I felt drawn to making a pithy statement about the symbolism of the leaves with their green and red, but sometimes you just need to let leaves be leaves.
Leave it alone
Tag: nature
An exploratory walk
Our first full day in Hawai’i on the Big Island, we woke to mostly cloudy skies–not surprising considering we were on the rainy side of the island and we’d arrived to Hilo Airport under a solid overcast. As is our wont, we spent our first morning lazily, eventually venturing forth to explore our near surroundings. Here, it meant taking a walk around the western half of Waiakea Peninsula. Our hotel sat on the northernmost tip of the peninsula, situated on pretty grounds, so we started there.
After touring the property, fencing forced us to the road in front of the hotel, Banyan Drive, so-called because 75-90 years ago a bunch of folks planted banyan trees to line it. Every time we drove in and out of the property we traveled Banyan Dr, making it one of the cool pieces of Hawai’i for me. Banyan trees are huge:
Our perambulations took us to a small park which culminated in Coconut Island, a spit of an island which took it in the teeth when a tsunami hit in 1960. (The somewhat famous Tsunami Clock is located nearby.) By now I had started cursing my brother who talked about the gloriously comfortable weather where humidity gets balanced by near-constant breezes. Our shirts were getting soaked. Temps were running close to 90 as the clock approached noon. As North Carolinians we’re very experienced with gray, overcast skies accompanying warm, humid conditions. We learned later this weather pattern wasn’t normal.
Our last stop consisted of wandering Lili’uokalani Gardens, a Japanese-style layout with plenty of Hawai’ian flora–at least I took it to be native. Who knows? Asking around later, I learned the park lies so low, so near Hilo Bay, that Waihonu Pond and other low-lying areas fill with extra water from the high tides. It prevented us from walking some of the paths.
On watch
While meeting with a representative from the company which recently installed a natural front yard for us, we watched a red-shouldered hawk sitting in our white oak tree. It sat there five minutes, flew a small circle through the neighbor’s trees, and returned for another ten minutes. Unlike my usual luck–it flew that circle just as I returned with my phone–after it returned, it remained there so long I grabbed a half dozen photos, finished with the landscape rep, ran downstairs for my 50x zoom, and captured another couple shots on that camera. I’ve yet to download it.
I get confused between Cooper’s and Red-shouldered hawks, but noted that Cooper’s don’t have the mottled white pattern on the wings that this one does. Also, all those skreeeee’s I hear aren’t Cooper’s, according to Audubon. If that’s the case, most hawks I see around our little copse of trees are Red-shouldered.
Fall, y’all
Like so many things in the American South, the arrival of autumn takes its own sweet time. I should say “fall” also because at two syllables, both of which have a “u” in them, it just seems a bit pretentious here. Our first inkling summer is nearing its end (besides a simple look at the calendar) occurs when “someone turns the humidity off” as a former boss of mine put it. (He was from Michigan.) Humidity levels build quickly in early June, and by mid-month your A/C chokes on the amount of water it’s removing from your indoor atmosphere. Around Labor Day a similarly rapid decline in humidity takes place. It seems even quicker than the ramp up because the lack of humidity means heat no longer lingers around all night, ready to leap into action at dawn. Instead of staying in the high 60’s and low 70’s suddenly one’s body registers temps that are downright cool at dawn. What follows seems like a coda to the summer, a time of 72-80 degree weather, mostly sunny weather, and dawn temperatures in the low 50’s.
For me fall can be said to be truly here when leaves start to turn color. Except for stressed trees and shrubs, this usually occurs around the second to third weekend in October. Even then it’s a slow, drawn out affair. This cluster of leaves seemed representative to me. We’re in the last week of October, and the trees reluctantly turn various colors dependent on species.
We arrived home Monday after a quick dash north for a wedding, when I realized, “Hey the dogwood is really turning color.” One of the first to herald spring with its blossoms, and one of the first to leaf out, it’s also one of the first to say, “Nope, gettin’ a mite too cold. Goodbye.”
And finally this photo to illustrate the sadness of invasive species. The Virginia creeper is native to central and eastern North America. It knows that it’s fall here. The English ivy isn’t native to North America at all. The latter will hang around nearly all winter, and in milder winters I believe I haven’t seen it turn colors at all. It chokes out most undergrowth if allowed, and it adds weight to trees if allowed to proliferate. It creates an eco-desert.
I encounter birds of Hawaii
I’m conflicted. I enjoy casual birding, and when I visit Hawai’i and can suddenly see many new birds, I should be thrilled. I did thrill to bright, different birds. Then I learned that virtually every bird I saw had been introduced to the islands in the past 150 years or so. It seemed none of the common ones (the birds hopping around parks and following the tourists around) could claim they were indigenous to any island in Hawaii. Still…they are quite different to commonly spotted birds where I live.
