To a human, Laysan Island is one of the most isolated locations on the planet. The tiny atoll, measuring only a mile square, barely peeks above the vast Pacific Ocean. The island is about 2,800 miles from Japan and 2,900 miles from California, with precious little in between. Kauai is the closest inhabited island, and to get there you’d have to cross 800 miles of open ocean.
Laysan was born 18 million years ago when a hotspot in the Pacific Plate sent a volcano surging two miles upwards from the ocean floor. The hotspot continued to send up volcanic islands as it drifted east, building the Hawaiian archipelago as it went. The long-dormant Laysan has weathered into a mere nub after millions of years of erosion; the big island of Hawai’i is just 400,000 years old and still growing.
While the island might seem like a speck lost in the ocean to a human, there are one million seabirds who return there to breed year after year without trouble. To all fit, they live on top of each other. Giant albatrosses nest on the sandy ground, while shearwaters dig their burrows underneath. Above their heads, frigatebirds and boobies make their nests in scraggly bushes, a situation that early naturalists compared to a four-story tenement.
Flittering around this packed avian metropolis were five species of land birds that existed nowhere else in the world. There was the Laysan Duck, a mallard-like bird well on its way to losing its ability to fly; the Laysan Honeycreeper, a strawberry-red songbird with a long, curved bill; the chunky Laysan Finch with its even chunkier beak; the drab but friendly Laysan Millerbird; and most delightfully, the tiny Laysan Rail.
For thousands, maybe millions of years, these birds made Laysan their home, and in turn Laysan molded them into new species. With no memory of predators, they reacted with curiosity or indifference to the first humans they met, although fear might have served them better. With no sense for self-preservation and nowhere else to go, Laysan’s birds were unprepared for the arrival of Max Schlemmer.
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When the French army poured into Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, Max Schlemmer was just fifteen years old. Rather than risk French occupation with his German family as the Franco-Prussian war intensified, Max saw in this catastrophe an opportunity to seize the life he’d always dreamed of. He found passage on a ship to New York City, never to return home.
But life in New York was not easy for a teenager who spoke no English. After less than a year in the city, tired of being roughed up by the streets and buffeted from one bad job to another, an advertisement for work on a whaling ship caught his attention. Signing up for an adventure on the high seas instead turned into fourteen brutal, perilous, and exhausting years slaughtering whales in the Pacific, receiving little pay and even less respect. By 1885, Schlemmer had had enough of that life. While his whaling ship was docked in Mexico, Max stole away in a stolen skiff, which he traded to another ship’s captain for passage to Hawaii.1
Things started looking up for Max once he found work on a sugar plantation owned by a fellow German immigrant on Kauai. Max married that man’s daughter (when she died he married her sixteen-year-old sister and had seventeen children between them) and spent the next several years developing an expertise building the mule-drawn rail tracks used to haul sugarcane off the plantations. This work took him throughout the Hawaiian islands, and eventually brought him to the attention of the North Pacific Phosphate and Fertilizer Company. They offered to make him foreman of their guano mine on Laysan.
It wasn’t until 1913 that scientists would develop an artificial process for creating fertilizer. Until then, the best way for farmers to increase their yields was mixing guano from seabirds into their soil. Albatrosses, frigatebirds, and boobies are incredible machines for sucking up nutrients from the ocean’s fish and depositing them as nitrates and phosphates in concentrated form where they made their nests.
On Laysan, the North Pacific Phosphate and Fertilizer Company’s operation for mining guano amounted to a few shacks, a rail track to drag guano to the dock, and a few dozen laborers to hack the ossified excrement using pick and shovel. In 1891, the company shipped 1,017 tons of guano to Europe, and 200 tons each to Hawaii and California, at the rate of fifty dollars per ton.2
In 1893, the same year that American businessmen staged a coup against the Hawaiian monarchy, welcoming American military intervention and ending Hawaiian self-rule, Schlemmer moved with his young family to Laysan Island.
Life on Laysan was harsh and lonely, but Schlemmer, his family, and his scores of Hawaiian and Japanese guano miners made the best of it. Max planted a vegetable garden and imported a small menagerie of animals to support the colonial venture. He brought mules to draw the guano carts and several cows for their milk. He released pigs to roam the island, which he’d slaughter periodically for their meat. He also brought over guinea pigs and rabbits, which provided food for the laborers and entertainment for the kids.
