The wild bunch: Ever since the nene’s reintroduction to Haleakala fifty years ago, a small band of people have worked tirelessly to help the bird survive. Here members of the park’s Endangered Wildlife Management Team and Feral Animal Management Team stand with a just-caught young nene; that’s Cathleen Bailey holding the bird and her husband Tim (with nene tattoos) standing next to her.

Miraculously, they didn’t—thanks to a few determined individuals. Halfway around the globe, British naturalist Sir Peter Scott had heard of the Hawaiian goose’s plight. Scott had a passion for studying and breeding rare waterfowl at his wetland preserve in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, and when a colleague of his named Charles Schwartz took a job managing game birds in Hawai‘i, Scott urged him to look after the nene. Schwartz did: In 1949 he helped establish a breeding program at Pohakuloa on the Big Island, with a mix of wild and captive birds.

The Hawai‘i-England connection proved fertile. Scott sent specialists to train the new nene caretakers, and Pohakuloa returned the favor by sending Scott a breeding pair of nene. Or so they thought until both geese, upon arrival at Slimbridge, laid eggs. A gander soon followed, and by 1951 the three geese—named Kamehameha, Emma and Ka‘iulani for Hawaiian ali‘i (royalty) —were nesting. Kamehameha proved himself highly valuable by producing forty-nine descendants over seventeen years.

After ten years both the Pohakuloa and Slimbridge breeding programs were stable enough to attempt releasing nene back into the wild. Biologists chose four sites on the Big Island and one on Maui: Haleakala National Park, which is how, on that June morning in 1962, thirty-five British-born birds found themselves in boxes carried by Carl Eldridge and his fellow scouts.

For the nene, recovering their native turf was a historic reversal of fortune. But the threats of the past hadn’t gone away. “Right off, a mongoose killed two birds,” remembers Eddie Andrade, a no-nonsense outdoorsman who was hired to shepherd Haleakala’s flock in 1968. It was Andrade who found the dead birds—the first wild goslings born in the park to captive-bred parents. In response he established a predator control program and installed fifty traps throughout the park. “I caught just about every rat, cat and mongoose in the crater, even some dogs,” he recalls. Owls weren’t above suspicion, either: Andrade suspected they preyed on downy goslings.

For thirty years Andrade supervised the release of hundreds of captive birds into the crater and guarded their wild offspring. “I used to spend more time in the crater than at home,” he says. “I would climb the highest pu‘u [volcanic hill] and look around for nene. I’d track them miles away from Paliku.” He retired fifteen years ago, in 1997, but his voice still softens when he talks about nene goslings, as if referring to his own offspring. “The little babies have a hard time following their mother and father through the tall grass,” he says. “If they don’t keep up, they’re gone.”