"Every week at the Maui airport, a small helicopter gets loaded with 250,000 passengers. They're male mosquitoes, key players in a strategy that could be the last, best hope for Hawaii's endangered birds.
"We got mosquitoes to drop," Christa Seidl of the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project calls to the pilot. She wheels over a crate with several hundred cardboard tubes filled with mosquitoes. Soon, they’ll be airdropped into Maui's high-elevation forests, the last refuge for endangered birds.
There were once more than 50 species of Hawaiian honeycreepers, small colorful birds that filled the native forests and have important significance in Native Hawaiian culture. Now, those forests are going silent. Only 17 species of honeycreeper are left, with some expected to go extinct in the wild as soon as this year.
Honeycreepers are disappearing because of avian malaria, transmitted by mosquitoes that were introduced to Hawaii by accident in the 1800s. With no immunity, native birds often die after a single mosquito bite."
Lauren Sommer and Ryan Kellman reports for NPR June 12, 2024.
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