A tiny Hawaiian bird was nearing extinction. Then the Maui fires came.

MAKAWAO, Hawaii - Inside a barn, atop a dormant volcano on Maui, a pair of birds is building a nest. It’s their kind’s last chance to survive in our rapidly warming world.

This is the ‘akikiki. This little, silver bird holds the unenviable title of being the most endangered bird in the United States. A grim census earlier this year found only five left in the wild on the neighboring island of Kauai, its native home.

So here at the Maui Bird Conservation Center, their human caretakers have brought the pair of potential lovebirds everything they need to weave a nest and save their kind: fern hair, forest moss, cocoa fibers, even spiderwebs. Plants sprouting from high shelves simulate the rainforest canopy. An overhead water system mists to mimic the wet weather of Kauai’s forests.

“It’s the last effort to save the species,” said Jennifer Pribble, who oversees operations at the bird sanctuary.

But this landlocked Noah’s ark was almost struck by the wildfires that raged across Maui earlier this month. The fires are first a human disaster, destroying the coastal town of Lahaina and killing more than 100. Yet as fire approached the sanctuary, Pribble and others fought the flames and kept the birds safe.

It’s just the latest way a changing environment is challenging this tiny bird, which even the most optimistic bird researchers are certain only has months left to live in the wild.

In recent years, rising temperatures have expanded the range of avian malaria-carrying mosquitoes high up the hills, decimating the ‘akikiki and the islands’ other native songbirds.

In one of the most ambitious species conservation projects ever undertaken, a coalition of federal and state officials and nonprofit groups is preparing to release insects with a special strain of bacteria into Hawaii’s forests to suppress the pest.

Fighting wildfires, sterilizing mosquitoes, breeding birds: This is what saving species in the age of extinction looks like. With hundreds of thousands of plants and animals poised to vanish, biologists are pushing the boundaries of science to save wildlife before it’s too late.

Perhaps nowhere in the country is the extinction crisis more acute than in Hawaii, which is home to nearly 500 of the roughly 1,700 plants and animals listed under the Endangered Species Act. Climate change coupled with waves of invasive species have pushed so many of the Aloha State’s native creatures to the brink that scientists have darker nickname for the state: endangered species capital of the world.

Already more than three dozen ‘akikiki relatives have gone extinct. The ‘akikiki is next.

The mosquito eradication plan, which will take years, cost tens of millions and test the public’s tolerance, promises to save at least the songbirds. If it works.

‘They were just dying’

Before it was a paradise for people, Hawaii was a paradise for birds.

Far from the mainland, birds ruled the roost for millions of years. The only mammals capable of making it to one of the world’s most isolated archipelago were bats and seals. With little competition and few predators, Hawaii’s songbirds evolved into a kaleidoscope of reds, yellows and greens, filling nearly every niche with beaks of all shapes and sizes.

When people - first Polynesians, then Europeans - arrived, they didn’t come alone. A cavalcade of cattle, pigs and goats trampled and devoured native vegetation. Feral cats, rats and mongooses, meanwhile, ate unsuspecting ground-nesting birds.

For songbirds in the trees, the biggest invasive threat was also the tiniest. Mosquitoes carrying avian malaria began killing the islands’ birds, which unlike their mainland counterparts have little natural defense to the disease.

For a while, the threat was contained to low-lying areas. It seemed like the songbirds high in Hawaii’s forests were protected by the mountains’ mild climate. As recently as 2004, ornithologists were “cautiously optimistic” about the birds’ chance on Kauai’s Alaka’i Plateau, a damp and dense rainforest where temperatures remained low enough to keep the insects away.

“We never had to put mosquito spray on,” said Lisa “Cali” Crampton, project leader at the Kauai Forest Bird Recovery Project.

But soon, the bugs were swarming the biologists. Woods once filled with birdsong grew quiet. By 2012, it was clear the malaria-infected mosquitoes were getting to the ‘akikiki, with fewer than 500 left. Surveys showed it wasn’t alone, with the populations of it and five related songbirds contracting by two-thirds at the core of the forest.

