EP 56 Bird biologist Justin Hite on the joys and sorrows of working with Kaua‘i’s rarest forest birds

Justin Hite has worked with some of Kaua‘i’s rarest forest birds like the ʻAkekeʻe and the ‘Akikiki, down to the last individuals in the remote ʻAlakaʻi rain forests. As the former field supervisor of the Kaua‘i Forest Bird Recovery Project over a decade, he helped track and collect eggs of these incredibly rare birds for captive propagation to establish “emergency” populations in the event of their extinction in the wild. His career as a birder spans decades across multiple continents and countries to Kauai where he spent over 1,000 field nights camping in remote terrain. He talks about his field adventures and his current work on the Birds Not Mosquitos project which aims to reduce the most serious existential threat to Hawaiian honeycreepers: fatal diseases carried by mosquitoes.