We recently returned from ten days on Kaua’i, and while we were primarily there for the diving, we also did some sightseeing, which included birding. Birds in Hawaii are a mix of pan-subtropicals, migrants, endemics, and introduced species. We didn’t do any hiking in the mountains so I didn’t see any of the really spectacular endemics like honeycreepers, who now live mostly in the high elevation woods, but even so, the birds I did see were pretty exotic to me. We stayed in Kekaha a block from the ocean and spent most days out on the dive boat so the birds I’m reporting here are coastal: mostly seabirds, other waterbirds, and a few “urban” birds.
First, a little background on Hawaiian birds. The islands emerged from the seafloor as volcanoes relatively recently (6 million years ago) and were of course utterly barren of life until colonized. Being tiny land masses in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, plants and animals had to accidentally arrive across many thousands of miles of water, blown by storms or drifting in currents, a very hit or miss process. Not many made it. However the upside to the isolation and extreme topography was lots of scope for speciation, even over such a short time, which is how the 56 species of honeycreepers evolved from one ancient species of Eurasian Rosefinches, a few individuals who probably ended up there during an irruption. Many birds evolved to fill niches occupied in other places by mammals and reptiles, since there were none of those in the Hawaiian islands until humans introduced them.
Numbers vary by source and definition, but of the roughly 110 endemic Hawaiian birds before human settlement, the hunting and agriculture of Polynesians (who arrived about 900 AD) drove about 35 extinct, some of them flightless, and with the next wave of settlers after Captain Cook’s visit in 1778, another 25 or so disappeared. Of the 42 or so currently extant endemics, 31 are federally listed, with 10 of those not been seen in decades. The extinction rate for native birds (and plants) is shockingly high in the Hawaiian islands, and all can be traced to human activity. There are efforts to stem future loss, from habitat restoration to exclusion of nonnative predators to the release of nonviable mosquitoes as a way to reduce avian diseases vectored by them. Strategies are being implemented to protect native non-endemic seabirds as well.
We visited several sites to see birds, specifically or incidentally. Here’s a map showing those sites:
Lehua island
We went across the 20-mile channel of open ocean from Kaua’i to dive a couple of sites between Lehua and Ni’ihau islands. While over there, we circumnavigated Lehua and got pretty good looks at the birds who live and nest there, though not necessarily very good photos since the water was a bit rough and the boat bouncy. Besides the birds pictured below we also saw shearwaters and tropicbirds. No albatrosses, since they fledged in July and have gone back to sea — they won’t return for the next nesting season until November.
Lehua is owned by the US Coast Guard and managed by Hawaii state Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) as a seabird nesting site, no public access allowed. Until just recently seabird nests were decimated by invasive rats and rabbits (yes, rabbits eat eggs, for the moisture). Decades of aggressive eradication efforts have finally eliminated those predators and seabirds are nesting again successfully. DLNR is working now to bring back terns and petrels to nest. Here’s a long but fascinating video about the rat eradication project (20 minutes):
Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge
These 200 acres were once a sugar plantation, then a lighthouse, and are now actively managed by US Fish and Wildlife to protect nesting seabirds. Only a small part of the Refuge is accessible to the public and tickets are required as a way to limit the number of visitors at any one time. Some people were turned away but we’d reserved a spot months before.
Across a pocket beach from the lighthouse is the stretch of 300-foot high cliffs surrounded by 11,000 feet of exclusion fencing to keep out egg predators. The fencing has to be constantly monitored to keep under repair. Last winter feral hogs got into a section and destroyed all the albatross nests there. Pigs were brought to the islands by the Polynesians for food, but it was the introduction of feral hogs by Western settlers that really created the problem. These animals were much larger, more aggressive, left to run wild, and between dominance and interbreeding, took over wilderness land in the islands. The state encourages licensed hunting in designated unpopulated areas, and a lot of locals hunt feral hogs for eating. Which makes a lot more sense to me than buying beef imported from California.
There’s a lookout at the entrance where you can watch soaring seabirds. For me, the tropicbirds, with their streaming tail feathers and swooping flights, were especially glorious. Very hard to catch in still photos. There’s White-tailed and Red-tailed tropicbirds, and despite their names, tail color isn’t the best way to distinguish them since 1) you can’t always see it well and 2) there’s variation within the population. Red-taileds are twice as big as White-taileds but good luck trying to tell size when they are on the wing!
White-tailed tropicbirds have black markings on their upper wings and back while Red-taileds do not.
The trick for ID is to see them from above or backlit enough to see through the wings.
See if you can tell which these are in the Kīlauea section of this 44 second video. The first 15 seconds of the video is boobies at Lehua, the rest is from the overlook at Kīlauea:
Great Frigatebirds were very common at Kīlauea too. Some were perched on an offshore rock:
but most were soaring effortlessly overhead. It was very windy. You can get a real crick in your neck watching the birds there.
Wedge-tailed shearwaters (Ardenna pacifica), known to native Hawaiians as ‘Ua‘u kani, were flying around too. Their flight is varied, from bat-like erratic swoops to shearing the waves.
