The idea that entire bird species that once inhabited Hawaii’s skies—birds that sang, nested, competed, and evolved over millions of years—simply vanished before anyone thought to write them down is subtly unsettling. No pictures. No eyewitness reports. Only bones, waiting in the volcanic sediment.
They were discovered by Helen James. For the better part of forty years, James, a paleontologist and curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., has been extracting answers from the earth, sometimes literally. She can be seen headlamp on as she descends into dormant Hawaiian volcanoes in footage that the Smithsonian published years ago, searching for fossil remains in the kind of darkness that most scientists would rather study from a comfortable distance.
A mystery that had plagued ornithologists since the middle of the 20th century was solved by what she found in those lava tubes and volcanic pits, as well as specimens from museum collections that had been mostly ignored for decades. The question wasn’t particularly difficult. The question of why and when so many bird species disappeared from the Hawaiian Islands was unsettling.
James and her longtime coworker Storrs Olson pieced together a startling response. Together, they discovered about 60 extinct bird species in Hawaii’s fossil record. More significantly, the evidence made it abundantly evident that the disappearances started after the initial Polynesian colonization of the islands rather than after European contact, as many had believed. The arrival of humans appeared to be the pivotal moment. Loss of habitat, hunting, and the introduction of predators were all part of a terrible chain of events that was once clearly visible in the fossil record.
It’s the kind of ending that adds weight to history. No living ecosystem could provide the evidence base that the Smithsonian’s enormous collections—bones cataloged and stored over decades—became. That is the aspect of natural history museums that is frequently disregarded. The specimen drawers, meticulous labeling, and archival DNA all add up to something that future researchers can use to address questions that weren’t even raised at the time the samples were taken.
James, the daughter of two ecologists, was raised in the Arkansas Ozarks. At the age of twelve, he joined an archaeological association after becoming interested in Amerindian artifacts. At the age of fourteen, she and her family were in Ghana while her father was receiving a Fulbright Fellowship.
It’s possible that her early, varied exposure to the physical world—to the notion that, if you know where to look, the past leaves material traces—shaped who she ultimately became. At sixteen, she enrolled at the University of Arkansas, developed a passion for biological anthropology and archaeology, and before she had even graduated, she ended up working as a summer volunteer at the Smithsonian.
Since then, she has conducted research on everything from the evolution of island waterfowl to Madagascar to the phylogeny of perching birds, all of which demonstrate a certain level of scientific patience. The information found in the fossil record is not readily available. The secrets of museum archives are kept under wraps. You must search, frequently in uncomfortable locations, and then spend enough time contemplating what you discover to fully comprehend it.
Beyond the particular science, there is also a wider resonance here. Fundamentally, the story of the extinction of Hawaiian birds is about what happens when human populations move into areas that have evolved without them. It took place in Hawaii. It took place all over the Pacific. It’s still unfolding. James contributed to the creation of a more accurate picture of how brittle those evolutionary relationships are and how quickly they can fall apart, rather than merely a historical timeline.
Not only did the bones she discovered in those volcanoes tell the tale of birds. They recounted the tale of a whole world that existed, flourished, and vanished before the majority of people knew to lament it.
