'Alawī: A New Old Name for the Hawai'i Creeper

摘要

For more than 100 years there has been no known Hawaiian name for the endangered bird now commonly called the Hawai'i Creeper (Loxops mana). A review of the major literature on native Hawaiian birds by important authors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reveals no specific Hawaiian name for this bird. The earliest of these authors was Scott B. Wilson who first arrived in Hawai'i in 1887. While he was the first westerner to record the existence of L. mana, he did not collect any ethnographic anecdotes on it from native Hawaiians, probably because he did not realize that it was a separate species from the superficially similar Hawai'i ‘Amakihi (Chlorodrepanis virens) until his specimens were examined when he returned to England (Wilson & Evans 1890, xvii-xviii, 47). Later, Lionel Walter Rothschild, utilizing information from his collectors (most notably Henry Palmer) erroneously gave the name “‘Akikiki” for L. mana, which is the Hawaiian name for the closely related monogeneric Oreomystis bairdi of Kaua'i. Rothschild must have assumed that such similar birds would have shared the same native name, in spite of the relatively great distance between Kaua'i and Hawai'i islands (Rothschild 1893,117). George C. Munro and Henry W. Henshaw provide no native name for L. mana in their own respective published works (Henshaw 1902,46-47; Munro 1967,106). However, the great naturalist Robert C.L. Perkins apparently made some effort in looking for a name for L. mana, noting that it, "...is not distinguished by natives of the present day from the Amakihi (C hlor odre pan is), but it is unlikely that a bird so different in voice and habits had no special name in the days of the old professional bird-hunters." (Perkins 1913, 413)