“pinky”; and the hindquarters of an adult mouse that had been sliced in
half, so that it had a pair of feet on one end and a mess of guts on the
other.
No one is sure exactly why the alalā became extinct in the wild; probably, as with the poouli, there are multiple reasons, including
habitat loss, predation by invasive species like mongoose, and diseases
carried by other invasive species, like mosquitoes. In any event, the last
forest-dwelling alalā is believed to have died in 2002. Kinohi was born at a captive breeding facility on Maui more than twenty years ago. He is, by all accounts, an extremely odd bird. Raised in isolation, he does not identify with otheralalā. Nor does he seem to think of himself as human. “He’s in
a world all to himself,” Durrant told me. “He once fell in love with a
spoonbill.”
Kinohi was sent to San Diego in 2009 because he refused to mate with
any of the other captive crows, and it was decided that something new
had to be tried to persuade him to contribute to the species’ limited gene
pool. It fell to Durrant to figure out how to win Kinohi’s heart or, more to
the point, his gonads. Kinohi came fairly quickly to accept her attentions
—crows do not have phalluses, so Durrant stroked the area around his
cloaca—but at the time of my visit he still had failed to deliver what she
referred to as “high-quality ejaculate.” Another breeding season was
approaching, so Durrant was preparing to try again, three times a week
for up to five months. If Kinohi ever came through, she was going to rush
with his sperm to Maui and try to artificially inseminate one of the
females at the breeding facility.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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