Mike in the Wild

I wasn't checked into my Maui hotel for more than five minutes before I noticed  a Pacific golden plover  inspecting the lawn in front of my room's lanai.   This long-distance migratory bird divides its time between arctic environments like Alaska, where it breeds, and tropical lands like Hawaii, where it just feeds.  It stood out in stark contrast with the many other birds populating the resort's tropical beachfront landscape: all of them, year-round transplants.  They were introduced during the past two centuries and fill the voids left by the native birds that started disappearing at the same time man settled the islands almost a thousand years ago. Plovers almost certainly began visiting the Hawaiian islands long before the first Polynesians discovered the archipelago.  While I saw one hunting for insects in my resort's manicured St. Augustine grass, it's just as likely to forage in nearby habitat that hasn't changed over the millenia, like al...

A long, long time ago, a number of finches found their way to several remote, bird-less and unpopulated islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  The archipelago's volcanic mountains contained tropical jungles with cascading waterfalls along with dry forests sloping to the coasts and beaches.  These stranded birds found plenty of nectar or seeds to sustain them and over millennia multiple new species of birds evolved from their descendants by adapting to the specific diets and habitats available on the different islands.  Later generations of the original finches became the large and diverse family of Hawaiian honeycreepers. With widely varying colors, bill shapes and sizes, the honeycreepers were especially prized by the first human settlers, the Polynesians, who landed on the islands almost a thousand years ago.  The rich reds, bright yellows and stark blacks of the birds' feathers were used to decorate the cloaks and adornments of the most important tribal le...