The White-tailed Tropicbird in Kauai

What strikes you most about the birds you initially see in Kauai and the other Hawaiian Islands is that there are so few native species. At the airport, along the coastal roads, and throughout your hotel's manicured landscape, you're going to immediately see myna birds, a type of starling from India that's filled some of the void left when many native birds died off from the mosquito-born diseases that reached the island with western visitors in the nineteenth century. And unique on the Garden Island, as Kauai is nicknamed, are the countless feral chickens noisily and aggressively begging for food. Of course the equally numerous cats make you wonder why it's not referred to as the Kat Island!

Nevertheless I was pleased to encounter one local sea-going bird within a day of arriving on Kauai. The white-tailed tropicbird has probably been visiting since before the original Polynesian settlers reached the Hawaiian archipelago almost a thousand years ago. Like many seabirds, it spends most of it's life at sea, preferring warmer tropical and subtropical open waters for feeding, while nesting on islands and coasts closer to the equator. Fortunately Kauai has many canyon walls that provide safe locations for the tropicbirds to birth and raise their young.

My first sighting was close to the end of Highway 560 on the picturesque northern side of the island, where I saw a number of the birds soaring close to the dung-spattered ledges on a cliff above Ha'ena State Park's parking lot. But later during my visit I'd see them in even more beautiful locations like in Waimea Canyon and along the Na Pali Coast. Called the koa‘e‘kea in Hawaiian, the bird was the perfect Aloha to my week-long adventure on Kauai.