Confirmed: Two Endangered Seabirds Have Been Rediscovered on Oahu

Thought to be extinct on the Hawaiian Island for centuries, Newell's Shearwaters and Hawaiian Petrels were found using acoustic monitoring.

By Jillian Mock
February 01, 2019

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Hawaiian Petrel. Photo: Natural History Library/Alamy

No one thought that two of Hawaii’s most endangered seabird species still lived on Oahu, the archipelago’s most populous island. Once widespread during the breeding season, the black-capped, white-bellied birds—Newell’s Shearwaters and Hawaiian Petrels—abandoned the island centuries ago, scientists thought, even before modern threats decimated their populations on other Hawaiian Islands.

However, over the last 30 years, a few dozen dazed or dead petrels and shearwaters had been found in Oahu’s urban areas, including Honolulu. One person even made phone recordings of what sounded like the whine of a Newell’s Shearwater in 2006. Those birds could have been lost, off course, or just passing through. Or not. So when Lindsay Young, executive director of the nonprofit Pacific Rim Conservation, started a statewide survey for the two species a few years ago, she decided it wouldn’t hurt to check her home island, just in case.

“We were not really expecting to find anything,” she says, “but no one had ever really looked.”

Young and her team set up acoustic monitoring devices in areas of the island where they thought they would be most likely to find the seabirds. To their surprise, the recordings picked up multiple Newell’s Shearwater and Hawaiian Petrel calls in two remote mountain ranges. The findings were published in January in The Condor: Ornithological Applications.

More:
https://www.audubon.org/news/confirmed-two-endangered-seabirds-have-been-rediscovered-oahu