The U.S. Issue: Explorer: An Eden for Rare Birds in Hawaii

Marco Garcia for The New York TimesHikers make their way up the rocks at Kokee State Parl, which has good trails for tracking Kauai's birds. More Photos ?

THE trade winds were pushing a misty fog across the treetops of the Alakai wilderness — a cloud forest atop the mountain hinterlands of Kauai — when my guide spotted something yellowish flitting among the boughs of an ohia tree.

The bird guide David Kuhn with a sound-collecting microphone. More Photos ?

“Bird!” he declared. I peered through my binoculars and spotted a lemon-lime bird with a faint black mask. It was an akekee, one of the rarest birds in the world.

Rare birds aren’t a rarity in Hawaii, which leads the nation with 35 birds on the endangered species list. The green, tranquil island of Kauai has lost almost half of its native forest bird species. Only eight of the island’s original 13 forest birds still exist, six of which can be found only on Kauai. They include the akekee, the akikiki, and the puaiohi, three species that are on the brink of blinking out.

Such peril is a morbid draw for birders: an opportunity to see extremely rare birds that, like the passenger pigeon, may someday soon exist only in museum exhibits and photographs — reason enough for me to carve some birding time out of a recent family vacation in Kauai.

Collapsing native bird populations aren’t promoted by Kauai’s tourism industry. At a car rental counter at Lihue Airport, brochure racks were stuffed with advertisements for charter fishing and whale watching. But finding a birding guide is a bit like trying to score a Cuban cigar: Keep asking around until you find somebody who knows a guy. My guy sent a cryptic e-mail the night before our planned trip — “like to met by 06:30 Thursday at Puu Hinahina Overlook.”

The next morning I drove 35 miles in the early-morning darkness from ocean-side Poipu up into the Waimea Canyon in the middle of the island. Dawn revealed a different world — gone were coconut palm trees and road signs touting luaus. I was amid a dense forest of gray trees. At the overlook parking lot, I met David Kuhn, a middle-aged man with a graying beard in khaki vest and shorts. He had wedged me into a busy schedule: 10 straight days of birding tours. His clientele are mostly wealthy travelers from around the globe, he said, “world birders in search of those rarest species near extinction.”

I hopped in his truck for a half-hour drive to the Alakai Wilderness Preserve, a bumpy ride down a mud road. He parked at the trailhead of the Alakai Swamp Trail on a ridge above a verdant river valley. The air was moist and cool.

I slipped on a rain jacket and followed a boardwalk into the last remaining stand of native forest on Kauai. It was a quiet morning, no bird chatter. After 30 minutes of birdless hiking, Mr. Kuhn wielded his bamboo walking stick like a machete and bushwhacked off-trail. We clambered over tree roots and tiptoed amid bushy ferns to a small clearing in the forest canopy. There we spotted a single akekee that alighted in the crook of a gnarled tree branch 50 feet above our heads. It flitted over to a leaf cluster at the tip of the branch. “See how it’s working to pry open the leaf bud of the ohia?” he whispered. “‘Akekee has a crossed bill that’s specialized for opening the buds and getting at the insects inside.”

Suddenly, he stopped talking and cocked his head. He kissed the back of his hand, producing a squeaking noise that summoned a curious Kauai elepaio, a little gray bird with dark wing bars. Next he alerted me to a lemon yellow anianiau on a tree branch above us. Then he pointed to a fire-engine-red apapane shuttling among similarly bright red ohia blossoms. “Apapane resemble the flowers from which they get nectar,” Mr. Kuhn told me. In a 10-minute time span, I had four new birds on my life list.

Back on the trail, we descended a few hundred steps on a wooden staircase into the river valley, hopscotched rocks across the stream, then summited the ridge on the other side. There the trail snaked beneath the wooden skeletons of World War II-era telegraph poles. Then we heard a squeaky whirring echo in the forest. “Iiwi!” Mr. Kuhn exclaimed. The bright crimson bird flashed like a red siren as it fluttered to a nearby tree branch. There the iiwi stayed put, allowing me to admire its long, delicately curved beak, which had evolved especially for sucking nectar out of flowers. Iiwi aren’t an endangered species, Mr. Kuhn told me, but like many of the island’s other forest birds, their population is plummeting on Kauai.