This is bird note.

Like many native Hawaiian birds, the Ou is presumed to be extinct.

It was a stout secretive yellow and green honeycreeper,

seen for the last time in the late 80s.

Sam Ohugan was one of the last people to see an Ou.

He's worked at the Nature Conservancy of Hawaii for nearly 40 years. And back in 1988,

he took part in an Audubon Christmas bird count, hoping to encounter some of the critically endangered native birds.

And my team and I had been listening and training ourselves via tape recordings of various birds of that region

to identify the calls of all of the endemic forest birds known from that place.

Beliloh.

Oh. And so Sam and his group are dropped off, deep in the native forests on the island of Hawaii.

I remember that day was a miserable wet and cold day at elevations above 4,000 feet.

And every 50 meters we would stop and listen for a certain amount of time, observe whatever birds, write them down.

And I remember deep in the Hapuu, the native tree fern section of that forest and the

hapu were so thick there and the fronds are very solid you know if they're

really dry you can break through them but they're crisscrossing from all of the tree ferns growing in such density and you're trying to push through those old fronds that haven't gotten soft enough yet.

We were getting exhausted and your senses tend to dull when you're

miserable and cold and wet and exhausted in the middle of nowhere and yet we were stopped at one of those stations and we heard that call

and we looked at each other and could hardly believe it right right? Did you hear that?

Do you think that's what we heard?

We heard it called several times

and then it was right above us

...