The Paradox of Preservation
Content Warning: Description of Dead Animals
Article by Nalani Wood Art by Ciara Wiesner
On the northern slope of Maui’s dormant volcano Haleakala, the house of the sun, an old prison now serves as a sanctuary for critically endangered native Hawaiian birds. The Maui Bird Conservation Center cares for a population of Akikiki birds, native to the Alaka’i Swamp on Kaua’i where only five ‘Akikiki birds still live. Clever Hawaiian crows, given the name Alalā which resembles their caws, are also cared for at MBCC. The goal is to eventually release these birds back into the wild, but freedom from their necessary captivity is still a long way off.
The wooden A-frame entrance of the Maui Bird Conservancy is barely visible from the narrow road that winds up the mountain. Once through the heavy wooden doors of the sanctuary, the first thing you’ll see is a wall with kupu kupu ferns growing from floor to ceiling. The sprinkler system that waters the fern wall periodically breathes a cloud of mist, disrupting the stiff quiet of the room.
My first day as an intern at the bird conservancy was a bloodbath. I started my day shadowing the quiet caretaker of the nectar birds at MBCC. Within the first 20 minutes, I realized that bird people are pretty weird. I asked her name, but she said it so quietly that I had to ask her boss what it was later because I couldn’t hear what she said the first or second time I asked. After three hours of silence, walking from aviary to aviary with only the chirping of birds to keep me entertained, I was starting to wonder what my role as an intern was.
I was relieved when I was told I would be working with someone new for the second half of the day. Apparently my silent companion had had enough people time for the day. The head chef for the Alalā crows, extinct in the wild since 2002, asked me to help with some meal prep. He called the job “protein processing.” I followed him into a small room with a large cabinet incubator and a sink. We heard soft chirping coming from inside the cabinet, and the head chef, a man of more words than my previous mentor but still not exactly talkative, pursed his lips and nodded, then handed me a large pair of scissors. He opened the cabinet to reveal dozens of baby chicks, some so fresh out of their shells that their little fuzzy feathers were still coated in mucus.
My stomach dropped and the queasy tightness of anxiety rose in my throat. I forced myself to repress the ohmygod-tiny-fluffy-delicate-orb-babies instinct. The crow chef looked at me with what I interpreted as a combination of humor and regret, then demonstrated how to hold the baby chicken by its little body in one hand and snip its head off with the scissors. He said to let the bodies rest in the sink for a while so they’d stop twitching and bleed out.
By this point in the day, I just wanted to be useful. It was my first day on the job and this was the first task I'd been given that wasn’t just holding things or opening doors. I gritted my teeth and accepted the scissors. I winced each time the sharp blades of the scissors closed on a delicate neck and the severed body thunked into the sink. After an hour, there were no more cheeps to be heard. I was surprised that almost 100 severed heads fit into one 24 ounce Rubbermaid Tupperware. Among the mass of yellow fuzz and beaks, I saw hundreds of little eyes. Some were closed peacefully almost as if taking a little chicken nap, but so many were open and lifeless, staring directly at me. The sensation of sticky blood on my hands, the sudden absence of any sounds other than the whirring of the incubator, made me uncomfortable, but not debilitatingly so. For the first time since starting my task, I let myself look into the sink at the heap of bloody feathers and stiff, protruding chicken feet. I picked them up one by one, some by their feet, or by a tiny wing, and placed them in another Tupperware. As I finished my task, I felt a pragmatic sense of accomplishment mixed in with my lingering nausea. The bird conservancy was a known dump site for unwanted chickens and roosters, but rather than letting that be a burden, they turned it into a sustainable food source. I looked out the window at the sky and thought to myself how tragic it was that all these baby chicken heads were snipped off before they ever got to see the light of day.
I went home that day and wondered at the sanity of the place I found myself working. What kind of operation kills babies!? But as I thought more about it, I came to respect the dedication of these crazy bird people. There are an estimated 26 billion chickens on the planet and only 120 Alalā crows alive today. Maui’s valleys are overrun by chickens, where before the invasion of foreign cultures and species, there might have been hundreds of Hawaiian bird species sipping nectar from flowers or pecking at papaya. I learned an unexpected truth on my first day as an intern at MBCC: to save the birds, a bunch of baby chickens have to die. Over the course of the summer, I worked with seven other organizations, ranging from native forest conservationists to tide pool caretakers. I got to see a huge variety of ecosystems, and in each one, the threat of invasive species and climate change loomed like a dark, roiling thundercloud. Hawai’i will never regain the plant and animal life it used to have, and even just preserving what is left feels like a sisyphean task. Conservationists are faced with compounding problems and a lack of funding, and the only way to overcome those hurdles is dedication. I’m proud that I overcame my horror at decapitating baby chicks. I know that conservationists face horrific things all the time, like the rapid extinction of hundreds of species, and walking away just isn’t an option.