Jack Jeffrey, a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, is known to thousands of refuge visitors for his lucid, witty and empathetic descriptions of the unique flora and fauna of Hawai`i that are still abundant there. To many thousands more, he is portraitist without peer of Hawai`i’s rarest birds, whose images he has captured on film for more than two decades.
Jeffrey will be presenting a slide show of his dramatic work at Environment Hawai`i’s annual dinner July 26. (See the calendar listing for details.) Editor Patricia Tummons caught up with him recently in his crowded office – whose walls were covered, naturally, with images of birds.
Which came first, the biologist or the photographer?
In one respect, I’ve always been interested in biology. When I was young, my parents used to take me for walks in the woods and point out interesting things, butterflies, snakes, trees. Later, as I grew up, I was the kid down the block who always used to climb trees and collect birds’ nests, seeds, leaves, and what not. Somewhere along the line I borrowed my dad’s camera and took pictures of birds’nests. Not great shots, but a beginning. That was a long time ago, when I was maybe 10, 12 years old. As my interest in living things grew, I collected bugs, had a great bug collection, pet frogs, rabbits, birds and snakes. I scared my mother half to death many times with the snake in the cellar, in my bedroom or in my jeans pocket. Biology and photography interests sort of grew together from that.
But the photography didn’t really develop until I got to Guam. I moved there in 1967; my dad was Civil Service and the whole family moved to Guam. I did most of my undergraduate and graduate work on Guam. After graduation I started working for Guam Fish and Game. I photographed Guam wildlife, birds, plants, scenics whatever else I could. Sold my first photos while I was there. That was exciting. Then I moved to Hawai`i in 1974 and there was a hiatus of my photography for a while. In the early 1980s, I started in again and continued from then.
What rekindled my interest was, I went to a slide show about Hawai`i’s birds and it was horrible, just horrible. The speaker was good, but the pictures were just horrendous. Mostly slides of birds in the hand , you know, scruffy, posed. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘if we’re going to try to promote Hawai`i’s great birds, somebody’s got to go out there and get good pictures.’ Can you imagine if the World Wildlife Fund tried to raise interest with a picture of a dead roadkill panda? They’re just not going to sell. No, you’ve got to have pretty pictures of the animals in the wild.
So I went out with my camera and tried to get pictures of the birds. My first pictures were even worse than those I’d seen in the slide show. Then I got a better lens and camera and over time got better and better pictures.
When you moved to Hawai`i, did you start working for the Fish and Wildlife Service?
No, actually, when I first got to Hawai`i, I needed a job but there weren’t any biologist jobs available. But the sugar plantation was hiring so I went to work for them, the Hilo Coast Processing Co. I did many different jobs for them for about three years or so; flume operator, bulldozer/loader operator, supervisor.
One of my jobs was that of supervisor for the land containment. They used to dump all their soil-laden dirty water into the ocean but the EPA wouldn’t allow that anymore. So we developed these huge sumps in Pepe`ekeo and Papaikou. I was nighttime supervisor and we’d use a big clamshell crane to dig out the sumps once they were filled with dirt. One night, I got a call on the radio from a crane operator in Papaikou that something was scaring him. He was an older man and he was saying, “There’s obake (ghosts) in the cane” right next to him. He knew that the area where we had put the sumps in happened to be an old burial ground – actually an old village site; but that’s another story. So I went over to find out what was going on.
There was this loud, weird noise coming out of the cane. I was standing there by the crane when I heard it, and I said, ‘Well, that sounds sort of like a seabird.’ And suddenly there’s this bird flying around the lights of the crane. Bingo! It hit the crane and fell to the ground. It was a Newell’s shearwater, which is a threatened species. And I thought, ‘these don’t breed on this island,’ but this bird still had some down feathers, indicating it was a very young bird. ‘Oh, this is strange,’ I thought. The bird was still alive, so I popped it into my lunchbox and took it home.
Next morning, I got up and started calling people. When I got to Mike Scott at U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Volcano, he said, ‘well, the best thing you could probably do is to take him back to the cliffs and launch him, somewhere where there’s no lights. He’ll probably do just fine.’