Just as Laysan’s birds nourished far-off plants with their guano, they nourished the guano miners with their eggs, and both were transported from the nesting colonies back to camp in the same carts. Schlemmer described how they only needed to harvest eggs every few months, since in three hours’ labor they could gather six thousand eggs. The miners rarely ate the albatrosses and shearwaters, but their bodies still had a purpose. Schlemmer periodically harvested the birds, chopped up their meat, and fed them to the hogs, ducks, and chickens.3
Over the next ten years, Max Schlemmer became increasingly attached to his island domain, so much so that he began styling himself the “King of Laysan Island.” As one newspaper reported, “His subjects number but 100, and they are all under his supervision and his pay as his laborers in the guano deposits. They are all coolies from the Orient. There is not a single white person on [Laysan] aside from the Gov. and his family. Schlemmer is now a rich man, although no one would ever know it from his appearance, talk, or demeanor.”4
But by 1904 the island was no longer turning a profit for the North Pacific Phosphate and Fertilizer Company. They made their initial investment in Laysan estimating that it held 85,000 tons of guano, but the mines began running out after they’d extracted only half that amount.5 To make matters worse, a few boats had sunk with hundreds of tons of guano aboard. Infighting eventually broke the company up, but Max was not ready to abandon his island kingdom. He bought out the company’s infrastructure and mining rights and set out to squeeze a profit from the island on his own.
Max had much grander ambitions for the island than running it as a small-scale guano mine. Schlemmer wrote to Hawaii’s territorial governor to request a ninety-nine year lease to the island. His presence was necessary to protect the colony of nesting birds from poachers, he argued, since “owing to the depredations of the Japanese, the birds are becoming scarce; and in a few years’ time, unless protected, will be entirely driven away.” But he immediately gave away his true motivations. “I will agree to protect the birds,” wrote Schlemmer, “but ask for the privilege of killing annually [22,000 birds]; the skins of the birds to be turned over to the Territorial Government for sale.” Hawaii would keep ten percent of the proceeds; Schlemmer would pocket the rest.6
The hypocrisy of this request was just as baffling as it was galling, and the governor responded accordingly. “I am at a loss to know how many birds it would probably be safe to kill without affecting their numbers… One suggestion you make, it seems to me, is not at all practicable – that the Territorial Government go into the question of the sale of birds. The policy of the Territory should be, I believe, to keep out of this business.”7
Feather poachers were indeed raiding Hawaii’s uninhabited leeward islands to supply the global trade in feathers used for women’s hats, and conservationists raised the alarm. In response to their concerns, President Roosevelt issued an executive order on February 3, 1909 to designate the archipelago as the Hawaiian Islands Bird Reservation.
Max Schlemmer was also concerned about poaching, but his greatest worry was that he was not getting a cut of the profits. Feathers were so lucrative that they made guano money seem like a pittance. Schlemmer heard of one Japanese captain who made $65,000 in a single season from selling 157,000 bird skins. And so, Schlemmer signed a contract in Tokyo on December 22, 1908, where he granted a Japanese company rights to extract “phosphate, guano, and products of whatever nature in and from the island of Laysan” for fifteen years. In exchange, Schlemmer would be paid $150 per month in rent.8
By this point, Schlemmer had spent years negotiating a lease of the island from the territorial government of Hawaii. Six weeks after he signed the contract in Tokyo, the lease finally went through. As part of the terms, he was required to protect the island’s birds from being captured or destroyed. Max was now caught between two contracts, but by April, 1909, feather harvesting was fully underway. That month, poachers harvested two thousand pounds of feathers and 128,000 wings, worth an incredible $131,000, or $4.6 million today. And Max looked the other way.9
However remote Laysan may have been, word still got out that feather raiders were poaching on Laysan. In response to these rumors, the U.S. Navy sent the revenue cutter USS Thetis under the command of W. V. E. Jacobs to investigate. When they finally reached the island on January 16, 1910, they found a horrifying scene of slaughter, which Jacobs described in his official report:
“One building was full of the breast feathers of birds in bulk, another was two-thirds full of loose bird wings… On the sand adjacent to the buildings were about two hundred mats held down with rocks, under which were laid out masses of birds’ wings in various stages of curing. Stretched along the beach and over the island were bodies of dead birds in large numbers from which emanated obnoxious odors.”
