Endangered
Mao (bird)
Gymnomyza samoensis
Mao (bird) is an endangered species and is endemic to the Samoan Islands.
Appearance
The plumage is dark, varying from blackish on the head and breast to olive-green on the wings and body. There is a dark greenish mark under the eye. The bill is long, curved and black in an adult and yellowish in a chick or juvenile and the legs and feet are also black.
It is a large honeyeater, 28–31 cm (11–12 in) long.
Range and habitat
It is an endangered species and is endemic to the Samoan Islands. It is found on the islands of Upolu and Savai'i and formerly occurred also on Tutuila but is now locally extinct in the latter. It normally inhabits mountain forest but has also been recorded in scrub and coastal coconut trees.
In December 2014, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service announced the maʻomaʻo as a candidate for ESA protection, describing the species as "a large, dusky olive-green honeyeater native to Upolu and Savaii, Independent Samoa (Samoa), and Tutuila Island, American Samoa, but now only found in small populations on the islands of Savaii and Upolu.".
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
It characteristically bobs its tail while foraging along the trunk and branches of trees. A single whitish brown speckled egg is laid in a simple sticky cup nest.
The single chick is in the nest for approximately 1 month prior to fledging. After leaving the nest the juvenile remains in the core breeding territory where it is fed by the female for 2–2.5 additional months.
In crisis
The population, that numbers between 250 and 999 birds, is thought to be declining. It is threatened by destruction of the forest and the spread of introduced predators such as rats.
Mao (bird) is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Mao (bird), Wikidata item Q517840. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
