Creature Consciousness is Resonant

The forest is alive. Pale silver sickles of koa trees reach toward an azure sky. Massive grandmother ʻōhia trees, covered in brightly colored pom-poms of red, orange, peach, and yellow, spread their canopy skyward in ancestral majesty. Underground, fungal networks weave through layers of soil and strata, connecting the trees to each other, sending messages through the unseen mycelial network below. The trees are aware of each other, so branches in the upper canopy don’t quite touch, ensuring their friends get ample light, allowing a certain amount of sunlight to enter the shaded areas below. A diversity of under canopy trees, shrubs, ferns, and herbaceous plants thrive in the shade provided by the grandmothers. Plants breathe, and transpire, creating oxygen that the other inhabitants of this landscape require to survive, creating mist in the morning warmth, holding moisture in the forest. In nearby fields, flowers curve their faces skyward, as if staring at the sun. 

A secret symphony resounds in the forest. Plants emit ultrasonic sounds,¹ and mushrooms emit low frequency vibrations² that we cannot hear, but some animals such as moths, bats, and rodents—all nocturnal—can; these sounds likely help them navigate the forest in the darkness. In addition to echolocating to find prey, bats navigate through fields of sound inaudible to the human ear. In fact, the range of frequency for bat calls is similar to the frequency of sounds emitted by plants. Perhaps bats have evolved vocalizations that mimic the forests they live in. Their prey, the moths, can hear these sounds as well, so it would make sense for bats to resonate at the same frequency as their forest to remain incognito. This resonance is the language of the earth, and relationships are maintained through resonance. 

Birds play a vital role in the resonance of the forest, and we can hear their symphony. They communicate through “multi-tonal harmonic sounds,”³ songs that are learned,^4,5 and are passed down through generations. 

Vocal learning is rare in the animal kingdom and is known only in humans, birds, bats, and cetaceans⁴—whales, dolphins, and porpoises. When a bird alights on a branch, they sing a song that has been passed down for millenia, through generations. Hearing these songs has been shown to provide lasting mental health benefits to humans.⁶ Hearing songs from multiple species simultaneously can decrease depression, anxiety, and paranoia.⁷ This indicates an important ancestral relationship between people and birds—our last common ancestor walked the earth (yes, walked) over 300 million years ago.⁸ Hawaiian ancestors understood this relationship: that hearing birds had a positive effect on our mental health, and made one feel less lonely:

ʻŌlelo Noʻeau 1094: Hoʻolaukanaka i ka leo o nā manu. The voices of birds give the place a feeling of being inhabited, used by those who live, work, or travel in lonely places — life is made happy by the voices of many birds. 
–Pukui⁹

Manu, however, are not just birds. The term manu also refers to any winged creature—bats, dragonflies, butterflies, and moths: the flying beings in our earthly realm, each with their own superpowers and relationships with plants and people. Many of our most unique endemic species evolved over millenia in relationship with our plants in a process called adaptive radiation. The decurved beaks of honeycreepers such as the extinct Mamo (Drepanis pacific) and ʻŌʻō (Moho nobilis), and the extant ʻIʻiwi (Scarlet Honeycreeper, Drepanis coccinea) co-evolved with Lobeliad species in the Bellflower family (Campanulaceae), who have beautiful tubular decurved flowers. Our two endemic butterflies, the koa blue (Udara blackburni) and pulelehua (Kamehameha butterfly, Vanessa tameamea) rely on the koa (Acacia koa) and mamaki (Pipturus albidus), respectively, as host plants. The soundscape varied greatly across the islands with different assemblages of manu that had evolved over millennia with these endemic plants. Less than 100 years after the first Europeans came to Hawaiʻi, our forests started falling silent due to an onslaught of extinctions that coincided with changes in land stewardships and cultural practices. Birds, plants, moths, and singing tree snails have been the groups most affected. As a result, many extant plants have lost their pollinators: bird or insect, resulting in an extinction vortex, where the extinction of one species accelerates that of another. 

The resonance in our forests has dramatically transformed in this relatively short period of time. Population declines have resulted in a loss of song diversity for our remaining bird species: Hawaiian birds are singing less complex songs.¹⁰

Our understanding of bird consciousness has been limited in orthodox science, perhaps due to the stigma around anthropomorphizing, or, more accurately, an inability to see animals as people. New advances in neurotechnology are turning commonly held notions about bird consciousness on their head. Recent studies have shown that bird brain structure and learning capacity is similar to our own.¹¹ Birds have a region called a pallium, which resembles our cerebral cortex.¹² We also have a similar hearing range, but birds are more sensitive to tones and rhythms than humans: some can hear insect larvae inside trees.¹³ Owls have asymmetrical ears that allow them to precisely determine the location of their prey.¹³

Vision is the most important sense for manu. They are highly visual creatures, and in addition to having more visual acuity than humans they also see more colors. Some manu like birds¹⁴ and butterflies¹⁵ are tetrachromats who see into the ultraviolet spectrum, seeing hundreds of millions more colors than humans can. Dragonflies can see into ultraviolet and far-red spectrum, a rarity in the animal world.¹⁶ Spectrometry has revealed patterns on the feathers of songbirds, the wings of moths and butterflies, and on flowers that are invisible to our eyes. The sky looks violet to birds with these optical receptors.¹⁷ Raptors can see their prey from miles away due to their visual acuity. The beauty that we see in the forest pales in comparison to the ultraviolet spectrum from which certain manu view the world. 

