Nēnē.org - Protecting Hawaii's State Bird

Beta access

Kilo is in beta with members of the Nēnē Recovery Action Group (NRAG). NRAG members already manage these birds in the field, so they are the ones shaping the workflow before anything goes wider.

What Kilo does

Nēnē banding, sighting, injury, and mortality records have historically lived in separate spreadsheets, separate databases, and separate inboxes. When someone finds an injured banded bird, the band number often does not resolve to a full history without phone calls. Kilo pulls those records together so the bird's life history is on screen the moment the band is read.

What it does

Injury reporting from the field

Photo, GPS, and band number captured on the spot. The report reaches managers and rehabbers without waiting for someone to type it up back at the truck.

One record per bird

Each banded bird has a timeline. Sightings, injuries, treatments, releases. Whoever opens the record sees the same history.

Movement view

Sighting locations over time make altitudinal movement and habitat shifts visible without compiling a separate dataset.

Offline by default

Most nēnē habitat has bad cell service. The app records locally and syncs once signal returns, no fiddling required.

The problem this solves

Before Kilo, an injured banded bird could sit in a rehab facility while the band number got passed around through email, phone, and paper. The same bird's last GPS location might be in someone's notebook. Sightings logged by partner organizations rarely made it back to the managers responsible for that population. None of that is a failure of the people doing the work. It is a failure of the tooling.

Kilo replaces that with one record per bird, a shared map, and a reporting flow that works when you are standing in a pasture with a hurt nēnē in front of you.

Additional features

Feed of notable events

Surfaces birds that have not been seen in a while, large movements, location changes, and rehab releases without needing to dig through records.

Watchlist

Flag specific birds (rehab releases, breeding pairs, individuals of concern) and get notified when something happens to them.

Photo attachments

Multiple photos per sighting or injury record, cached locally so the report goes out fully when offline.

Role-based access

Managers, partners, contributors, and supporters each see what they need to see. Sensitive nest locations stay restricted.

Why this matters

Nēnē are conservation-reliant. Federal status moved from endangered to threatened in 2019, but state status remains endangered, and every island still depends on ongoing management. Maui has lost roughly half its population since 2017 for reasons that are still being investigated. Molokaʻi is functionally extirpated. Good record-keeping is part of how you catch a decline early.

Kilo is not the answer to those problems. It is a piece of infrastructure that lets managers and partners spend less time reconciling records and more time on the actual work.

Built for the field

Offline-first. Large buttons and high contrast for outdoor use. Short forms designed for one-handed phone use. Automatic GPS capture so you do not have to type coordinates while holding a bird.

Timestamps in Hawaiʻi Standard Time. Hawaiian place names. Sensitive records like nest locations and gosling counts sit behind role-based access.