Fragile Items

Fragile Items was Originally Posted on December 1, 2004 by lavarock

I just got back from the post office after shipping out a couple of gift baskets. They just barely fit inside the new flat rate boxes the Post Office has created.

On the other front:

While scanning TV channels I ended up on Fox and was watching Oprah. I used to watch her do the news many years ago on a Baltimore channel just before she moved to Chicago and became famous.

This particular show involved heros who saved lives (sometimes of people they didn’t know).

While not to diminish these humans, there are some lives nearby that are not being saved. While this show was on, I was reading news items online. The headline says that another specias is on its way to extinction. In an older article, people on Maui knew they were down to 3 po’ouli, a small bird with a “Lone Ranger” mask on its face. There was a male and two females left in the world. The birds are quiet things and don’t travel out of a small area. The females and the males paths would never cross. Plans were made to catch a female and bring her into the area where the male would find her. It does not sound as though that happed because that male just died. Then today the following was posted:

“Conservationists had hoped to start a captive breeding program with the last three po’ouli.

A team from the Maui forest Bird Recovery Project is now in the reserve to locate the remaining two birds, which have not been seen for several months.”

So with the male gone and the two females missing, I’m afraid that the birds may now be extinct. I would have liked to have seen one, once…

Some links about the bird are:

http://www.npr.org/programs/re/archivesdate/1998/may/19980512.poouli.html
http://www.hawaii.gov/dlnr/dofaw/pubs/endgrspp
http://pacificislands.fws.gov/wesa/poouli.html

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If I was crass, I could have titled this blog “Bye Bye Birdie” (a movie and song title), but I really am sorry to hear this bird may possibly be extinct. How sad it is that a mate was around the corner and would never have had their paths crossed.