worth getting 
LOST.

“And bizarre, isn’t it, that the most intellectual creature, surely, that’s ever lived on the planet is destroying its only home. And I always believe it’s because there’s a disconnect between that clever, clever brain and human heart, love and compassion. And I truly believe, only when head and heart work in harmony can we attain our true human potential.”
—Jane Goodall
(Interview with Krista Tippett for “On Being” podcast, April 2020)