COURTESY U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE
An iiwi is seen in the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge on Hawaii island.
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With slightly more than 500 listings (80 animals and 424 plants), Hawaii is the nation’s hands-down endangered and threatened species capital. Largely responsible for that ranking: island isolation and pests.
In the sad case of the iiwi, or scarlet honeycreeper, an invasive mosquito is a culprit, restricting the bulk of the bird’s population to a narrow forest area on East Maui and on the windward side of Hawaii island above 4,265 feet. Iiwi are now climbing to that cool elevation to escape the mosquito’s reach — and avian malaria infection.
Here’s hoping a recovery plan can bring the bird with the distinctive down-turned bill back to lower elevations, where it once flourished.
Health care proposal can make a person ill
When people who eat, sleep and work the complex system of government help with health care costs are feeling worried, we all should fret a bit. Judy Mohr Peterson, who directs Medicaid at the state Department of Human Services, is watching the reports about the last-ditch effort in the U.S. Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and she doesn’t like it.
The proposed radical reshuffling of federal health care funds will tend to hurt states disproportionately that expanded Medicaid. States like Hawaii.
“I’m not sleeping,” she said. We can all feel a little sick now.