Appreciating what makes the ‘akikiki special requires seeing one alive - not merely as a museum specimen, the fate of so many extinct Hawaiian birds.

It is an acrobat, flipping sideways and upside down on branches to fetch insects from tree crevices. Crampton took her teenage son to see one last year. “He’s like, ‘Oh cool, it’s upside down,’” she said. “People don’t see birds upside down very often.”

With extinction imminent, biologists raced over the past decade to rescue as many ‘akikiki eggs and live birds as possible. The birds were safer at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s aviaries where mosquito nets prevented them from getting bitten.

To gather the M&M-sized eggs, Crampton and her crew helicoptered into the jungle a 40-foot ladder and suspended it from ropes tethered below so as not to lean on the high, fragile trees.

Capturing live birds is even harder. Rarely does the ‘akikiki belt out its signature song - a quiet eek eek eek after which it is named. Playing the tune from a speaker seldom brings out the bird.

At the beginning of the year, the population was down to about three dozen. Even then, the researchers thought they had more time.

“They were just dying as we tried to catch them,” said Justin Hite, another Kauai project biologist. One nest was blown off a tree by a storm. Another eaten by rats. More were just abandoned with unhatched eggs or dead chicks after the parents succumbed to disease.

This year, when Hite heard the eek eek eek in the wild, it no longer filled him with joy. More often than not, it meant a male had lost a mate. “He’s blasting all around the territory, and singing and singing and singing. And it’s like, ‘Oh my God, she probably died.’”

Tinder, but for birds

Across the ocean more than 200 miles away from Kauai, birdsong can still be heard in the Maui sanctuary.

The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance bred and hatched its first egg in 2018, and today keeps a captive flock of 34 behind metal doors and mosquito nets on Maui. Another 17 are kept a similar sanctuary on Hawaii’s Big Island so as not to keep “all of our eggs in one basket,” said conservation program manager Bryce Masuda.

But with many of those birds coming from wild-captured eggs, the zoo alliance needs to figure out how to get them to lay more eggs and keep the flock going.

In the wild, ‘akikiki are monogamous, building homes high on the outer edges of delicate ‘ohi’a trees. “They spend a huge amount of time just together,” Hite said. “So we joke like, ‘akikiki are for lovers.”

To recreate that romance at the sanctuary - and foster more egg laying - the zoo built a bird version of Tinder. While some captive breeding programs choose pairing solely to prevent inbreeding, here biologists are letting the female birds pick their mates, as they do in the wild.

Each female is given the choice of two males, one put on each side of its enclosure. Since birds can’t swipe, the researchers looked for clues of courtship: Some fed each other. Other flirted simply by spending more time near one another.

The team found females paired with the suitors of their choice were more likely to lay eggs and had more eggs per clutch, according to a study published earlier this year.

“We’re trying to play matchmaker,” Masuda said in a whisper on a tour of one of the aviaries in Maui, Forest Bird Barn II, in December so as not to disturb the birds, “and there’s no handbook or textbook written on how to do that.”

Masuda and Pribble walked by a row of enclosures with a couple of pairs of ‘akikiki darting lightning-quick from branch to branch and peaking with their needlelike beaks in their food trays.

One duo was already building a nest. “It’s a good nest,” Pribble said.

The ‘huge’ experiment

While ornithologists untangle the birds and bees, a multiagency partnership is ready to stop the deadly carrier of avian malaria from reproducing. As temperatures rise, mosquitoes will continue to climb the mountains until the birds have no more refuge. The plan is, essentially, birth control for mosquitoes.

The pill, so to speak, is a type of bacteria called Wolbachia. It occurs naturally in most insects, but there’s a catch. Male mosquitoes with one type of Wolbachia can only reproduce with females that have a compatible strain.

So scientists are preparing to breed males with a version of Wolbachia incompatible in Hawaii. As early as this year or next, wildlife managers will airdrop mosquitoes by drone - first on Maui, then on Kauai.