Jacobs arrested twenty-three poachers and seized bales and bags of feathers weighing more than a ton, in addition to more than 119,000 bird wings. Schlemmer was in Honolulu at the time of the raid, but was indicted for illegal poaching as soon as the Thetis returned. While he escaped the charges on a technicality, the court barred him from returning to the island.10
It wasn’t until the following year, when a scientific expedition arrived at Laysan, that the full scale of the destruction became clear. “Our first impression of Laysan was that the poachers had stripped the place of bird life,” wrote the University of Iowa professor Homer Dill. “The poachers killed these helpless creatures with clubs and threw the wings and feathers into the cars, heaping the bodies up along the sides of the track as they worked, and used the cars to carry the spoils to the sheds.” William Bryan, of the College of Hawaii, wrote that where the ground was once densely packed with birds, now “not a single bird remains, while heaps of the slain lie as mute testimony of the awful slaughter of these beautiful, harmless, and without doubt beneficial inhabitants of the high seas.”11
Altogether, the poachers had killed more than 300,000 birds, not counting the chicks that had been orphaned by the slaughter of their parents. The poachers had evidently been working their way through the nesting colony from near to far, and had not yet harvested the defenselessly sedentary birds furthest from the abandoned guano sheds. If they hadn’t been interrupted, concluded Professor Dill, the poachers “would probably have exterminated the entire colony of birds on this island.”12
All the same, Dill had reason for optimism. If they could be protected from further disturbance, he expected that “the birds will in time repair this loss and continue to live as they have for thousands of years before civilized man intruded on their beautiful avian world.”13
While the poaching was stopped for the moment, the island was too remote from federal oversight, and its inhabitants too tempting to be left alone. Poachers again visited the island in 1915, killing nearly as many birds as in 1909. As devastating as these attacks were, they were never so destructive that the seabirds were entirely purged from Laysan. Once the poaching finally ended, the birds were able to begin a slow recovery.
Yet all this time, an even greater threat was brewing. The rabbits that Schlemmer brought to Laysan in 1903 had been kept in check as long as Max and the guano miners were around to harvest them for their meat. But when Max left the island in 1909, the bunny population exploded.
By the time the zoologists visited in 1911, the entire island was crawling with rabbits. Homer Dill wrote about seeing so many rabbit ears poking out of the grass “that they resemble a vegetable garden.” While they hadn’t yet stripped the island bare, the scientists recognized that they would do so soon unless every last rabbit was exterminated.
Professor William Bryan explained that “all the small species peculiar to the island, except possibly the Laysan teal, depend entirely upon the vegetation on the island for their food supply. The uninterrupted and astonishing increase in the numbers of rabbits and guinea pigs can have but one result if allowed to continue unchecked.” Laysan finches, millerbirds, honey eaters, and rails were “doomed to extermination on the island on which they have maintained themselves long enough to develop into distinct species, unless something is done to preserve for them the source of their food supply.”
The government, however, did not respond with the urgency that the situation required. In 1915, William T. Hornaday, the director of the New York Zoological Society wrote to the Biological Survey that
“We all agree that it would be a mighty good thing to have the rabbits exterminated but knowing Departmental resources as I do, I have no idea that it would be possible for the Department of Agriculture, or for that matter any other department to find $4,000 that could be made available …If Max Schlemmer could be exterminated at the same time, it would make the elimination of the pests of Laysan Island quite complete.”14
It was not until 1923 that the Bureau of Biological Survey would send an expedition to remove rabbits from the island, and by that point it was too late. When the biologists reached Laysan aboard the USS Tanager, they found it reduced to a barren wasteland. Alexander Wetmore wrote in National Geographic that “The desolateness of the scene was so depressing that unconsciously we talked in undertones.” Hordes of rabbits had eaten nearly every shrub and blade of grass, and then starvation reduced their numbers to a few hundred. Any sprout that breached the sandy soil was cropped by hungry rabbit teeth. Using shotguns and poisoned alfalfa, the expedition soon killed every rabbit that remained.15
The seabirds who relied on the ocean for their food were not too badly affected. But for the land birds unique to Laysan, the worst-case predictions made by professors Dill and Bryan in 1911 had come true. The population of hearty Laysan Finches was reduced to several dozen birds hanging around the abandoned sheds. Laysan Ducks, once numbering in the hundreds, were winnowed to a population of twenty. Only two Laysan Rails remained, and the Laysan Millerbird had vanished entirely. Wetmore’s expedition arrived just in time to watch the Laysan Honeyeaters go extinct. When they combed the now-barren island for the bright-red birds, they could find only three, managing to record one of them lifting its head in song. A severe gale blew over the island a few days later, and once the wind died down the honeyeaters were gone.
