num_pages: 320
description: A lively rich natural history of Hawaiian birds that challenges existing ideas about what constitutes biocultural nativeness and belongingThis natural history takes readers on a thousand-year journey as it explores the Hawaiian Islands beautiful birds and a variety of topics including extinction evolution survival conservationists and their work and most significantly the concept of belonging. Author Daniel Lewis an award-winning historian and globe-traveling amateur birder builds this lively text around the stories of four speciesthe Stumbling Moa-Nalo the KauaI Oo the Palila and the Japanese White-Eye.Lewis offers innovative ways to think about what it means to be native and proposes new definitions that apply to people as well as to birds. Being native he argues is a relative state influenced by factors including the passage of time charisma scarcity utility to others short-term evolutionary processes and changing relationships with other organisms. This book also describes how bird conservation started in Hawaii and the naturalists and environmentalists who did extraordinary work.
language: English
title: Belonging on an Island: Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in Hawai‘i
publisher: Yale University Press