The ʻAumākua Cry

Everyone knew the most basic and unspoken law: Do not get attached. 

Matteo had expected to write reports of the crows by referring to them with long strings of eight digit numbers and to call them the first three numbers for short. But when the conservatory had given him a list of his charges, they all had beautiful Hawaiian names that meant god of light or ocean diamond or little pest.

They had the last hundred Hawaiian crows in the world, the director had explained. They might as well have names.

This was the other law everyone knew: You will get attached.

All the ʻalalā (the name sounded like many of their cries) had unique personalities. Matteo suspected he’d be able to tell many of them apart given a few minutes without the tags. Keolamauloa was typically a sweet girl, but when it came to food she was first in line and aggressive. The motivation helped her learn puzzles faster than the others.

Ulu had a habit of watching when someone new entered his enclosure. Then he would swoop down from the top branches of his favorite ʻōhiʻa lehua tree and beat his wings inches over the visitor’s head. He would perch in front of them in an unmistakable display of pride, a ruffle of wings that said, so what do you have to offer me?

And then there were Kalani and Eloa. Kalani meant both sky and royalty. She had been named for her cold demeanor toward the other birds and the sleek shine of her feathers. ʻAlalā all looked very similar, all of them large winged black corvids with curved beaks. But Kalani was clearly very different. She was the largest female in the sanctuary, and the brown tint of her feathers, rather than dulling her coat, sparkled under the sun. He and the rest of the team had been afraid she would not mate, until Eloa.

Eloa was one of the newest generation at the sanctuary, headstrong with youth. Dawit suggested it was Eloa’s fluffy plume that had convinced the queen of the sky to finally take a king. Kekoa thought it was his speed. But none of them really knew. What they saw were only courting rituals: the male proving his strength, talent, care. Many other perfectly fine males had tried to do the same for her. The secret of what had been missing was behind the meeting of four black intelligent eyes, the shared wind underneath their wings. Something Kalani had seen in Eloa had determined the partnership, and no amount of observation would reveal it to the human world. 

During a warm Hawaiian day at the sanctuary, Matteo sat shaded under a tall canopy of trees, vines, red clouds of flowers, seed pods that looked like small earthy bell peppers, orange berries that loaded down the branches of its own shrubbery. Next to him a hōʻawa tree with clumps of long-fingered leaves reached upwards like a crowd rejoicing and dozens of māmaki bushes spread out their magenta veins in soft green bursts. Spring was coming, along with its miserable heat, and even though he was Michigan blood through and through, he didn't mind it.

Kalani gave her particular screech of greeting, something that sounded almost human at the beginning, a child’s joyful ah! Ka ah! She and Eloa raced through the branches as if they were as slight as fireflies. They burst into the clearing and dove toward the ground as one dropped stone, rocketed back up, and chased each other around in loops. Eventually they landed near him. Eloa gave him a friendly clicking noise. Kalani went to his feet, hopped around the log he had brought.

Eloa flapped away and rejoined her with a thin stick in his beak. He lodged it in the log’s crevices and swept the bugs he found into the open. When he picked one up, Kalani flew in to steal his lunch. Matteo took the opportunity to show her the slices of papaya he'd also brought. As soon as the orange fruit was in sight, her bugs were forgotten. Her feathers spread with another delightful cry and she landed on his hand. She left a painful mark on his palm in her hurry to feast on her favorite food. The last bit she took to Eloa and dropped it beside him, who gladly accepted.

“I think you two can do it,” Matteo said to them. They fed each other, cawed at each other playfully. “Your first nest together, and it’ll be out there. You’ll blow everyone away.”

The controlled release test had the sanctuary buzzing with anxiety and excitement. It was coming fast, and it was timed with mating season for a reason. They wanted the crows to make families out there, put down roots without human help. 

Controlled releases were historically not very successful for ʻalalā. The crows relied too much on their human supplied food sources, and their predators, the ʻio, or Hawaiian hawks, were ruthless against them. This mating season the team was testing a new food tapering program, and if they had successfully trained the crows to listen for the cry of an ʻio and to hide. Their sanctuary and another had been doing this for nearly thirty years and the ʻalalā still hadn’t reached critically endangered status. Besides a dozen or so birds the team knew about, they were completely extinct in the wild. 

If Eloa and Kalani could make a nest out there, they would be the third pair in all that time.

“That’s the last papaya I can give you,” Matteo told Kalani, who had jumped back on his hand to look for more. “There’s better fruit out there. Flowers you've never tasted. You'll love it.”

She tilted her head at his words. Carefully projecting his movements, he reached his index finger toward her. She accepted a small neck scratch then flapped back towards Eloa to help him collect and eat more bugs.

