I only discovered this on my recent trip to Hawaii, and I'm pretty sure most people have no idea, so I'm "sharing" :)
So, that modern phrase of an eerie silence before something sinister happens is in fact a derived term and it has a Hawaiian origin.
It comes from an endemic species of bird that lives there... The "i-iwi"
photo credit: the American Bird Conservancy... borrowed from the website:
https://animaloftheday.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/iiwi/Interesting related facts are that the iiwi is part of the Honey-Creeper family and is endemic to the Hawaiian islands and while it used to be common all over the islands, these days its confined to the temperate and very rugged highlands because tropical mosquitoes that carry some very nasty avian diseases cant live up there... and mosquitoes were only recently introduced to the islands by humans.
And the iiwi is part of a large group of endemic Hawaiian birds (about 50 in total) that are all descended from a single ancestor species; the Eurasian Rose Finch. Interestingly, studies suggest that the original pair of Rose Finches somehow managed to arrive on Hawaii about 5 million years ago, and from there have evolved into 50 new species that all exploit slightly different ecological niches in the varied climatic/vegetation regions of the islands... And that means that (in the simplest form of a geometric progression) that it took about 900,000 years to differentiate one species into two different ones... That seems like an excessively long time to me for an animal with a relatively short lifespan since Id have expected it to take only about 50-100 thousand years... So, that suggests that there may have either been lots of intermediate species that went extinct for their own reasons or that other factors have interfered and evolutionary processes have had some pretty long "stable" periods on the islands and there have been some occasional but very "disruptive events" that prompted the bursts of rapid evolution of the birds... Or, I could be completely wrong because I'm not an evolutionary scientist and don't really know what I'm talking about
... Just between you and me, I suspect its that last option :)
Rosefinch (Carpodacus erythrinus)... Image borrowed from Wikipedia.
Anyway, back to the main story line:
So, the iiwi lives happily on the islands for a few hundreds of thousands of years after its species has evolved there. Then along came the Polynesians who only managed to sail there canoes there for the first time about 800 years ago!... That's really really recently! (I bet most people don't know that!)
It was only about 550 years later that British navigator Captain James Cook arrived at the islands and made the first European contact with both the land and the people (in 1778 I believe).
But, in that 550 years, the Polynesians developed their own cultural peculiarities (though much of their culture is shared by many other Pacific islands including as far South as New Zealands Maoris)... And that phrase I mentioned at the start of this post "iiwi silence" is a tinny little piece of that Hawaiian heritage. You see, the newly arrived Polynesians set about doing what all humans do when they come across new places and new things... They named everything as seemed best to them, which is how the iiwi got its name, but they also utilized the natural resources however they saw fit too, and for the iiwi, that meant they used its bright red feathers as clothing/decoration in the form of beautiful feather cloaks for their royalty. A single cloak could have up to 250,000 feathers in it! Incidentally the New Zealand Maori have a very similar tradition with cloaks made out of Cassowary/Kiwi feathers and added Kakapo green feather highlights... The Hawaiians used the yellow feathers of the mamo bird as highlights (It was an extinct species but I think I read somewhere that it had been recently rediscovered in some remote Hawaiian local??).
... but I digress again...
So, anyway, the Hawaiians learned all about their new land and all about the plants and animals in it... and they learned about the iiwi... And it turns out that the iiwis tend to move around their habitat in groups of a dozen or more birds (I'm not sure if its an extended "family" or just a community), and that they have an interesting habit of defending themselves as a group too. It seems that when any of the group detect a threat of some sort, they communicate it to their group with a call, and then the whole group goes completely silent. (I think usually its the Hawaiian hawk or 'io since I don't think there are any endemic non-avian predators on the islands that have been there anywhere long enough to have co-evolved this behavior in the iiwis). And then they promptly attack the threat as a group too... Individually the little iiwi isn't much of a threat to the hawk (though it does make a tasty snack), but in a group they can fend off the threat, much as we all have seen crows doing to hawks and other threats.
Image of 'io (Buteo solitaries) borrowed from Wikipedia site.
So, anyway, the native Hawaiians noted this and to some extent seem to have adopted the strategy for their own defence against threats... Which of course are most usually other humans!
... And once Europeans discovered the islands and started interacting with the Hawaiians, as always happens, there was some "cultural appropriation" on both sides of the equation and we "Westerners" acquired the phrase in the English language... and after a bit of miss-hearing and passing on of the phrase between multiple people, it became the phrase we have today... Eerie Silence!
... and one last interesting anecdote is that Captain Cook himself seems to have fallen victim to the proverbial iiwi silence when he was speared to death by a group of angry native Hawaiians on a beach during a return visit in 1779... Some accounts of the incident suggest that there was in fact a short period of apparent silence and stillness from the group before they suddenly attacked the English captain and his men! ...
Things you didn't know :)
Cheers
Grant
...just to note that while there are many actual facts in this little tale, the main premise of the story is entirely fictitious... I made it up for fun :))
