PAU

An elegy for a songbird native to the island of Kaua‘i—once common, now vanished.

Explaining that the title is the Hawaiian word for “finished” or “all done,” Piedra and Joy retrace the history of a small bird whose song “filled the Island” for hundreds of thousands of years. A first wave of Polynesian settlers, followed by others, along with invasive species and diseases after Captain James Cook’s visit in 1778, forced a retreat into steadily vanishing forests and a decline in numbers until, after years of fruitless searches, the bird was officially declared extinct in 2021. In the illustrations, native species of several sorts (keyed by a labeled gallery at the end) pose in lush, misty tropical settings that give way to cultivated fields and then settled towns as a racially diverse population of human figures grows. Succinct verse, tinged with melancholy, brings the tale to a somber close: “One ‘ō‘ō left on the Island. / One ‘ō‘ō left in the world, still singing.” According to the closing timeline, an ‘ō‘ō was last seen in 1985 and last heard in 1987; thanks to a QR code in the backmatter, readers can hear the ‘ō‘ō’s liquid song…if only in a field recording.

A terse, poignant, richly illustrated, all-too-common story.