I am a computer expert who loves a challenge. When I am not managing servers and fixing flaws, I write about it and other interesting things on various blogs.
Hawaiian honeycreepers are small, passerine birds endemic to Hawaiʻi. They are closely related to the rosefinches in the genus Carpodacus. Their great morphological diversity is the result of adaptive radiation in an insular environment.
Before the introduction of molecular phylogenetic techniques, the relationship of the Hawaiian honeycreepers to other bird species was controversial. The honeycreepers were sometimes categorized as a familyDrepanididae, other authorities considered them a subfamily, Drepanidinae, of Fringillidae, the finch family. The entire group was also called "Drepanidini" in treatments where buntings and American sparrows (Emberizidae) are included in the finch family; this term is preferred for just one subgroup of the birds today. Most recently, the entire group has been subsumed into the finch subfamily Carduelinae.
Birding hawaiian honeycreepers
Classification
The group is divided into three tribes, but only very provisionally so. Several taxa appear to be too basal to really place into one of these, and others are best considered incertae sedis. Some unusual forms never seen alive by scientists, such as Xestospiza or Vangulifer, cannot easily be placed into any tribe.
Psittirostrini
Members of Psittirostrini, known as "Hawaiian finches", are granivorous with thick finch-like bills, and songs like those of cardueline finches. The group once covered the islands. Finch-billed drepanids include the Laysan finch, the Nihoa finch, the Maui parrotbill and the palila, which may be the last remaining species left alive in this group. Extinct species include the four koa finches, the ʻōʻū, and the Lānaʻi hookbill.
Hemignathini
Hemignathini includes the Hawaiʻi creeper and its allies, such as the nukupuʻu. These are generally green-plumaged birds with thin bills, and feed on nectar and insects. Members of this group usually have green, yellow, orange, red, and gray feathers.
Drepanidini
Species in the tribe Drepanidini are nectarivorous, and their songs contain nasal squeaks and whistles. Members of this group often have red black, yellow, white and orange plumage. It includes the ʻiʻiwi.
Characteristics
The male Hawaiian honeycreepers are more brightly colored than the females in the Psittirostrini, but in the Hemignathini, they often look very similar. The flowers of the native ʻōhiʻa lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha) are favored by a number of nectarivorous honeycreepers. Many species of this subfamily have been noted to have a plumage odor that has been termed the "Drepanidine odor", and is suspected to have a role in making the bird distasteful to predators.
The wide range of bills in this group, from thick, finch-like bills to slender, downcurved bills for probing flowers have arisen through adaptive radiation, where an ancestral finch has evolved to fill a large number of ecological niches. Some 20 species of Hawaiian honeycreeper have become extinct in the recent past, and many more in earlier times, between the arrival of the Polynesians who introduced the first rats, chickens, pigs, and dogs, and hunted and converted habitat for agriculture.
Genera and species
The term "prehistoric" indicates species that became extinct between the initial human settlement of Hawaiʻi (i.e., from the late 1st millennium AD on) and European contact in 1778.
Subfamily Carduelinae
Tribe Drepanidini
Genus CiridopsNewton, 1892 – finch-like, fed on fruit of Pritchardia species
Ciridops anna Dole, 1879 – ʻula ʻai hāwane (extinct, 1892 or 1937)