Birds are also more sensitive to changes in the environment than humans and are thus important messengers and environmental indicators. The earliest recorded use of birds as omens comes from ancient Greece, where the practice was called ornithomancy. At one time it was commonly understood what specific omens the birds foretold.¹⁸ Hawaiians have many examples of what could be called ornithomancy, as well. For example, seeing large groups of ʻIwa (Great Frigatebirds, Fregata minor) or ʻĀ (Boobies, Sula spp.) over land indicates a storm is coming.¹⁹ ʻElepaio (Chasiempis sandwichensis) and ʻAlalā (Hawaiian Crow, Corvus hawaiiensis) warned boat builders that certain koa trees were not good for harvest by pecking at the tree, looking for insects—an indication that the tree was infested. ʻAlae ʻUla (Hawaiian Moorhen, Gallinula chloropus) are sacred to Kapō, and are famed for having given Māui the secret of fire.²⁰ Kōlea (Pacific Golden Plover, Pluvialis fulva) and ʻŪlili (Wandering Tattler, Tringa incana) were messengers who warned a chief Kapepeʻekauila where his adversaries were.²¹ In the song Hiʻilawe, the birds gossip through the forests of Waipiʻo about the secret love affair happening behind the waterfall. 

To the ancient Hawaiian birds were called ka po‘e kino manu (people with bird bodies). Birds are our ancestors, akua (deities, nature spirits, gods), and ‘aumākua (deified ancestors, family guardians).  Two of our most powerful messengers and ʻaumākua are Pueo (Hawaiian Short-eared Owl, Asio flammeus sandwichensis) and ʻAlalā who can both navigate between the worlds of the living and the dead and are important species in forest health and regeneration.

ʻAlalā—who are more raven than crow—are intelligent, inquisitive birds. Corvid intelligence is not dissimilar to our own. They use tools, plan for the future, barter,²² pass down knowledge generationally,²³ and hold funerals for their dead.²⁴ It is likely that ʻAlalā have a right or left eye bias in tool use, like New Caledonian Crows, as most birds are known to have differential use of each eye.²⁵ ʻAlalā were known to make a deafening racket when someone entered the forest²⁶ and were so curious about humans that they would often follow them, observing their behavior.²⁷ They were famed in old times for clarifying or revealing hidden things.²⁸ Once abundant in the forests and at low elevations, by the end of the last century their numbers had plummeted to single digits.²⁷ ʻAlalā went extinct in the wild in 2002, and with them we lost our last remaining large native seed disperser. 

ʻAlalā are an ʻaumakua (family protector, deified ancestor) who guide people from this world into the land of the dead.²⁹ When Captain Cook arrived at Kaʻawaloa, Kānaka (Hawaiians) had two captive ʻAlalā who lived in their houses and were considered akua (gods); they tried to buy the live birds as specimens and were told no.²⁷ A woman named Hainau had a pet ʻAlalā in Honolulu in 1864²⁸—despite there being no English language documentation of the species on Oʻahu. 

Indeed, documentation about the ʻAlalā was scant for a couple centuries.²⁷ Due to large declines in the Native Hawaiian population, changes in land stewardship, and shifting cultural values, the relationship between people and ʻAlalā was ruptured. Instead of welcoming the ravens to eat in the chicken yards, settlers who had moved here from the continent began shooting the birds, oblivious to the fact that a corvid could go extinct. As ʻAlalā likely passed the knowledge of their relationships with people down through generations, perhaps their cultural knowledge of a relationship with humans fueled their curiosity about people, making it easier for people to shoot them. I wonder if they felt anger when their brethren got shot, if they reacted by scolding with alarm calls. I wonder how they felt about the settlers and their foreign ways, if they were forlorn about the cattle released into the forest destroying the understory, and the subsequent extinction of plants that bore their favorite fruits. I wonder if their sadness made them more prone to decline and disease, as trauma in humans does. 

When the last few individual ʻAlalā were left in the forest, one of the birds who had recently lost his mate wailed in grief—in the same way that people grieving the death of a loved one do—the reason for a chanting style named after the beloved ravens.²⁷ For such an intelligent bird, watching the last members of their species die all around them must have been a heartbreaking experience. I imagine the last few of these beloved ravens, flying free in the forest, screaming into the void, hearing only silence. The last remaining ʻAlalā were brought into captive breeding facilities, where I now work. While their population has increased in captivity, none of the subsequent attempts to reintroduce them to the wild have been successful. These failures have largely been blamed on ʻIo (Hawaiian Hawk, Buteo solitarius), despite the observed deaths also being coincident with an end to their supplemental feeding. They are still incarcerated in human care.