These tubenose birds fly with stiff wings and use a "shearing" flight technique (flying very close to the water and seemingly cutting or "shearing" the tips of waves) to move across wave fronts with the minimum of active flight. (Wiki)
The shearwaters still have chicks in nests, mostly burrows on the hillside. However there were two in the bushes next to the visitor center. The staff had set up blockades to protect them from getting stepped on.
Napali coastline
From the boat during our dive days we saw a variety of these same seabirds — Wedge-tailed shearwaters, Noddies, Boobies, Frigatebirds, Tropicbirds — and on the trip around the island to the famous Napali coast we saw all of them. This 6000-acre northwest corner of Kauai is protected as Nā Pali Coast State Park. There’s no road along this stretch of coastline. You can’t land a boat on the shore unless it’s a kayak/paddleboard, and then only at two sites, and in summer. Is inaccessible (legally) by land except for limited backpacking permits and an 11-mile trail. Tourist helicopters fly over periodically. It’s a stunning site, with lush carved 4000-foot cliffs, waterfalls, rainbows — quite magical.
One minute video at the Napali coast, including a cave where shearwaters were flying through.
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(An endemic seen from the boat along the south coastline: we saw a Hawaiian owl once, a subspecies of Short-eared owl, cruising low over an agricultural field — so said the dive op professionals, who know a lot about birds, though to me all I can say is owl. The other owl in Hawaii, the introduced Barn owls, are a real menace to the fledglings of endangered birds. The Short-eared owls are so frequent at this particular spot on the south coast that the dive site nearby is called Pueo, the Hawaiian name for them)
Hanalei National Wildlife Refuge
Just inland from the coastline, wetlands become the draw for birds. On the north side of Kauai after visiting Kīlauea, we pulled over along the way to take a look at the Hanalei valley from above. This lush valley was first used by the Hawaiian people to grow taro, bananas, breadfruit and other crops brought by the Polynesians. Then in the 1800s, later settlers planted sugar cane and rice, and it was used as a cattle ranch into the 1900s. By the mid 20th c, as tourism heated up, the company that owned the valley was about to develop it into housing, hotels, golf courses etc, but it was saved at the last minute when the US Fish and Wildlife purchased 900 acres from the corporation, turning it into a National Refuge with the goal of protecting several threatened endemic bird species. The valley is currently cultivated under arrangement with the USFW.
The taro ponds are great habitat for waterfowl and shorebirds. The Refuge was currently closed to the public so to get good looks at the birds you need a serious scope up high there on the main road pullout. My camera was pretty hopeless for IDs at that distance but there was a local young man with a scope the size of the Hubble who was digiscoping birds from the overlook. I asked him who he was seeing and he mentioned Hawaiian ducks (aka koloa) as especially important, but said that unfortunately he was also seeing koloa x mallard hybrids. Apparently these hybrids are common on the other Hawaiian islands but have been less so on Kaua’i until recently. Since the hybrids are fertile and more vigorous than the pure Hawaiian ducks there’s a real concern the endemic ducks will become extinct. I asked him if he was reporting to eBird — “yes, you know about eBird?” — and I was able to find his checklist later by location, date and time. Judging from his many checklists, he’s a serious birder so I’m assuming he knew who he was IDing.
I took some photos at max zoom with my Canon SX70:
Kawai’ele Waterbird Sanctuary
This small wetland is part of a larger effort, the Mana Plain Wetland Restoration Project. The Mana Plain is a 2000-acre flatland on the southwest coast of Kauai, and was one of the largest natural wetlands in all the islands until it was drained for sugar cane plantations in the early 1900s. There are still agricultural fields on the plain, but some acreage is also owned by the US Defense Dept (used for the Pacific Missile Range Facility, Barking Sands) and some by the state of Hawaii. When the Kekaha Sugar Company ceased operations in the 1990s they gave up their lease and the state initiated plans to convert a couple hundred acres back into wetland as a way to protect threatened endemic birds. It’s been a long process, with a long way still to go.
The wetland ponds are constructed, and don’t look totally natural but it’s a start, and birds have enthusiastically taken up residence.
Hawaiian geese, aka nēnē, are fairly numerous at Kawai’ele, as you can see by who’s marching past the sign.
The ponds look like this. There are a couple of stilts foraging on the shore.
Nēnēs evolved from Canada geese, which either migrated from Canada to Hawaii or were blown off course some 3 million years ago. Over the years the Nēnē goose adapted to Hawaiian habitat and foods, losing much of their foot webbing, spending the majority of their time wandering around on land. Two other endemic geese descended from Canada geese are now extinct since they were flightless and easily hunted by early Polynesian settlers (along with flightless ducks and rails). Nēnē came very close to extinction themselves, with only about 30 remaining by the 1950s. Captive breeding programs, legal protection and restoration sites like Kīlauea and Kawai’ele have saved the nēnē, although there is concern about their genetic diversity.