Hakalau National Wildlife Refuge

What an amazing day. Definitely one of our favorites of the whole trip. We did so much that organizing these photos for this blog post took forever. I went ahead and made a few different photo albums, so people can just look at what interests them. We scheduled our big birding day for our second day on the island because we figured it would be the easiest day to wake up at 5 am. This was pretty smart because really we woke up at 4 am with no trouble and had plenty of leisure time before setting out.

This trip was a tour with Hawaii Forest and Trail, which we choose for several reasons, first of all as you can see from the sign there is no public access in the refuge, second you see way more birds with a guide, and third most rental car agencies frown on taking your car on the mountain road we drove on, yet Saddle Mountain Road as it is known is one of the more scenic on the island. It was totally worth the money. Our guide, John, was absolutely fabulous, our companions were equally enthusiastic about birds, and we saw nearly all the endemic Hawaiian birds. Best of all, I actually took this picture of the I'iwi below. I had one that was sort of my buddy and followed me around! You can see from my special I'iwi photo album, that I really got a lot of time hanging out with this bird. (Though please note, I do have a pretty good lens on my camera).

The I'iwi is one of the Hawaiian Honeycreepers and you can listen to the birdnote about them (and hear what they sound like) here. The I'iwi and other Hawaiian Honeycreepers dine on the Ohia blossom of the Lehua Tree, which of course, like most things in Hawaii, has a lovely romantic myth that explains why the blossom and tree name are different. The Lehua Tree only grows above 3000 feet and the I'iwi won't descend below 4000 feet in an effort to steer clear of mosquitoes, which really made going to see it all the more pleasant. Our guide John told us that the Lehua Tree grows at an extremely slow rate and the gigantic ones we saw were so tall that it really craned my neck to look at some of them. He believes that the Trees in Hakalau are "some of the oldest angiosperms on Earth." I had to look that up, it means flowering plants.

So we set off from Kona just after 6 am, and headed up Saddle Mountain Road, which truly was gorgeous, and made a quick stop at a golf course for birding (it really is amazing how many species of wildlife like to hang out on golf courses, when we were in Hilton Head there were Ibis and Alligators strolling the courses and Joe tells me he regularly saw monkeys on the courses in Malaysia). This golf course offered up quite a few beautiful birds including the endangered Hawaiian state bird, the Nene goose. See the golf course album here. Saddle Mountain Road was an interesting mix of pretty views, military outposts, and farms. The oddest thing for me was that this area is home to tons of wild farm animals. It kind of blew my mind really, since I have really only seen domesticated farm animals. Hawaii protects all its wild animals, so these can't be hunted or taken for food. We saw wild sheep, goats, cows, turkeys, and chickens. I know there are also feral pigs on the island as well, but they are damaging to bird populations so there are fences to keep them out of the area we were in. The most impressive of this whole bunch was a wild bull that we saw. He took one look at our van and seriously considered fighting it to keep his territory. I was kind of a bit scared! Nothing like the docile dairy cows I'm used to seeing! Our Saddle Mountain photo album is here.

Our second stop of the day was the Mauna Kea State Park, where we were able to have a snack, use the restroom, and meet up with another tour member. John took Charlie and I around to learn about some of the trees and tell us about how some of the birds have adapted to them. Plus we had white pineapple for the first time, wow that is good. The new tour member was Gerald from Austria. Charlie and I really liked him. He was on his third trip to Hawaii and only had one more Hawaiian bird left to see on his life list, so we were kind of setting out on the birder's equivalent of Everest to see that bird on the trip, which also meant we got a slightly longer tour. We arrived at the refuge around 9 am and set out on our hike. We started up high, and walked downhill for about two miles total, and then hiked back out. Though birding is a pretty slow moving activity, so it took us about 4-5 hours to do this hike, including a picnic lunch. We mostly stayed on a path, but also did some grassy side trips to visit specific trees. In the end we were incredibly successful, seeing nearly all the endemic birds including the one Gerald wanted to see. Our checklist for the day is below. When we got back to the van at the end of the day, John had ice cold towels to cool off with and lava cake for us to eat. So perfect. Plus he had us back in town in time for us to have our sunset dinner on the Lanai. Such a perfect day. Our Hakalau photo album is here.