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Honeycreeper Evolution
Researchers date the arrival of the ancestors of honeycreepers – a group of Asian rosefinches – to Hawaiʻi around 5-6 million years ago. These ancestors arrived when Niʻihau and Kauaʻi, the oldest islands of the current main Hawaiian islands, were still young and relatively new. From that rosefinch ancestor, at least 50 species of honeycreepers evolved in Hawaiʻi. The honeycreepers could be heard singing in trees from ma uka to ma kai – from the mountain to the shore.
Manu Moʻokū'auhau
The arrival of the birds to Hawaiʻi is memorialized through a classic piece of Hawaiian oral tradition called the Kumulipo. Thousands of lines long, this version of the Hawaiian creation chant recounts the creation of the universe, the life of the sea, land, and sky, and then ends with the birth of the Hawaiian gods and the creation of human beings. The birds arrived in Hawaiʻi during the third wā - or epoch. In comparison, the major Hawaiian gods did not appear until the eighth wā - with humans being created after that. This order of emergence places the birds as ancestors to the kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiians).
PC: Douglas Pratt
Adaptive Radiation
The honeycreepers adapted and radiated into almost all of Hawaiʻi’s ecosystems: dry low-elevation shrublands, mesic and wet forests of ʻōhiʻa and koa, with their lush understories and the drier, sparser vegetation of high-elevation mountains. Their nuku (bills) diversified from being finch-shaped to: heavy and hooked like a parrot, straight and thin like a warbler or long and curved for sipping nectar. From birds that were predominantly seed-eaters, they diversified to dine on hard seeds, insects, nectar, and even our native kāhuli (land snails). This type of evolution is called 'adaptive radiation' and is the same kind of evolution that Darwin's s finches underwent.
Today, only 17 species of honeycreepers remain, the majority of which can only be found in remote high-elevation forests. Many people have never personally met a native honeycreeper.
A sampling of the tremendous beak morphology of the honeycreepers includes the curved mandibles of the 'i'iwi (far left) designed for sipping nectar from lobeliad flowers, the seed crushing bill of the palila (left), and the mismatched upper and lower beak of the ʻakiapōlāʻau (right) specially designed for finding arthropods and grubs inside bark.
PC: Bryan Shirota
