Conservation contributors

Herbert Cornelius Shipman was a Hilo rancher who kept Nēnē on his own property for decades when almost no one else did. He started in 1918 with two pairs of geese at his family's Kea'au estate (Ha'ena). The flock grew slowly over the following decades and reached 42 birds by 1946; for many years it was the only captive Nēnē population in the world. In April 1946 a tsunami swept through his property and killed roughly half the flock, and Shipman moved the survivors up to his 'Ainahou Ranch at higher elevation. By the late 1940s fewer than 30 wild Nēnē remained, and Shipman worked with territorial officials to start a formal restoration program. In 1949 he loaned two breeding pairs to the Hawai'i Board of Agriculture and Forestry, providing the founder stock for the new state-run propagation project at Pōhakuloa. He also sent live Nēnē to the UK, including a gander shipped in 1951 to Sir Peter Scott's Wildfowl Trust to help start an overseas captive-breeding colony. Without Shipman's private flock there would have been no birds to seed the recovery program.

Paul Baldwin was among the first scientists to study the Nēnē at any depth and to put hard numbers on its decline. In the early 1940s he worked as a zoologist at Hawai'i National Park, surveying what was left of the population and its habitat. In 1945 he published "The Hawaiian Goose: Its Distribution and Reduction in Numbers" in Condor (47:27-37), which mapped the goose's shrunken range and tallied its losses. Baldwin estimated that by 1944 fewer than 50 Nēnē remained in the wild, down from an estimated 25,000 historically, and called the species "one of the world's rarest birds." He pointed to hunting during the breeding season and to introduced predators (mongooses, cats, dogs) as the main drivers of the decline. His 1930s and 1940s work gave Hawai'i its first quantitative picture of where the Nēnē stood, and the paper drew enough outside attention that territorial officials had to respond.

Colin Grant Lennox was President of the Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry (Territory of Hawai'i) in the 1940s. After Baldwin's 1945 report appeared, Lennox wrote to the wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold asking how the territory should respond. On Leopold's advice he recruited Charles and Elizabeth Schwartz from Missouri to survey Hawai'i's game birds with the Nēnē as a particular focus. The Board funded the Schwartzes' two-year field investigation (1946-47) and acted on the recommendations they brought back: in 1949 it established a Nēnē propagation program with $6,000 in initial funding from the Territorial legislature. Lennox secured both the political backing and the money inside territorial government that got the first official Nēnē Restoration Project off the ground.

Charles ("Charlie") and Libby Schwartz were a husband-and-wife wildlife biology team from Missouri whose field studies in the late 1940s produced the first detailed picture of where the Nēnē stood. Recruited in early 1946 at the request of Colin Lennox and on Aldo Leopold's advice, the Schwartzes spent nearly two years (1946-1947) crisscrossing the main islands, "from sea level to volcano top," studying native and introduced game birds. They concentrated on the Nēnē: observing it on the high lava plains, trapping and banding birds, and dissecting specimens to work out diet and ecology. Libby later recalled Charlie walking out to collect birds while she stayed in camp "dissecting them on the tailgate of our jeep" and looking after their children. In 1949 they published A Reconnaissance of Game Birds in Hawaii, a report to the Territorial Board of Agriculture and Forestry. The conclusion was blunt: the Nēnē was likely to be the next Hawaiian bird to go extinct, and the territory had to act now. They put the wild population at around 30 birds and pressed for protective legislation, predator control, and a captive-breeding program. The Nēnē Restoration Project was created that same year. Before leaving Hawai'i, Charles Schwartz also arranged at Sir Peter Scott's request for Nēnē eggs or goslings to be sent to the Wildfowl Trust in England as a backup population. Their fieldwork and the 1949 report are what turned earlier warnings into a funded program.

