Lesser Akialoa †

Birdfinding.info ⇒  The last incontrovertible record of Lesser Akialoa was the collection of two specimens at Umikoa, north of Mauna Kea, in September 1903.  The species was regarded as common across the Big Island well into the 1890s, but then vanished extremely quickly around the turn of the century.  There were isolated reports in 1937 and 1940 from Keanakolu, on the northeastern slope of Mauna Kea, also near Umikoa.  The 1937 report was of a vocalization identified as an akialoa based on its similarity to the better-known voice of the Kauai Akialoa, and the 1940 report was visual.  These reports seem inherently dubious in light of the species’s sudden catastrophic islandwide population collapse forty years earlier.