You may think it’s curious, but at the moment no one can tell you which is the rarest bird in the world. Not precisely, anyway. A decade ago, there was no doubt – it was the po’ouli, one of a family of small songbirds on Hawaii known as honeycreepers. Only discovered in 1973, the po’ouli’s already tiny population went into a rapid decline after an invasion of its forest habitat by wild pigs. By 2004 there was only one po’ouli left, which was taken into captivity while a frantic and fruitless search went on for a mate; it died in November that year.
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