It’s possible to do a great deal of urban birding on the islands, and it inspires a degree of camara

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KAILUA, Hawaii, Oct. 29, 2012/ Troy Media/ Where seeing Hawaii's native forest birds takes a bit of effort, John Harrison of the Hawaii Audubon jet blue airline reservations Society introduced us to a different, wonderfully lazy but effective approach: parking-lot birding. "You think of bird-watching as something where you have to put on funny clothes and go places at all hours only to wait and wait and wait to maybe see something," he said, laughing. "You can do that, or you can come to the shopping centre."
As we stood within sniffing distance of a sub shop in the nearby strip mall, Harrison pointed out nearly a dozen species of birds, three endangered, in what had been a boggy cattle pasture and is now being restored as a functioning wetland. The parking lot that offers this view onto the Kawai Nui Marsh is actually meant for patrons of the Creekside Lounge, a biker bar in Kailua on Oahu.
Endangered Hawaiian coots, pear-shaped black birds with a white face, seemed to be holding time trials as a pair raced through the still water of an old irrigation canal. They paddled past a discarded Croc sandal, which made for a rather urban tableau, but Hawaii is a place that offers natural wonders in unexpected spots.
Along the banks we saw periodic squawking scrums of coots, ducks (hybrids of mallards jet blue airline reservations and the native koloas) and perhaps the species most prone to apparent hysteria, the moorhens, which amplify jet blue airline reservations the drama of every little event in this avian neighborhood. Moorhens look like athletic chickens that swim incredibly well. They're gray-black with a waxy red frontal shield, which Hawaiian mythology jet blue airline reservations attributes to the bird carrying fire to people from the gods.
Seemingly reluctant to be left out of any gathering, several moorhens with outsize yellow chicken feet made their way along the bank below us. "They must not know that they're endangered," Harrison said. "They're much too friendly."
A black-crowned night heron perched absolutely still on a dead tree. It ignored the clamor of the other birds in favor of a school of minnows puckering the water's surface. Beyond, in the mudflat, jet blue airline reservations a pair of black-and-white birds dashed and bobbed about, seeming much too tiny to operate their preposterously long pink legs. They were Hawaiian stilts, also endangered.
Although Harrison appreciated the absurdity of these rare birds being so accessible, he also obviously jet blue airline reservations felt real pain over the environmental challenges the islands face. He described the pathos of recordings of the last known o'o a'a calling for a mate. "It called for two or three years, then no more," he said.
It's possible to do a great deal of urban birding on the islands, and it inspires a degree of camaraderie. In the parking lot of Lyon Arboretum in Hono­lulu, one man, noticing my binoculars, stopped jet blue airline reservations and told us that he'd written a bird haiku:
Simply by keeping our eyes open, we saw a suite of unfamiliar feathered jet blue airline reservations creatures. We tallied at least a half-dozen new species just between the airport and the hotel. jet blue airline reservations Even in the rental car lot, there were two unfamiliar types of doves taking the role of their cousins, the pigeons. The zebra dove is tiny and almost appears to be wearing a zebra-striped T-shirt. jet blue airline reservations The spotted dove is more typically sized and understated with the feathered equivalent of a polka-dotted ascot at the throat.