So we built the pens. I lent them some wire from old zoo pens that we had to tear down to build a parking lot. The post for the pens, they have areas up on the mountain. It was in a former CC camp. Nobody went there, it’s all deserted. Read More
Birds never got sick. They never caught no fungus, no germs up there, nothing. They all lived forever. They had babies, that was slow in the beginning, and we did have to later capture some of, a few once we knew more about what’s going on. We got started with… Read More
I said, “I will promise you this. If you lend us two pair of your birds to do a breeding program up here on the mountain, I will see to it as well as I possibly can, to be sure that we follow up your friend, Herbert Chip, I mean,… Read More
Peter had urged an environmental study, an ecological study of the birds. Read More
Why is the number so low?… Read More
Are they really gonna do what they’re gonna say?… Read More
And I could perceive, we were well aware that he’d be reluctant to give us a geese, not gonna just say here. So I was the youngest of that bunch, and I was 26 then. And I approached him and I said, “Mr. Shipman,” he hadn’t told us no and… Read More
And he lost a very large number of geese in that so he was down to only 11 birds. He’d had 40-something before. So he knew he wanted, he was torn between relinquishing some of his birds and still the need to perpetuate them. “Are these guys credible, that want… Read More
Now it’s a thriving and it was in too active community. So we had to approach this formidable character, and we did it through this intermediary that was a brother of a friend of mine, and so who was a prophet. So we went to his home prearranged, he was… Read More
He treasured those geese. He had the only flock in the world. 11 of those birds, they were all free winged, right in his yard, on the coast, it was beautiful. But he knew it was vulnerable because they’d been a tidal wave in 1946. In April 1st, 1946, a… Read More
They’re the only ones in captivity, but the one that you’ve got at the zoo and the one that Ms. Wall owns in her ranch in Kona. Let’s set up a captive breeding population of the nene. Because until we have control of the population that we’re not doing our… Read More
He made him somewhat of a formidable character for us to approach. But we did the normal thing that a proper human relation person would do. We approached Uncle Herbert through an intermediary that would build some credibility on our part. Now visualize for a minute, here we are. We’re… Read More
We determined the full wild population was probably no more than 30. So there is a endemic bird that, actually, it’s endemic genus, that is now down to numbers that it were (indistinct) close to the extinction. The reasons probably introduced, similar to, you read Quammen’s “The Song of the… Read More
During the gold rush time in California, in 1849, there are historic records of barrels of nene preserved in some sort of brine or something, being sent to San Francisco as food for the miners. It was that much of a decimation of the population. They’re good to eat, I… Read More
The legs are longer, the webbing is less. But when I began at the zoo, my friend was the head of the territorial department of fish and game, who was a fisheries biologist and an amateur herpatologist. So we became close friends by sharing the few reptiles as captives that… Read More
But he included the nene, and one of the results of that survey was as he did in an, of as close a census as he could, he determined that there were only 13 of these birds in captivity, in the entire world, all in Hawaii, 11 of which were… Read More
And we did collect two from that French Frigate Shoals and sent them to the San Diego Zoo because they’d had great success with marine mammals while sea elephants, stellar sea lions. And they did not thrive. They do thrive in captivity. It just so happened those two that we… Read More
Both the humans on them would harm the seals and the sea birds, but particularly the damage to the seals or to the islands would come from rats that would come ashore on those islands. And it has not happened up there fortunately, that the shipwrecks very, very luckily did… Read More
Almost none. The fishermen that had been into that area, there was a landing strip built by the Navy at French Frigate Shoals. They took this low sandbar island and took up dredges, and made it into a landing strip because it was halfway to the island and midway. It’s… Read More
No they were there, and they were wonderful. And a small population for the kids to feed is great, but emphasis on small. Read More