HOW THE BIRDS CAME
Geologically the Hawaiian Islands are considered to be fairly young, probably no more than 20 million years old. The islands are also extremely isolated from any other land masses; it is more than 2,000 miles to the nearest continent. Before any resident birdlife could exist here, plants had to become established. Seeds arrived by various means from distant lands, and one by one new kinds of plants began to grow on the volcanoes—at first only a few primitive types could get a foothold on the barren lava, but in time those early plants decayed and combined with the basalt rock to produce a soil that could support a complex vegetation.