In one moʻolelo, it was an ʻAlalā kupua (shapeshifter, demigod, trickster) name Pīkoiakaʻalalā who taught Pueo how to kill rats with their “spear” tip,³⁰ their beak. Pueo are another beloved ʻaumakua who were kept at temples before our religion was toppled.³¹ A famed akua kumupaʻa (ancient family god) named Kūkauakahi was the son of Haumea (the earth) and Kanaloa³²(ocean akua who is related to death and decay and was called Satan by well-meaning Christians). He had a Pueo body.³³ Dead loved ones were offered to Kūkauakahi in a ceremony called kākūʻai, a type of ritualistic feeding, or invocation, of Kūkauakahi into a dead loved one to become a Pueo ʻaumakua. If the offering was accepted a Pueo would be seen flying in the sky.³⁴ 

The relationship between Kānaka (Hawaiians) and ʻaumākua was not passive. ʻAumākua had kahu (caretakers) who were responsible for feeding them—to ignore this burden could bring tragedy upon the family. Pueo ʻaumakua were known for instructing people on how to live a good life, helping their kahu break out of prison, saving their kahu from imminent death, and for guiding their kahu back to land if they were lost at sea.^33,34,35 Pueo ʻaumakua also had the power to restore life.^36,37,38

As apex predators, Pueo are important indicators of ecosystem health and balance. Pueo were connected to “lofty” genealogies of aliʻi³⁹ (chiefs). Since aliʻi were responsible for maintaining abundance and water cycles,⁴⁰ having a relationship with Pueo—and other apex predators like sharks and ʻIo—would have likely helped aliʻi to recognize when the ecosystem was out of balance.⁴¹ By the turn of the 20th century, Pueo had suffered large declines due to sugar plantations destroying their breeding habitat, and were being “ruthlessly killed” by settlers, “for no reason other than that they were an owl.”³¹

Ancient kapu (taboo, law related to the sacred) forbid the casting of a shadow on an ali‘i. Birds were the only people allowed to cast shadows on them because birds belong to the akua realm, a realm higher than humans. Ali‘i adorned themselves in feathers: they wore ‘ahu ‘ula (feather capes), carried kahili staffs made of feathers. Our ancestors, the aliʻi, and their kahunas (knowledge keepers) specifically, had close relationships with these birds. They understood their ecological and imaginal functions, and were able to read them, as omens. 

With the birds who have gone extinct since European contact, we lost the omens they foretold and our relationships with them. The remaining species, many of whom used to be seen at the beach⁴² are relegated to high elevation forests, away from mosquitoes and the deadly avian malaria and pox that they carry, and, largely, away from humans. However, even in the highest elevation forests habitat loss, cats, rats, and mongooses are still major threats, especially to nestlings. In addition to avian malaria, habitat loss and invasive predators are the most common causes of bird declines and extinctions in Hawaiʻi. If bird assemblages are indicators of habitat quality,⁴³ Hawaiʻi is in serious trouble. Ungulates continue to destroy much of the under canopy and new growth in any areas that are not fenced off. Birds who rely on the understory, like the ʻAlalā,²⁷ “may be less able to adapt to novel and isolated habitats,”⁴⁴ exacerbating their declines. Many people here are working tirelessly to restore what we can, and some of the forests are slowly recovering.

True recovery means also mending and revitalizing relationships between birds and people, restoring our resonance. Indeed, much of the forest is a result of birds: pollinating flowers, eating fruit and dispersing seeds to aid in forest growth and regeneration, and consuming insects that infest trees. Bird song is likely to have positive effects on mycelial growth as well; mushroom growth and fruiting is accelerated by music and cricket sounds.⁴⁵ This growth in turn helps trees by way of symbiotic relationships, another type of resonance. The entire forest, and likely all of life, is maintained through these resonant relationships. 

“Birds are the messengers from the true earth, without them bringing life here, and without their song, nothing grows. For every seed a bird steals… a seed is brought here and planted in the soil but through a special means: the seeds are cast and sown through the human heart. Because inside your broken heart is found the entire world. And it is here that springs to life: the entirety of creation.”
—Chapman⁴⁶

Let us turn our gaze, now, back to the forest. The treetops dance synchronously in the wind. Fragmented sunlight filters down to the forest floor giving life to the restored understory. ʻApapane (Crimson Honeycreepers, Himatione sanguinea) banter in the treetops, in their endless search for nectar. ʻŌmaʻo (Hawaiian Thrush, Myadestes obscurus) sing loudly from a nearby koa branch. These birds may or may not remember the species that are no longer with us, and yet, they continue to sing and fly in the forests anyway. They must, even if they grieve for those lost. We also must, while actively trying to restore what we can—to fix the problems humans have caused. If our last native birds go extinct, which parts of ourselves will go with them? How much of ourselves have we already lost?

Notes

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