WAIMEA, Hawaii: Bird calls ricochet among the trees in a patch of native forest on Mauna Loa’s lower slopes, but the birds themselves are so evasive we sometimes spend minutes scanning the towering koa canopy to glimpse even a flicker of their small shadows.

Binoculars go up as a far-off silhouette wings closer and lands on a branch overhead. The bright red bird with a slender, curved bill, an i’iwi, matches the colouring of the pom-pom-shaped lehua blossoms whose nectar it sips. The i’iwi perches for less than a minute, then launches itself off the branch and flits away on black-edged wings.

Although i’iwi birds are common during winter, “today they are one of our target birds,” said our birding guide, Garry Dean.

Dean leads bird-watching groups on the Big Island for the Hawaii Forest and Trail tour group. He recognises a variety of Hawaiian bird calls and can identify a species by its characteristic movements – talents that come in handy when a bird is backlit by the sun or partially blocked by foliage.

Dozens of bird species once filled the formerly thick forests of the Hawaiian Islands before logging, cattle ranching and feral animals introduced in the last two centuries – such as European boars, sheep and goats – razed and uprooted most of the birds'’habitat.

But now 28 per cent of Hawaii’s 93 native bird species are extinct and another one-third are listed on the federal threatened and endangered species lists, according to figures released in 2000 by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Guided tours, while not cheap at $155 (e127), can help the novice birdwatcher search for these rare creatures, many of them fast-moving and others just a few inches high.

Our Rainforest and Dryforest Bird-watching Adventure tour begins at the western end of the serpentine Saddle Road, so named because it traverses the saddle between the massive volcanic peaks of Mauna Kea (white mountain) and Mauna Loa (long mountain).

Our first “target species”, Dean tells us, will be the pueo, or Hawaiian short-eared owl, found throughout the islands. The diurnal owl likes to sit on fence posts or the rocky outcrops of old cinder cones now domed and covered with tall grass.

“There’s one!” someone in the van yelps. Dean brakes and reverses to line us up with a pueo sitting on a fence post. Later we see another flapping in the distance, searching for rodents in the yellowed grass. I end up seeing 11 pueo over the course of the day. I was born and raised in Hawaii, but having spent most of my life in urban Honolulu, these are the first native owls I’ve seen.

We pass old cowboy housing and drive through the US military’s training site at Pohakuloa, spotting introduced game species of francolin (a type of partridge), wild turkey and pheasant.

The road crosses from Mauna Kea to Mauna Loa’s hardened old lava flows. A thick mist bears down on the jagged a’a and ropy pahoehoe, the two types of lava produced by Hawaii’s volcanoes.

We reach the trailhead that heads into a forest low on Mauna Loa’s northeastern slope. There, Dean hands out rain jackets, sweat-shirts, pre-ordered sandwiches and walking sticks. The trail, lined in sections with scraggly ohia lehua trees, leads over the lava field toward the oasis of native forest. Ferns and lichen, normally the first colonisers of cooled lava, grow in clumps where the trees thin out.

Our group picks its way across the cracked lava, stopping occasionally as we near the kipuka to examine bird specimens in distant trees.

As the shade of the koa trees closes over us, Dean, who also expounds upon geology, plants and Hawaiian lore, says we are entering a place traditionally known as the “wao akua” or “realm of the gods”.

We tramp through the forest. Browned sickle-shaped koa leaves (which are technically stems, Dean says) pad the trail.

Dean stops every few minutes to scan the trees.

I squint dutifully into the forest canopy, but see only a shadowy mat of koa and ohia blocking the sky.

But the quick eyes of Dean and tourist Meade Cadot, who leads bird treks in New Hampshire, pick out many native birds: the grayish oma'o, which feeds on berries; the brown elepaio, trimmed with black and white; the bright red i’iwi and like-hued, but shorter-beaked apapane, found often near lehua blossoms; the yellow and fairly common amakihi; and the endangered Hawaii creeper, one of the plumper forest birds.

Dean spots the endangered akiapola’au creeping along a branch. The yellow-green bird hammers away at the bark like a woodpecker but flies off before I can train my binoculars on it. Dean steers us off the trail in pursuit, hacking away at the introduced thorny blackberry bushes with his machete. The search ends with the decision to take our lunch break in a meadow pocked with lava rocks.

We drive next to Puu Laau, a dry upland forest on Mauna Kea, with stands of mamane, naio and sandalwood trees. Puu Laau is the only place to find the endangered palila, a yellow-headed, white-breasted bird that feeds on the mamane’s orange-yellow seeds. Dean’s tenacity pays off this time while tracking the palila. He leads us to a family of three – a male, a female and a juvenile. We even get to watch one wrest open a mamane seed pod.

There were no great photos or commemorative trinkets to take home. In fact, I only got one grainy photo of a pueo and cannot even remember what some of the birds looked like in the sights of my binoculars.

The one tangible reminder of our trek was a checklist of Big Island birds provided by the tour company.

The souvenir was small, but it gave me great satisfaction, and even a sense of closure, during the flight back to Honolulu to check off the boxes next to all the birds we had seen.