Black Mamo

The black mamo (Drepanis funerea), also known as the hoa, is an extinct species of bird once endemic to the island of Molokai; there is also subfossil evidence of it having lived on Maui. The last specimen was collected in 1907 by William Alanson Bryan. Tim Flannery quoted him as having written, "To my joy I found the mangled remains hanging in the tree in a thick bunch of leaves, six feet or more beyond where it had been sitting." Even if Bryan did not shoot the last black mamo, sightings stopped within a few years, and a large-scale search for this bird in 1936 found no specimens. Preserved specimens of the black mamo include the ones at Bremen, Boston, Honolulu, London and New York City.