So that afternoon I went down. Launched the bird. Zoom. Off he went.
The next morning the telephone rings. It’s Mike Scott. ‘What’d you do with that bird? Have you seen any more? What other birds have you seen?’ And on and on!! Apparently, he’d been talking with other people and realized what the potential was. Newell’s shearwaters hadn’t been known to breed on the Big Island for who knows how long, and here was a juvenile bird. The Hawai`i forest bird survey had already been started, and they’d been doing forest bird census work in Hamakua. They were hearing Newell’s shearwaters in the forest above Akaka Falls, in some of the valleys, and the more mauka areas.
Because I was a supervisor at the plantation, I had a radio in my truck and could contact all the other supervisors and nighttime harvesting crews all up and down the coast. So every night, I’d find out where harvesting crews were seeing birds. As soon as I started questioning people, they’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, when we’re harvesting up in these upper fields, we get the black-and-white birds that fly around the equipment lights at night.’
Mike gave me a couple of quad maps and we started marking where harvesting crews were seeing birds and also trying to get some historical records, and where we could, some actual records. Eventually we put together and published a paper on possible Newell’s shearwater nesting on the Big Island.
How did you eventually come to work for Fish and Wildlife?
Well, that’s another story. I was working seven days a week for the plantation, but I needed a day off to finish work on this old church I’d been tearing down. I was using the lumber to build a house in Volcano. ‘Sure, take the day off’, I was told. Then my boss’s boss showed up and said that someone hadn’t shown up to work the pumps, so I needed to get down there.
And I said, ‘Look, I’ve got an obligation to the church to get this cleaned up by tomorrow. My contract ends, and I’ve got to clean up all this broken glass and nails ’cause the building’s gone.’
And he said, ‘Jack, the only obligation you have is to the plantation.’
I was young and full of testosterone, and I just told him off.
And he said, ‘You’re fired.’
I went home that afternoon and said to my wife, ‘I just got fired. Oh my God, what am I going to do? How stupid! Well, tomorrow morning I’ll go down and just beg for my job back. I had been a little hot under the collar; I’ll be real sorry.’
The next day as I was getting dressed to go down to the mill to do a little groveling, Mike Scott called. He said, ‘Jack, have you ever thought about working for me? I got a job for you.’
Whoa! ‘Yeah!’ I was dumbfounded
He said, ‘well, come on up right now. Fill out the paperwork, and we’ll have you working by next Monday.’
And so I began my career with the Fish and Wildlife Service, getting involved in the Hawai`i Forest Bird Survey.
Could you talk a little about the Forest Bird Survey, which was such a watershed event in Hawai`i’s conservation history?
Back then, we really didn’t know much about the state of the forests. We knew very little about where birds were found.
People would see endangered birds here and there. But really we had no idea of the status or distribution of most of the forest birds. And so Mike Scott and others amazingly put together the Hawai`i Forest Bird Survey on a shoestring budget.
He hired young, energetic people to go out and set up transects, about two miles apart through some unbelievably rugged areas. They started the first forest bird census in Ka`u in 1976.
The first year, while doing Ka`u, they learned a lot. Next year, they did Hamakua – and the rain almost stopped them. Some of the transects took ten days to set up. Ten days! Each transect had to be cut, then the bird census team did bird surveys along the transect, and finally the botanists did their thing. It was extremely difficult.
I got involved just as the Hamakua survey was winding up. Then we moved to Kona, Kohala Mountains, Lanai, Moloka`i, and Maui, and Kaua`i. O`ahu was the only island we didn’t cover. It had been done previously by others.
That led to the establishment of the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge?
The Forest Bird Survey basically showed that in some higher elevation areas in the Hamakua area, Eastern Mauna Kea, there was forest habitat that had a high density of birds. Much of the other land that was surveyed was state land, but some was private.
Once finished with the survey, armed with maps with detailed information on bird distribution, we could go to legislators and say, ‘Look, if we’re going to protect endangered species, endangered birds, here are the places we need to protect.’