“Yeah,” he said. “You’ll love it out there.”

                             ***

They never found Kalani’s body.

A signal going dark did not necessarily mean death. A stationary signal that went dark after sudden movement made it more likely. That Eloa was always alone after made it near impossible to be anything else.

They’d hiked out with antennas to try to find her ping. They spread out with binoculars and searched the trees for a rare flash of black within verdant green. For Kalani’s sun-echoing golden brown feathers.

Matteo froze when he saw Eloa in the branches above him, at first thinking it was her. They stared at each other without a sound. 

Matteo stepped towards him. Eloa lowered his head. His black eyes looked down on him imperiously, as if out in the wild he’d learned the rich legend and power of crows -- that they gathered in murders, were shapeshifters in disguise. Hawaiian crows were guides of the afterlife. 

He opened his beak and spread his feathers with a caw of menace. He finally looked like a king.

***

They took the crows back into captivity. 

They attempted to pair Eloa with other females. Sometimes crows mated for life, sometimes for years, and their adult children usually stayed close by. It was eerily like humans. Eloa and Kalani had been paired for less than a year and with no children, so they hadn’t expected him to turn into their most difficult crow. But he had.

He hissed and pecked when the other ʻalalā got near him. One didn’t back down and it turned into an all out fight, their wings flapping, wrestling on the ground and air.

He had to be secluded. It was hard to find him in the large enclosure sometimes, until suddenly Matteo’s eyes met his two dull ones, high in a corner, silent and still. He was eating less. He refused to hunt at all for his own food.

Dawit and Kekoa stood with Matteo, looking up at Eloa. A long moment passed, and then he cawed at them. Then again, and again. It wasn’t angry -- it sounded like a sob.

“We have to remember that grief has an evolutionary purpose,” Kekoa said. “It’s a pain response. Our physical pain is a warning system to pull away from the stimulus. Grief is a warning system that tells us we lost something we needed.”

They let her words sit for a while. Eloa cawed over and over through the heavy humidity. 

Dawit sighed. “Bringing extinct animals back is crazy,” he said. “You can't talk to anyone else about it. Two hundred years ago some people cut down the forest and we still cry about it like it's fresh.”

“It is fresh,” Kekoa said.

***

And Matteo had cried. He had truly believed in them. He was a scientist, and even so he believed sometimes that science was wrong, that there was some beautiful pattern that humans could only guess at, and crows could brush with their wings. But the reality was at any moment a hawk could dive in from above to eat its prey, whose feathers would have stood out in the shimmering sun, and crush its VHF tag.

***

They were all worried about Eloa’s food intake. Matteo decided to try something new. 

He stood underneath the watching shadowy shape. The sanctuary was purple at night and hummed with ever present life. Occasionally a relieving cool breeze touched down from the stars and trickled beneath fronds and feathers and fingers.

Eloa eyed him with distrust. 

“I’m sorry,” Matteo said. “I know I would hate us if I was you. We’re… we are trying. To undo it.” He opened his palm out with his offering, a cut up papaya that glowed with orange in the dark. “I miss her too.”

The crow seemed interested in the fruit. He hopped slowly downwards, until he was only a few feet away. He made a slight clicking noise that almost blended entirely into the night. Matteo heard it, and reached down to set the fruit in between the two of them.

Eloa pecked once at it and lifted his head to the sky in a swallow. He caught two pieces in his mouth next. His appetite seemed to come back all at once, and in a rush of jabs the fruit was gone. All except one bite.

It was what Kalani had done -- save the last bite of her precious papaya for Eloa. Eloa looked at the piece on the ground, lifted it in his mouth, and fluttered towards Matteo. He dropped it at his feet.

Matteo wanted to say thank you but his throat was clogged.

 ***

One morning he was making his way through the sanctuary, giving the ʻalalā their breakfast. He heard a happy cry, an ah! Ka ah! He stopped to listen, his heart beating in time to the repeated call. It took him a moment to realize why: It was Kalani’s voice. 

He sped in its direction, toward Eloa’s enclosure. Ah! Ka ah!

But what he found through the mesh and vines was not Kalani, returned to her mate after all that time. It was Eloa, flying in loops, whirling through the branches, brushing his wings through soft leaves, plunging, plunging, and then flying back up. Ah! Ka ah! His voice was a perfect recreation of hers.

What everyone liked to say at the sanctuary was that when you trained one crow, you trained all its children after. They remembered and told each other which berries were poisonous and who to be afraid of. Matteo watched Eloa play and allowed himself to imagine a future for a moment, years after they were both gone. In that future there was still an ʻalalā singing Ah! Ka ah! And the other birds who listened knew it meant we once lost something we needed.