When the imported males mate with wild females, the resulting eggs will be unviable. As the incompatible insects overwhelm those in the wild, the mosquito population should plummet. The project’s name is “Birds, Not Mosquitoes.”

“People have really come together to try to help,” said Earl Campbell, a project leader at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, noting the number of partners in the project and the level of support from Hawaii residents.

But the plan, which is being rolled out by the federal Interior Department and the state of Hawaii, is as much a technological and logistical feat as it is a public-relations battle.

As a longtime Maui environmentalist, Tina Lia wants to save the birds. But she fears state and federal officials are about undertake something too “enormous and experimental” on her island.

“What else are we not looking at? Are there ways to do some of the alternatives that they already do now and really focus the resources on that, like habitat restoration?” she said.

In May, her advocacy group, Hawaii Unites, sued to stop the mosquito release on Maui, arguing the state failed to fully assess the environmental risks. Among her concerns are female mosquitoes with the new strain of Wolbachia inadvertently being released, potentially allowing a new line of invasive insects to take hold on the islands.

Proponents counter that kind of mosquito control, called incompatible insect technique or IIT, has been used for decades to fight mosquito-borne illness in humans in at least 14 countries, including the United States. This would be the first time the technique is used for wildlife conservation.

“Mosquitoes are such a major source of human disease and human health problems that there are millions, probably billions, of dollars invested in ways to counter” them, said Chris Farmer, Hawaii program director at American Bird Conservancy. We’re “lucky that there’s been all that research on human health because we’re able to build upon that.”

“I use ‘lucky’ with big air quotes.”

The fact that some environmentalists like Lia are against the plan shows the battle bird conservationists have to convince some Hawaiians, few of whom have ever heard or seen an ‘akikiki. Its plumage isn’t the flashiest, and its song isn’t the most elaborate.

“It’s hard for the general public to care about the little drab species,” Hite said. But doing nothing now means we may lose the “really, really flashy, beautiful” ones later.

‘This can’t be happening’

Now, the same warmer temperatures that have turned much of Hawaii into prime mosquito territory have helped fuel unprecedented forest fires in Maui.

At first, Pribble didn’t think much of the storm on the evening of Aug. 7 that would lead to deadly Maui fires. She lives in a home at the sanctuary, and has seen strong winds before. But once she awoke to the sound of glasses falling off the counter, she knew something was wrong. Outside, the sky was orange with flame.

A short walk from the bird barns, the forest was ablaze, with only the road separating the fire from the stretch of the dry grass in front of the bird center’s entrance.

When she and a neighbor took a closer look, they saw the flames had jumped the road. It would only take minutes to reach the aviaries. There was no time to evacuate the birds.

“Oh my God, this can’t be happening,” she recalled thinking. She told herself: “We can’t let this fire cross the road.” Pribble ran to grab fire extinguishers to hold off the flames, exhausting four in total. The pair unwound a water hose to further douse the flames.

Once a fire crew arrived, Pribble assessed the damage. Fallen limbs and strong winds punctured holes in the protective mosquito netting. A tree had crashed into the side of Forest Bird Barn II.

Staff members used chain saws to cut their way up the road to join Pribble and begin mending the nets. In the damaged bird barn, her team boxed nine ‘akikiki and one palila, a related bird, up in crates to transport them to an undamaged aviary on-site in case more trees fell. Like lifeboats on a ship, each building is stocked with enough boxes to move each bird in emergencies.

All the birds were unscathed by the storm. But the ‘akikiki isn’t saved yet. It’s still waiting for its chance to fly free in the wild again.

“Our primary concern is just making sure that these birds are thriving in our care.” Pribble said. “If we don’t do an appropriate job of getting these birds to thrive in our care, then there’s no chance.”

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This article is part of Animalia, a column exploring the strange and fascinating world of animals and the ways in which we appreciate, imperil and depend on them.