This is bird note.

The ala-la is a crow species that only lives on Hawaii.

In the 1990s, the species was on the verge of extinction.

So biologists decided to raise ala-la in captivity, aiming to release them once the captive population

was big enough.

The tricky thing, says Sarah Malik Walls, is teaching an ala-la how to be an ala-la.

So birds that have been raised in captivity are not exposed to the same stimuli as they are

in the wild.

Sarah is the research and recovery coordinator with the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project.

She and her team devised ways for captive ala-la to gain skills to survive in the wild.

There's a socialization process that we're using at the breeding centers where the birds

are put into juvenile flocks to try to develop proper communication skills and other things

that you would get that are kind of intangible from interacting with a cohort of your peers.

The project released about 30 of the crows in the wild a few years ago.

Unfortunately, many were lost to predation from hawks, but a few seemed to get the hang

of evading predators.

So the decision was to bring those five that still had some of that wilds bird knowledge

back into the breeding flock to be able to preserve that knowledge.

You're more about the ala-la recovery project on the Threatened Podcast.

Listen in your podcast app or at birdnote.org.

I'm Ari Daniel.