The Common Myna appeared everywhere on Hawaii and Maui. It’s native to Asia, but has spread so much it qualifies as “one of the world’s most invasive species,” according to the IUCN Species Survival Commission which listed it on its 100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Species (one of only three birds on it). When we first landed on the Big Island, and I heard this incessant chattering, I thought Starlings had made it to Hawai’i. It’s a noisy bird, and it looks a little bit like a Starling until you get close enough to see the yellow eye patch, the more brown body, and that it moves rapidly on the ground when it wants to.
The Saffron Finch comes from South America. It’s been on the Big Island (Hawaii) only since 1960. We only saw these in the Lili’uokalani Gardens and around our hotel, both of which are on a very small peninsula on the east edge of Hilo, Mokuako.
There are three common cardinals in Hawai’i, and none of them are native. One of them isn’t even a cardinal! We saw two: I photographed only the Yellow-billed but we also saw the Red-crested. They both originate in Brazil, but the former has a wider range into Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, and northern Argentina. Thankfully we didn’t see any Northern Cardinals. I see plenty of those at home, and it would have been very depressing. Because I have no photos of the Red-crested, I’m including one from Wikimedia Commons.
Photo By lwolfartist – https://www.flickr.com/photos/151817352@N04/53873018807/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=150656259
My biggest consternation regarding birds wasn’t the Northern Cardinal. It was the onslaught of House Sparrows which assail one in every open restaurant, marketplace, park, and you name it. The fearless critters even hopped into our room in Hilo on several occasions….
Though we saw plenty of spotted and zebra doves (both introduced from SE Asia), I failed to take a good photo of one. It remained until we traveled to Maui before I saw a bird endemic to the Hawaiian Islands…
Sifting my photos for birds proved beneficial when I tripped over one, and only one, photo of a different group of birds. The Chestnut Munia isn’t native to Hawai’i (of course), but it’s a pretty cool-looking bird nonetheless. In the photo below, the bird on the left is a classic, I’m-sure-it’s-a-Munia example. Moving left to right, birds #2 and #4 appear to be Munias but they’re not supposed to have breasts like that. (Males and females are supposed to look about the same.) Photos of immature birds don’t look like those two. Bird #3? I’ve no idea what that is, but I find it difficult to believe it would just hang out in this group without being one of them.
And in Maui I finally got a photo of one of these long-legged things which had bedeviled me on the Big Island. (Blurry photos? Sure, I’ve got ’em.) I don’t try to identify long-legged birds like this because they are so diverse and so similar. I don’t even know if this one is the same species as the ones which ran around on the rocky coasts of Hilo Bay.
I would be remiss not to include a photo like the one below. Chickens. Yes, chickens. They’re not exactly everywhere but they’re darn common running around many areas where you wouldn’t expect to see them. They apparently are “wild” in the sense they don’t go to a coop and get fed by humans. They hang around the cities and towns, though, so…what is “wild” anyway?
Maui Aquarium
Aloha
Leaf
I’d just as lief. Grammar on the ground. Who says “lief” isn’t a word? As boldly as being healthily red while sitting on a piece of pavement. Yes.
2 Weeks of “Shoulda”
For the past 35 years, well….pretty much for my whole adult life, I’ve tried to use a few words very consciously: can’t, had to/have to (and variants), and should have/shoulda. The last breaks down into me telling you that you should do or say something. More insidiously we say this to ourselves.
In that vein, I realized I’m again spending far too much time on reading things I think I should, and not enough on what I like. This occurred right after I subscribed to a newsletter from the New York Times which twice a week will highlight some songs that are pretty salient and should be listened to, a topic I really care about. Yes, I appreciate the irony. Instead I spend several hours making sure I’m on top of geo-politics, cultural developments, science and technology, and all sorts of sociological things like economics and psychology.
In the past couple weeks a few things happened, but I don’t even have photos to show for it because most aren’t fun and some are ideas, not physical things lending themselves to the snap of a shutter: an impending death in our family; a friend having serious surgery; discovering that a minor roof leak isn’t so minor after all and requires a complete re-roofing from the rafters on up; and learning today that quite possibly an incredible amount of our personal data may have been stolen because of some third party company I’ve never heard of but which inexplicably has our complete health records including diagnoses, our complete financial stuff like credit cards and account numbers, and oh yeah, our Social Security numbers. Apparently health insurance companies use this company to do what they can’t because they’re too busy counting my money.
Sigh. I shoulda just posted a photo…
How green was my…
Sticking with the ten years ago thing, I saw this photo. It’s unretouched (though cropped). It really is that green. McConnell Springs is the neatest little park, barely one square mile if I recall properly. European settlers were here, damming a spring to power a mill. The park sits on the edge of an industrial park hemmed in by railroad tracks on the other side with residential developments beyond that. Yet inside the densely forested park you feel a calmness as you’re transported back to another century.
all the voices in my head 