Plans to repopulate Hawaii’s forests with its crows have been upended | Hacker News Reader

Plans to repopulate Hawaii’s forests with its crows have been upended

washingtonpost.com

36 pointsperihelions11 comments

> So far, plans to repopulate Hawaii’s forests with its native crows have been upended in part by the ‘io. The hawks are the crows’ natural predator, and have come after the corvids during prior reintroduction efforts

Interesting, where I am I see crows chasing hawks a lot. Maybe it is due to population density. There are many more crows than hawks here.

With 120 left and all in captivity, it does not look good. Plus I wonder if the crows would even know the io (hawk) represents danger these days.

The Hawaiian goose (Nene) was down to 30, but captive breeding and reintroduction has been going well. The population is up to about 2500. It seems contact with outside humans was pretty bad for Hawaiian bird species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nene_(bird)

The California Condor was down to a population of 27. We've managed that one pretty well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_condor

Human contact has been a bad thing for a lot of bird species.

...and a boon for many others, including other types of corvids, gulls, pigeons etc.

While humanity’s impact has been a boon for a few dozen cosmopolitan species, the impact of humanity on most bird species has been a tremendous net negative. Especially for the Hawaiian Islands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hawaiian_animals_extin...

...yeah, on the whole I can't imagine thinking that humanity's impact on birds overall has been a good thing

Unless you really, really love pigeons

Interesting, where I am I see crows chasing hawks a lot

A tiger can take/kill a human, especially a smaller human (eg a child).

But if even a larger human or two see a tiger, they can easily scare it, and chase it away.

Predators don't want a fight, they want an easy and fast kill.

So I suspect the same here. Adult crows chasing them, because they know their young are at risk.

Noticed three crows chasing an eagle in my back yard this morning and succeeded in harassing it till it left the area.

> Interesting, where I am I see crows chasing hawks a lot. Maybe it is due to population density. There are many more crows than hawks here.

It's pretty common to see smaller birds chasing larger birds in the air. Crows chase hawks, jays chase crows, etc. Once the bigger bird lands, little birds seem to give up chase.

https://archive.ph/qhY0j

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