Mike in the Wild

When I came face to face with my first moray almost thirty years ago in Honolua Bay on Maui, I was terrified.  I was snorkeling in shallow water close to the rocky shore when the animal appeared to lunge at me.  Of course it didn't.  Instead, it was most likely nestled in a rocky crevice with mouth agape as it breathed in water and waited for small fish prey.  I was new to snorkeling, meeting the vast underwater world for the first time, and just the word moray eel was menacing to me.   Today I'm much more comfortable around these members of the eel family.   Hawaii is home to almost forty species of morays, the whitemouth being the most common.  In fact on my recent trip to Maui, I saw at least five different specimens of the whitemouth moray at five different sites.  An especially fat individual was even one of the last fishes I observed off Napili Beach on the last snorkeling foray of my vacation.   Over the course of the week, I also encountered at least one zebra, one undu

As if I needed another Siren's call to lure me back to Maui, I discovered a spotted eagle ray off of Maluaka Beach.  I had never seen one on any of my frequent trips to the island where, until my late morning stop at Maluaka the day before flying home to Phoenix, I always considered turtles, moray eels, and the occasional barracuda as my most thrilling finds.  My brother-in-law was visiting Maui at the same time and had just told me about the time he and my sister-in-law had swam with several a few hundred feet off of their time-share's beach in Kaanapali.  It had been a one-time encounter in the more than twenty years that the couple have been regular visitors to the island. Just before my own encounter, I had snorkeled for the second time in two days at Ahihi-Kinau Natural Area Reserve in South Maui.   The 807 acres of protected ocean off shore from a stark volcanic landscape is closed to motorized boating and to fishing because, as the signs say, "Wildlife Comes First.&

As the one year anniversary approached since I discovered a bat cave in my Phoenix neighborhood, I was keen to visit the site again.   Early June was uncharacteristically pleasant, barely reaching the one hundred degree mark during the day.  So it wasn't a difficult decision to head to the site, near 40th Street along the Arizona Canal, to watch Mexican free-tailed bats swarm out at sunset.   Last year, the summer migrants departed their daytime roost in the thousands, in an endless undulating cloud that lasted close to an hour.  It was late June, and the numbers could have included some new fledglings from nests hidden in the long floodwater tunnel.  That's at least one possible reason why the bats departing the cave were only a trickle, maybe not even in the hundreds on the early June evening I recently visited the site.   There weren't enough bats or sunlight to catch any pictures of the creatures except for one of a lone individual that preceded most of the others by ar