Palila

Appearance

The Palila has a yellow head and breast, with white to light gray plumage ventrally, medium gray plumage dorsally, and olive-green wings and tail. The bird also has a heavy dark bill with swollen sides, a brown iris, and dark feet with yellowish soles. Males tend to have brighter colors overall, as well as clear-cut black lores.

With a body mass of 38.1 g (1.34 oz) on average in males and 37.6 g (1.33 oz), it appears to be the heaviest Hawaiian honeycreeper.

The Palila is one of the largest living Hawaiian honeycreepers, measuring around 6–7.5 inches (15–19 cm).

Range and habitat

Currently, the Palila can be found only on the upper slopes of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaiʻi. Essentially, this means that the species is confined – and may always have been so – to the area above the moist forest belt at around 3,000–4,500 feet (910–1,370 m). The fossil record shows that prior to human arrival the Palila also occurred in Kauaʻi and Oʻahu, and thus could likely have occurred on Maui and neighboring islands as well, but it has not been recorded out of the island of Hawaiʻi since European arrival.

The first specimen of the Palila was collected in 1876 at the Greenwell Ranch on the Big Island by Pierre Étienne Théodore Ballieu (1828–1885), who was French consul in Hawaiʻi from 1869 to 1878. The remaining the Palila usually lives in actively being preserved, with public access being limited to nature trails such as the Palila Forest Discovery Trail on Mauna Kea.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet

The diet of the Palila is almost exclusively the immature seeds of māmane when these are available.

In crisis

The bird has a close ecological relationship with the māmane tree (Sophora chrysophylla), and became endangered due to destruction of the trees and accompanying dry forests. In May 2019, 6 Palila were reintroduced to a patch of restored forest on the island in order to establish a second population, marking the first reintroduction attempt for the species. Threats to the Palila's survival include drought, fire, invasive mammalian predators, especially feral cats, invasive weeds, māmane fungal pathogens, and introduced insects that reduce food resources.

The greatest known driver of Palila declines has been extensive habitat loss from deforestation by humans and browsing by ungulates. A 2025 study concluded: "Perhaps the hardest threat to combat is climate change, because Palila population declines are strongly associated with severe drought events that suppress māmane reproduction.".

Palila 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 Palila, Wikidata item Q1300132. 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.