Among those preparing for this week’s inclement weather are the rearing facilities for Hawaiʻi’ endangered native birds.
So far it has been confirmed that at least one rare bird in captivity has already died: a center on Hawaiʻi Island lost an ʻakekeʻe after the second Kona low storm. The bird is native to Kauaʻi and is critically endangered according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list of threatened species.
The ʻakekeʻe that passed was reared at the Keauhou Bird Conservation Center on Hawaiʻi island which, along with the Maui Bird Conservation Center, is one of two centers belonging to the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance in Hawaiʻi.
Hannah Bailey is the wildlife care manager for the two conservation centers and she spoke with HPR about the damaging impact the past Kona storms had on their facilities.
“There was just lots of limbs, lots of trees. We put in a new fence this past fall, and a lot of damage to the fence from the trees coming down,” Bailey said. “It was probably about $10,000 to $15,000 worth of damage to the fence.”
The severe storms were just one factor behind the death of one of the ʻakekeʻe they were caring for, according to Bailey.
“I also have to say this bird was fairly old for an ʻakekeʻe, so I think it was the combination of age and just overwhelming weather,” she said.
“But I will say I'm very relieved that we only lost one bird, because I've seen in the types of storms that these were, I have definitely seen young healthy birds succumb to illness or injury during storms like this.”
Bailey said a silver lining of the storm has been getting to put freshly fallen branches in the birds’ enclosures.
The birds also time their breeding with the end of the rainy season and the storms have kicked all of them into mating behaviors — which is a cause for concern as storms are expected to return.
In Maui, the Maui Bird Conservation Center houses rare birds like the Hawaiian crow, or the ʻalalā. There are fewer than 150 ʻalalā left in existence, with only five in the wild.
Workers at MBCC averted a close call back in 2023 when they fought back the Olinda wildfire. Keanini Aarona, an avian recovery specialist at MBCC, spoke with HPR about the impacts of the recent storms.
“Storm was a little hectic. We lost power,” Aarona said. “Nothing too wild happened with our birds, our buildings were still all okay. I'm kind of happy that we didn't have the pine trees around the buildings, because in the past, we've had pine trees create damage.”
Any holes created by branches can become an entry point for mosquitoes, which can introduce disease to bird enclosures, explained Aarona.
HPR also spoke with Martin Frye and Tess Hebebrand from the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project, an organization in charge of monitoring the five ʻalalā that were released into the wild as part of a pilot project nearly a year and a half ago.
Frye says the bad weather forced them to pull their monitoring team from the remote slopes of Haleakalā, where it had a constant presence for the last year and a half.
“It was really a walloping that we got in some places, I think nearly 100 inches of rain,” said Frye.
“When you think about running a research station, or as I call it, this boutique zoo in the forest, so to speak, there's a lot of things that can go wrong when there's a big storm.”
Having monitored and made steps to acclimate the ‘alalā to living on their own, they were hopeful that the 'alalā would be able to weather the storm, Hebebrand explained.
“They luckily have been through a few storms before, and early on in the release we were able to give them access to their pre-release aviary, where they were… naturally sheltering on their own during the storm,” she said. “So we had some confidence that they would do that again.”
This story aired on The Conversation on April 7, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
