Encounter with a Vanished Bird
In all the bird kingdom—is there a more elegant profile than this one?
Here, reflected in a pool of brackish water, is the A‘eo, or Hawaiian Stilt, standing on one leg, the other folded and tucked neatly against its underbelly. Dressed to the nines, in black dinner jacket and pressed white shirt, his sartorial prowess is on full display, just as evening commences.
It’s been years since I’ve been privileged to see one. These endangered birds, indigenous to the Hawaiian Islands, have all but vanished from Oahu. The specimen here was photographed in a brackish pond just off South Kihei Road in Maui. On Oahu, where I live, the marshy lands where this shorebird once thrived have been drained—and shimmering glass condominiums erected in their place.
In Victoria Ward Park, there are statues of this bird, in various poses, placed around an artificial pool—to memorialize the population that once thrived there. It’s a weird sort of tribute—enshrining in bronze replica a creature displaced from its natural habitat, where it lived undisturbed for millennia, so luxury dwellings could be built. But I do not doubt the sincerity behind the symbolic attempt to placate the vanished bird. The whole place is haunted by the absent presence of the bird who stands tall.
Even in the shopping mall, The South Shore Market, there is a tribute to the A‘eo.
On the cement walkway leading to the front entrance, there is an abstract motif in red, repeating like a chain of paper dolls. For years, I simply walked over it, not thinking much about it, until one day, with a kind of shock, I recognized the artist’s rendering of the beak, the head, the neck, the tail and elegant long legs of our resident island bird.
Painted onto the cement floor, like a flash shadow, the a’eo stands in effigy—silent and unappeased.
