Mike in the Wild

Swimming for hours with your face sealed in a snorkel mask and your feet paddling rubber fins may seem like one third of an arduous triathlon for most people.  But for me, with my inexpensive underwater digital camera attached at the wrist and snapping non-stop shots of a cornucopia of underwater life, it's a dream vacation.  And Tunnels Beach in Kauai might be the closest it comes to heaven for that kind of snorkeling on the Garden Island, if not in the whole state. Tunnels Beach is close to the end of the road on Kauai, where Route 560 or the Kuhio Highway, ends near the Na Pali Coast on the mountainous and scenic north shore of the island.   The beach is actually reached from Ha'ena State Park, where there is very limited parking but adequate facilities like a shower and restrooms, and more important, a lifeguard station.   However, they're all situated at an end of the beach where some lateral currents might be dangerous in certain conditions, ...

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.  Li...