Critically Endangered
Olomaʻo
Myadestes lanaiensis
The olomaʻo is a small, dark solitaire endemic to Maui, Lānaʻi and Molokaʻi in the Hawaiian Islands.
Appearance
It is dark brown above and gray below with blackish legs.
It grows up to 7 inches in length.
Range and habitat
The olomaʻo is a small, dark solitaire endemic to Maui, Lānaʻi and Molokaʻi in the Hawaiian Islands.
The last definitive sighting occurred on Oahu in the 1850s, on Lānaʻi in 1933, and on Molokaʻi in 1980 in the Kamakou Preserve.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
Perching birds hold with three toes forward and one back. A named island starling or leafbird in this catalog is a wild population, not a cage type.
In crisis
It is currently listed as Critically Endangered under the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The olomaʻo is still classified as Critically Endangered due to the possibility that an extremely small population or individuals may still exist. In the late 19th century, it was considered common to abundant on Maui, Lānaʻi, and Molokaʻi, but land clearing, among them the establishment and subsequent development of Lānaʻi City, and avian malaria brought on by introduced mosquitoes decimated the birds.
Introduced animals such as feral pigs (that create pools of water from their wallows that allow mosquitoes to breed) also aided in its demise.
Olomaʻo is Critically 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 Olomaʻo, Wikidata item Q1301092. 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.
