You are browsing the archives of Hawaii.

It’s that time of year when a young man’s thoughts turn to tropical seabirds like the Christmas Shearwater… wait, that doesn’t work! In fact, if you were looking for a bird that represented the spirit and traditions of Christmas, this elegant, compact and dark shearwater would hardly be the first thing that comes to mind. [...]

While I often tease Corey about how many albatrosses we have down here in New Zealand, the fact is that the United States has three species of Albatross that breed within its boundaries, albeit one of them only very rarely, and visit the western shores of North America. But the islands of Hawaii have two [...]

I’ve spoken before about the time I was lucky enough to work on Tern Island in French Frigate Shoals. Part of the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, it is an amazing place to take in the seabirds of the North Pacific. Last time I talked about the amazing Great Frigatebirds, today I’ll introduce the birds [...]

Last week I introduced the Great Frigatebird, one of five species of man-o-war bird. I got rather carried away showing all the plumages you can see around a breeding colony, which means I had to split my post on the species into two. Here I’ll finish off what I started, looking at the lives of [...]

I’ve always thought there is something prehistoric about frigatebirds, as something about their shape evokes in my mind the shape I imagine the later pterosaurs would cut in the late Cretaceous skies. This association belies the advanced and highly sophisticated adaptations the family has evolved for a life of wandering, hunting and, yes, piracy on [...]

The ‘alala is a matte-black crow endemic to Hawaii’s Big Island. This noisy, social, and exceedingly clever corvid, classified by Western ornithology as the Hawaiian Crow (Corvus hawaiiensis) was once plentiful throughout Hawaii’s upland `ohi`a or `ohi`a-koa forests, a constant companion to denizens as recently as the mid-20th century. Today the species teeters on the [...]