Make me a honeycreeper

Irsquove never seen a honeycreeper When I first heard the name about a week ago I thought it would be a kind of bee creeping from flower to flower looking for nectar and honey It turns out to be a small bird about the size of a tennis ball with feathers I havenrsquot seen it and yoursquore not likely to have either even if yoursquore a birder unless yoursquove been to HawaiiEven if yoursquove been to Hawaii chances are slim that yoursquove spotted a honeycreeper unless you went trekking up the mountain and crossed the 1500m line Then if yoursquod stayed a few days and been very watchful you might have seen small fleeting explosions of colour in the bushes or trees gone before you could get a good look If it had a long gently curved bill it might very well have been a scarlet honeycreeper Vestiaria coccinea or lsquoilsquoiwi eeEEwee as it is locally knownPerhaps you only heard the lsquoilsquoiwirsquos song Itrsquos a twonote samba a pure high note and a lower one like an afterthought with a leisurely pause in between To my ears it sounded exactly like the bird was saying ldquoTimersquos uprdquo Over and over againWhy the sudden interest in a bird Irsquove never seen and probably never will Last week researching something I came upon a photograph of a lovely scarlet bird with black wings perched in a shrub and sipping nectar out of a blue belllike flower Its long scarlet beak was curved like a kitchen gadget I use to peel prawnsWhat stopped me in my tracks was the flower It was also curved and its curve exactly matched the birdrsquos beak It was as though someone had designed this particular flower exclusively for this particular birdrsquos beakNothing in nature evolves in a hurry Flowers and birds have found their shapes colours and fragrances over countless eras of trial and error and mixing and matching How long would it have taken for this specific flower to evolve to exactly match the shape of this specific birdThatrsquos how my journey to Hawailsquoi startedWersquore back at a time 7 million years ago when there were no honeycreepers and no Hawailsquoi just a scattering of islands covered with dense forests Into this Eden we learn from fossil records a bird called the Eurasian rose finch flew in and settled downWith nothing to disturb them the children of the rose finch evolved and proliferated playing around with colours shapes sizes wings and beaks Some went yellow some blue and others mixed their palettes Everyone was having fun Soon there were almost 60 species of honeycreepers a delirious explosion of colours and songHawaiirsquos flowers eager for the birds to scatter their pollen over the islands flirted with the honeycreepers competing with each other to be attractive Love sparked between two of them the blue lsquopelu Lobelia grayana and our scarlet honeycreeper Over millennia the lobelia developed a curved tubular flower almost mathematically matched to the scarlet honeycreeper Now they were friends for lifeI wish Irsquod been around to see the dance of life in this paradise at that timeOr maybe I donrsquot The first humans were Polynesians and the first thing they did was clear the forests so that they could farm Suddenly the honeycreepers had nowhere to nest They fled up the mountain where the forest was still pristineThe European colonisers came about 200 years ago in their stiff suits with their strange customs and preferences and superior airs bringing mayhem to paradise They brought their pets and introduced vicious new birds Pretty soon honeycreepers were getting eaten by cats and dogs and hawksEverything changed after 1826 when a ship called HMS Wellington docked in Lahaina Some sailors tasked with getting fresh water supplies dumped dirty water from their barrels into a canal in Maui They could not have known that in those dregs were thousands of eggs of an insect called the mosquito till then unheard of in HawailsquoiThe parasites that cause malaria in birds Plasmodium relictum have probably existed in Hawailsquoi for millions of years but without mosquitoes to ferry them around they were impotent and could not cause disease Now thanks to a clutch of merry British sailors Hawailsquoi had the mosquitoReports of a new insect reached the Reverend William Richards in charge of the Mission Station at Lahaina It made its presence known by ldquoa singing in the earrdquo they said With the song came the killer parasites that cause avian malariaOnly 17 species of the original 60 or so honeycreeper species remain the rest are extinct claimed by avian malaria and other disasters humans bring with them With the lowlands taken by humans the birds fled to cooler heights but the planet is warming up and the mosquitoes are going higher too Soon there will be nowhere forhoneycreepers to hideLord make me a honeycreeper I do not want to be the human who casually wiped out in 200 years a family of gorgeous birds that nature took 7 million years to createYou can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper