Avise's Birds of the World

Apapane
Himatione sanguinea

Native Range: Hawaiian islands

Notes: this family (Drepanididae) provides a famous example of an evolutionary adaptive radiation in an island archipelago; after an ancestral finch (fringillid) reached the Hawaiian islands from some mainland source, species began to proliferate in the archipelago as they became isolated and adapted to various ecological conditions on the different islands; eventually more than 50 species arose, although more than half of these later became extinct after humans colonized the islands; most of the remaining species are now threatened or endangered (mostly because of predation, habitat loss, and avian malaria that is spread by mosquito vectors that humans inadvertently introduced); this adaptive radiation produced a great variety of plumages and bill shapes in different honeycreeper species on the islands; today, most of the extant species are given their native Hawaiian common names, such as Apapane, which is one of the few extant species that remains quite common.