It just so happened that in the early 1980s, Shipman decided to sell the Pua Akala Ranch. With the help of the Hawaii Nature Conservancy and money appropriated by Congress, that portion of the refuge – approximately 16,000 acres – was purchased. That was the beginning of Hakalau Forest NWR.
We’re 33,000 acres now. We’ve added quite a bit of acreage since.
From my point of view, it’s been great to be able to be part of the refuge from its inception. Even though I wasn’t a decision-maker, to eventually become the biologist for the refuge – it was something I had never even imagined.
When did you start working for the refuge?
For the first 12 or so years that I worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service, I was ‘temporary-intermittent.’ I would work for six months, then be off six months. Work a year, be off another few months. With all the time off I was able to build a house in Volcano from the used wood from old buildings and I had collected during my plantation days. And that was the time when I did all sorts of other things. I did some biological consulting work, led tours, I was a chimney sweep, my wife and I had a candy store in Hilo. In 1987 I was offered a job working for Fish and Wildlife Service on the palila project. I started working at the refuge in 1990. I knew the refuge really well long before I started working there. I had spent lots of time setting up transects for bird surveys, and organizing and conducting the surveys long before I started working for the refuge.
Your first books, A Pocket Guide to Hawai`i’s Birds and Hawaii’s Beautiful Birds co-authored with Doug Pratt, came out in 1996. Any more books in the offing?
I’m working right now on a book on Hawaiian honeycreepers. A pictoral coffee table book. Although the book will cover some of the prehistoric and Hawaiian perspective, it’s mainly a showcase for Honeycreepers, and will have anecdotes and quotes from historic bird collectors, up to present-day ornithologists.
At Hakalau, is it easier to take pictures of birds now than it was a decade ago? In other words, are the birds more abundant?
I think the question you’re really asking is, are we doing a good job with management at the refuge. Birds have always been reasonably abundant at Hakalau forest. That’s why the area was chosen to be a refuge. But now you can definitely see the changes. In the pasture areas – what was pasture before- is now becoming a forest because of all the planting we’ve done. We’ve planted over 250,000 trees up there since 1989 with the help of hundreds of hard working volunteers.
Also, ten to twelve years of feral cattle and pig removal has allowed major changes in forest understory recovery. If you go into the forest areas, you see some wonderful changes. In the past, the understory was only alien grass, now it’s native vegetation, shrubs, young trees and ferns — lots of ferns. You go into the pasture, it’s no longer pasture. It’s rows of trees, corridors of trees, and groves of trees that we’ve planted. And what do you find? Birds! Mostly native birds, but some exotics, too. Those birds weren’t there 10 years ago. They weren’t there because there were no trees in the past for them to forage in. No trees, only exotic grasses. “Plant it and they will come” and boy, they did!!
Whether there are more birds, or whether they’re just spread out into the new habitat – who knows? The U.S.G.S. Biological Resources Division is working up twelve years of forest bird census data from the refuge, putting it all on G.I.S. [Geographic Information System] as we speak. Very shortly, we’re going to finally see this data and compare year after year, with the different plantings and growth rates, understory growth, et cetera, and get an idea of the changes in bird density and distribution.
Think of the potential changes. The `Elepaio is an understory bird. Is the increase in understory good or bad for `Elepaio? I suspect it’s going to be good. There’s probably more `Elepaio now than before. Same thing for Amakihi. There’s more habitat available for Amakihi.
But has it changed `I`iwi and Apapane numbers? They use the forest canopy and that hasn’t changed much. So probably not, I’m guessing. I really don’t know of course. But this data analysis will give us a better look at the changes.
We’re looking at twelve years of data. That’s a great data set. It’s the only place in Hawai`i where we have consistent forest bird data, year after year – other than for Palila. And we’ve got some areas where management is occurring and there have been dramatic changes with habitat regeneration. So, we’ll see shortly. My gut feeling is, yeah, there are some changes, but what they are – we’ll see. I bet there will be lots of surprises.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 13, Number 1 July 2002
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