Lanai Oloma'o
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Lanai Oloma'O | ||||||||||||||
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| Myadestes lanaiensis lanaiensis (Wilson, 1891) |
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Phaornis obscurus lanaiensis |
The Lanai Olama’o or Lanai Thrush was an endemic species of Hawaiian Thrush that was only found on Lanai. It is a six to seven inch bird, with a brownish top and white bottom. The male had a greyish chest, and had blackish legs. The females had white chests and had grey legs. Both genders had dark lores.
It once lived throughout all of Lanai’s forests. It disappeared from the center of the island from key habitat due to the construction of the only establishment on Lanai, Lanai City. Once this city was created, people came to the island more because they could live there. As more people came, they brought favorite plants and animals. Some of the animals escaped and went into the forests. Plants may lost their seeds to the wind or were planted in the ground allowing them to spread. Once the plants were in high enough in numbers, they literally pushed out the natives plants and the released ones grew in their place. With the loss of the food plants of this bird throughout most of its range, the Lanai Thrush had to look harder for food. Animals like pigs, cows, birds and mosquitos were released onto Lanai.
Pigs were a large problem. They tore out all the low growing fruit plants causing the understory to grow bare. Without the cover of the plants water evaporated causing the trees to dry out. The pigs also destroyed much of the forests tree roots, causing them to grow weak and even kill them. As the trees died the forests became less dense till they gave out and turned into savannas. These grasslands would be used by people as good farmland for years till they grow too poor to use and the land becomes a desert. Cattle had a similar roles as the pig and they too destroyed low growing vegetation, but at a larger scale. Birds, which were used as pets occasionally got lost, as sizeable populations grew, they were able to breed and compete with native birds.
The Lanai Olama’o was now going up against other songbirds with similar diets and even more aggressive. With more competition the Lanai inhabitants were driven to less liked habitats. One of the last big introducers is actually not very big, it’s the mosquito. The mosquito is an insect, you can swat it and its dead, so why do birds have a big problem with it. The big problem is not the mosquito, but passengers inside. Bacteria, from North America, Europe and Asia were brought inside insects. The native birds like the Lanai Olama’o are not accustomed to diseases as such. In contact with diseases, such as Avian Malaria and Avian Pox, these natives will die. However how does the bacteria go from the mosquito to the bird. The male mosquito has no part in the diseases as they are nectivorus, and eat sugar and nectar, not blood. Females need blood, so their babies can grow. The female mosquito goes to an introduced bird that has the disease. It lands and prepares its self to feast. It gets its proboscis or tongue and gets its three mouth parts to work. First, something like a Swiss Army Knife comes out and drills the skin to the blood vesicle. Next comes the needle, this releases an anticoagulant, which causes the blood to keep flowing instead of clotting. In the anticougulant is the diseases, hitching a ride as they head toward the weak parts of the body. The last part of the mosquito tongue is a straw, which will suck until the belly can not hold any more and flies away, leaving the bird to grow ill and die.
With all of these environmental problems the Lanai Thrush grew extremely rare, even back in Wilsons time there in 1900. He stated that this bird was more common in the 1890s. He also stated that it grew rare in the 1920s. By 1930, the bird was almost no where to be found, except in a few sma;ll pockets of pristine forest on Lanai’s North Coast. The extinction of the species would soon follow, the year was either 1931 or possibly 1933. By then most if not all of the lands on Lanai have introduced plants.