Once the poachers were banished and rabbits exterminated, the island began putting its pieces back together. By 1987, the Fish and Wildlife Service could report that “Laysan is re-vegetated, the duck population is about 1,000, there may be as many as 10,000 finches on the island, and the seabird population is estimated at about 500,000. The resilience of the animals and plants which survived is remarkable. But the animal and plant species which disappeared are gone forever from the earth.”16
Yet Laysan’s endemic birds remained incredibly vulnerable, a point driven home by a 1993 drought that brought the population of Laysan Ducks crashing back down to one hundred. So the Fish and Wildlife Service decided to take out an insurance policy. In 2004, once the duck’s numbers had somewhat recovered, they transported forty-two birds from Laysan to Midway Atoll, which quickly grew to three hundred. Ten years later, they moved another twenty-four to Kure Atoll and successfully established a third population.
The same year that the Tanager expedition confirmed that Laysan’s millerbirds had gone extinct, scientists visiting Nihua Island 650 miles away discovered in a remarkable coincidence that Nihua too was home to millerbirds, which they determined to be a different subspecies from Laysan. In 2011, the American Bird Conservancy transported fifty precious millerbirds from Nihua to Laysan, both establishing a reserve population and restoring a piece of Laysan’s native ecosystem that had been absent for eighty-eight years. The reintroduction has proven spectacularly successful. As of 2024, Laysan was home to 600 millerbirds, while Nihoa’s population had grown to 1,200.17
Max Schlemmer makes an easy villain for this story. It’s rare, after all, that one man singlehandedly drives two species of birds extinct. But the factors that destroyed the Laysan Honeyeater and the Laysan Rail are not unique to this story. The hunger to wring every dollar out of unexploited land on one hand, and government inaction in the face of urgent environmental catastrophes on the other, still threaten wildlife today. It’s up to concerned citizens to hold capital and government accountable to preserve the wildlife that remains.
- Unger, Tom. “Max Schlemmer, Hawaii’s King of Laysan Island.” New York: iUniverse, Inc. 2003. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Unger, Tom. “Max Schlemmer, Hawaii’s King of Laysan Island.” New York: iUniverse, Inc. 2003; Rauzon, Mark. “The Diaries of Max Schlemmer from Laysan Island 1905-1907.” ‘Elepaio vol. 70, no. 4. May 2010. ↩︎
- Unger, Tom. “Max Schlemmer, Hawaii’s King of Laysan Island.” New York: iUniverse, Inc. 2003. ↩︎
- Hawaii reports, vol. 16: Cases determined in the Supreme Court of the Territory of Hawaii. Honolulu: The Bulletin Publishing Co., 1905, p. 552. ↩︎
- “This Year’s Work.” Bird-Lore, Vol. 7, No. 1. February, 1905; Unger, Tom. “Max Schlemmer, Hawaii’s King of Laysan Island.” New York: iUniverse, Inc. 2003. ↩︎
- “This Year’s Work.” Bird-Lore, Vol. 7, No. 1. February, 1905. ↩︎
- Unger, Tom. “Max Schlemmer, Hawaii’s King of Laysan Island.” New York: iUniverse, Inc. 2003. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Rauzon, Mark J.. Isles of Refuge: Wildlife and History of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Germany: University of Hawaii Press, 2000, p. 108. ↩︎
- Dill, Homer, and Bryan, William Alanson. “Report of an Expedition to Laysan Island in 1911.” U. S. Department of Agriculture. Biological Survey Bulletin No. 42. May 21, 1912. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Rauzon, Mark. “The Diaries of Max Schlemmer from Laysan Island 1905-1907.” ‘Elepaio vol. 70, no. 4. May 2010. ↩︎
- Wetmore, Alexander. “Bird Life Among Lava Rock and Coral Sand.” National Geographic vol. 48, no. 1. July, 1925, p. 77-103. ↩︎
- Restoring America’s Wildlife, 1937-1987: The First 50 Years of the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration (Pittman-Robertson) Act. United States: U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, 1987. ↩︎
- Wallace, George, and Farmer, Chris. “Return of the Millerbird.” American Bird Conservancy, June 26, 2024. https://abcbirds.org/return-of-the-millerbird/ ↩︎