J. Donald "Jack" Smith was the first wildlife biologist the Territory of Hawai'i hired specifically to work on the Nēnē and other game birds. A World War II veteran from Minnesota, he arrived in 1948 after the Schwartzes' survey recommended that the Board of Agriculture and Forestry create the position. In 1949 he set up the captive-breeding facility at Pōhakuloa on Hawai'i Island, a remote, high-elevation site that approximated the goose's natural alpine habitat. He built large predator-proof pens and started rearing geese from the two breeding pairs Herbert Shipman had loaned. By protecting nests and experimenting with diets, he produced the first captive-bred groups, and the first small release of pen-reared birds went out on Hawai'i in 1952. Field surveys he ran during this period put the wild population at no more than 30 birds by 1951. Smith summarized the early work in a 1952 report, "The Hawaiian Goose (Nēnē) Restoration Program," describing the methods and the problems, including low fertility in the inbred flock. He argued that the program needed ecological work in the wild as well as captive breeding, and that argument led to the first field studies of wild Nēnē, conducted by William J. Elder in 1956-57. Smith left Hawai'i in late 1952 to continue his career on the mainland. In four years he had got the propagation program running, shown that captive breeding could work, and set out the combination of breeding, release, and field research that the program followed afterward.

Paul Breese was Director of the Honolulu Zoo and Chairman of the Nēnē Advisory Committee, the group formed to guide the territory's restoration work. In 1956 he led a campaign to have the Nēnē named the official bird of Hawai'i, working with the Hawai'i Conservation Council and other civic groups; the Territorial Legislature passed the resolution in May 1957. Breese hoped the recognition would push the territory to put more money into recovery. When territorial agencies declined to expand funding, Breese went after federal support instead. He lobbied national conservation organizations and federal officials, and in 1958 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began appropriating $15,000 per year for Hawai'i's Nēnē work. Breese later credited state game chief J. Woodworth with rallying broad conservationist backing for the federal bill. That annual appropriation kept the propagation and release program running through the 1960s. Breese also visited mainland waterfowl facilities to bring back rearing techniques the Hawai'i program could use.

Sir Peter Scott was the British conservationist and painter who founded the Severn Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge, England (now the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust). Son of the Antarctic explorer Robert F. Scott, he had a long-running interest in rare waterfowl. After reading the Schwartz report in 1949 he offered to set up an insurance population in the UK. In 1950 a pair of Nēnē from Herbert Shipman's flock was shipped to Slimbridge. The first pair produced infertile eggs, but Scott kept at it. He sent his chief aviculturist, John Yealland, to Hawai'i to help with husbandry at Pōhakuloa and to arrange more birds for export. In 1951 a gander was flown from Hawai'i to Slimbridge to complete a breeding trio, which worked. The Slimbridge flock bred well through the 1950s and 1960s, and offspring from that line were later shipped back to Hawai'i for release: starting in 1962, dozens of UK-reared Nēnē went to Maui for release in Haleakalā National Park. Scott also brought publicity. His writing and paintings drew international attention to the Nēnē, and he hosted Hawaiian wildlife officials at Slimbridge and shared rearing techniques with them. He visited Hawai'i in person in the late 1950s to discuss the program. In 1979 Janet Kear and Andrew Berger dedicated their book on the species to him as one of the "enthusiasts responsible for the rescue of the Nēnē from extinction."

John Yealland was the British aviculturist who carried waterfowl-rearing know-how from Slimbridge to Hawai'i and back. As Curator of Sir Peter Scott's Wildfowl Trust, he was sent to Hawai'i in late 1949 and spent several months into 1950 at the Pōhakuloa captive-breeding station working alongside Jack Smith. He helped design improved rearing pens, advised on diet (introducing tender greens like watercress and thistle, which the Nēnē took to), and showed the Hawai'i crew hand-rearing and incubation techniques that improved gosling survival. Before returning to England in 1950 he accompanied a pair of captive Nēnē (a gander and goose provided by Shipman) on the journey to Slimbridge. That pair became the nucleus of Scott's ex-situ flock; one bird turned out infertile, but a replacement flown over in 1951 completed a working trio. Yealland is less well-known than several of his contemporaries, but his trip set up both the Pōhakuloa and Slimbridge programs at the same time.

Ah Fat Lee was the Hawai'i-born wildlife technician who ran the Nēnē captive-breeding program day to day for roughly two decades. After statehood and the arrival of U.S. federal funds in 1958, he was appointed full-time Nēnē Propagation Specialist at Pōhakuloa. The flock grew steadily under his management and the early breeding problems eased. He brought in artificial incubators and used broody bantam hens as foster mothers for Nēnē eggs, and he reworked the diet to push up fertility and gosling survival. The 1966-67 season produced a then-record 84 captive-hatched goslings. Lee also oversaw the releases: the first pen-raised birds went out on Hawai'i in 1960, and as production climbed, dozens more were freed each year. By 1975 hundreds of Nēnē had been reintroduced on Hawai'i and Maui, most of them from his pens. Lee rarely published. Colleagues later wrote that he had received "scant credit" in print even as the program he ran succeeded. In their 1979 monograph Janet Kear and Andrew Berger dedicated the book to him (along with Peter Scott) for his role as "head of the propagating station at Pōhakuloa."

Wildlife artist whose 1964 $3 Federal Duck Stamp featuring Nēnē sold 1.5 million copies, raising funds and nationwide awareness for the species' plight.

Dr. Janet Kear was an English ornithologist and waterfowl specialist based at Slimbridge, working as a research biologist and later as Assistant Director of the Wildfowl Trust. She had followed the Hawaiian Goose's situation for years, and in the 1970s she partnered with Andrew Berger in Hawai'i to review the whole record of Nēnē conservation work to that point. The result was "The Hawaiian Goose: An Experiment in Conservation" (T. & A.D. Poyser, 1979), which Kear and Berger dedicated to Peter Scott and Ah Fat Lee, among others. Kear brought captive-breeding and behavior expertise from years of managing waterfowl collections. She compared the methods and outcomes of the two propagation programs (Pōhakuloa and Slimbridge), looked at how reintroduced birds were faring in the wild, and used the final chapters to ask hard questions about genetics, disease, predator control, and long-term viability. Those questions shaped later recovery work, particularly the push for genetic diversity and predator management. She also led the Wildfowl Trust's endangered species programs and was active in the International Wild Waterfowl Association.

Dr. Andrew John Berger was an American ornithologist who became one of the leading authorities on Hawaiian birds in the 1960s and 1970s. He joined the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's Zoology Department as a professor in 1964 after an earlier career on the mainland studying bird anatomy and behavior. Once in Hawai'i he focused on the islands' endemic avifauna and was openly critical of government policies and private developments that threatened endangered species. In 1972 he published "Hawaiian Birdlife," which brought the Nēnē's situation to a wide audience, and he wrote a stream of articles combining field data with conservation arguments. His main contribution to Nēnē recovery came through his work with Janet Kear: the two spent years compiling historical records, field data, and accounts from people who had run the program, and produced the 1979 monograph "The Hawaiian Goose: An Experiment in Conservation." Berger supplied the Hawai'i ecology and on-the-ground program history; Kear supplied the waterfowl management side. The book set out the gains (the population had grown to about 2,000 birds by the late 1970s) alongside the unresolved problems, and Berger pressed the point that captive breeding alone would not be enough without habitat protection and predator control. His willingness to speak publicly kept the Nēnē in the news and put pressure on agencies to improve their work.

Winston Banko was a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and later the National Park Service who became the program's historian. Based at Hilo and Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, he spent years going through old records, interviewing the people who had run earlier work, and adding his own field observations to assemble the most complete population history of the species. In 1978 he completed "History of the Nēnē (Hawaiian Goose) in Hawaii, 1778-1949" through the University of Hawai'i's Cooperative National Park Resources Studies Unit. The report and its continuation covering 1950-1978 drew on Hawaiian Kingdom records, explorer journals, modern wildlife surveys, and captive-breeding logs. It catalogued the Nēnē's historical abundance, the decline to about 30 birds by 1949, and the year-by-year results of releases and management actions. In 1979 he published a bibliography of Nēnē references that subsequent researchers leaned on heavily. Banko's data fed directly into policy. His numbers on breeding success, survival, and the distribution of released birds showed which parts of the program were working and which were not. His documentation of low genetic diversity in the captive founder flock contributed to later decisions to bring in wild-caught birds for fresh bloodlines, and his tallies of predator losses argued for predator control at release sites. He helped draft the first official Recovery Plan for the Nēnē, published in 1980. The 1990 Studies in Avian Biology volume on Hawaiian birds was dedicated in part to Winston E. Banko for "laying the foundation" of knowledge on Hawai'i's endangered avifauna.