This is bird note.

Avian malaria has devastated native Hawaiian birds called honey creepers,

and now climate change is allowing the mosquitoes that carry the disease

to spread into the last mountain refuges of highly endangered honey creepers

on the island of Kauai, says ecologist Lisa Calli Crampton.

They are naive to this disease, just the way we were naive to COVID

and it has had dramatic consequences for the honey creeper species

the way COVID has had dramatic consequences for human populations.

However, there's hope that a new tool could eradicate the disease.

Researchers are raising mosquitoes in the lab infected with wabakia,

a bacterium that makes them infertile.

When these males mate with wild female mosquitoes,

they fail to reproduce, says research ecologist Dennis Lapoint.

If you do this successfully over time, you can suppress the population.

But the infertile mosquitoes aren't ready just yet,

and getting them in place won't be easy.

So we are either going to be hiking these mosquitoes in

by hundreds of thousands and releasing them in the field

or we're going to have to develop aerial techniques for that release.

In the meantime, Calli and her colleagues are making a last-ditch effort

to keep these species alive and captivity.

And then when familiar is under control with the wabakia,

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