All five ʻalalā released into East Maui’s forests nearly two years ago remain alive and healthy, giving Hawaiʻi conservationists their strongest evidence yet that the Hawaiian crow can again persist in the wild.
The birds are flying freely in the Haleakalā landscape, foraging for native fruit, insects, spiders and small vertebrates, and showing pair-bonding and territorial behavior, according to a state update issued Tuesday. A dominant pair has built nests during two consecutive nesting seasons. The female has sat on the nests while the male guarded her, although no chicks have resulted.
That distinction matters. Survival and natural behavior are important milestones, but a self-sustaining population ultimately requires successful reproduction. The field team continues to provide supplemental food through automated forest feeders while monitoring how much the captive-reared birds forage on their own.
The December 2024 release put ʻalalā on Maui for the first time. The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, which helped raise and prepare the five birds, said the project incorporated lessons from earlier releases on Hawaiʻi Island. Thirty birds were introduced there between 2016 and 2020, but the surviving birds were eventually returned to human care after losses increased.
ʻAlalā have been considered extinct in the wild since 2002. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the remaining population has depended on conservation centers operated through a partnership involving the federal agency, Hawaiʻi’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife and the zoo alliance. Earlier Hawaiʻi Island releases showed that some birds could survive for more than two years, but predation by ʻio, the Hawaiian hawk, became a major obstacle.
East Maui was chosen partly because the pilot could test survival and breeding without that same hawk-predation risk. A federal environmental review evaluated Kīpahulu and Koʻolau forest reserves and found the trial could proceed without significant environmental effects. The project also carries cultural importance: federal wildlife officials note that ʻalalā appear in the Kumulipo creation chant and are regarded by some Native Hawaiian families as ʻaumākua, or ancestral guardians.
The Maui cohort has also survived severe weather, including a Kona low and tropical storms. Managers initially considered adding two more birds but abandoned that plan after the original group developed stronger territorial behavior. That decision illustrates the adaptive nature of the experiment: behavior in the forest, not a fixed release schedule, is guiding the next step.
Continued monitoring will have to answer questions survival alone cannot resolve: whether pairs choose durable nest sites, whether eggs hatch, whether adults can provision young and whether future cohorts can establish neighboring territories without destabilizing the original flock.
Partners are now evaluating other Maui release sites and planning renewed introductions on Hawaiʻi Island. The survival of all five birds is a meaningful success, but the recovery benchmark remains higher—birds that can reproduce, raise young and persist with progressively less human support.
