:Seeking the Sacred Raven: Politics and Extinction on a Hawaiian Island.— Jerome Mark Walters . 2006. Island Press, Washington, DC. 286 pp. ISBN 1-55963-090-6. $24.95 (cloth).

Abstract

Seeking the Sacred Raven: Politics and Extinction on a Hawaiian Island.—Jerome Mark Walters. 2006. Island Press, Washington, DC. 286 pp. ISBN 1-55963-090-6. $24.95 (cloth). Seeking the Sacred Raven: Politics and Extinction on a Hawaiian Island, by Jerome Mark Walters, DVM, is the author’s very personal version of the decline of the ‘Alalā or endemic Hawaiian Crow (Corvus hawaiiensis). Walters’s writing belies his training as a scientist; his book is infused with what some readers will find contrived spirituality that can be distracting or downright annoying and is laden with hubris. In our opinion, the book lacks objectivity; Walters chooses sides—a private landowner is the heroine, and biologists are portrayed as antagonists. The veracity of much of what is written, especially the direct quotations, cannot be verified, although the bias of the author (e.g., the title of chapter 14, “Scientist to the Rescue”) comes through loud and clear. The book also has numerous errors of fact and, more importantly, errors of omission. For starters, the ‘Alalā is not extinct. At present, there are many more individuals in captivity (57) than there were in initial captive populations of other critically endangered species, like the California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) and Whooping Crane (Grus Americana), and, like the ‘Alalā, these species are now increasing. A number of what seem like minor errors (see Tummons [2006] for examples) will be aggravating to those readers who, through personal experience, know the story better than Walters. On the positive side, this book communicates many of the frustrations of doing conservation work in Hawai‘i. Walters’s description of the captive propagation program’s history is perhaps the most incomplete part of the account. According to Dr. Fern Duvall, who directed the ‘Alalā captive propagation program from 1984 to 1996, the author spoke to him only once for about an hour about ten years before the book was published; hardly enough to get a very complete picture of that period of the program. In 1984, when Duvall took over as a temporary hire, the captive crows were housed adjacent to a U.S. Army training area where the sound of artillery, exploding bombs and helicopters flying a few hundred feet over the aviaries were daily occurrences. After years of pressure from Duvall, other biologists, and environmental organizations, the U.S. Army and the State of Hawai‘i found funding to construct aviaries at a run-down former state prison facility on the Island of Maui. We read virtually nothing of this in the book. Instead, Walters merely recounts the captive propagation program’s inadequate infrastructure and funding under Duvall, as well as the lack of genetic variation in the captive flock, neither of which Duvall had any control over. Having informed readers of the captive flock’s low genetic variation and the possible role of this in the program’s lack of success, Walters denigrates virtually all efforts made by state and federal biologists to bring new genetic material into the captive flock. Those efforts