Mike in the Wild

When a tour tells you to expect some of the most spectacular scenery on Earth and up-close encounters with marine wildlife, all along accompanied by expert local guides, two meals and a mai tai bar, you have to wonder how are they going to guarantee all that in a five hour trip.  Well of course weather, seasons and luck are an important factor in any outdoor adventure, so nothing can be promised except for a bottle of rum.  But on the mid-September day I joined Kaui Sea Tours on their deluxe 60 foot catamaran, the Lucky Lady, out of Port Allen, I was destined to experience the thrills of a lifetime. Kaui is the oldest and in some ways the remotest of the main Hawaiian Islands because it lies so far west of the others.  Another distinction is that it was the first island to be settled by the ancient Polynesians.  It's also the wettest of the islands, if not of all Earth's locations, where one spot gets over 460 inches of rain a year.  As a result, the verdant i...

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...

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...

One of the greatest pleasures of birding is bearing witness to the kaleidoscope of colors in the subjects: the iridescent amethyst of a Costa's hummingbird's gorget, the azure of a blue grosbeak's head and torso, the chartreuse of a green-tailed towhee's wing and tail feathers, and the all-encompassing scarlet of a summer tanager.   While enjoying this pastime in the idyllic outdoors of Arizona, you're bound to see an equally vibrant range of hues in the abundant wildflowers and butterflies that populate the landscape, and to a lesser and more subtle degree, in the reptile population. Lizards and snakes are usually best known for the intricate patterns in their scales of their skin, the most famous of which might be in the aptly named diamondback rattlesnake.  These designs are often unique enough to identify specific individuals.  However reptiles are also quite colorful, as seen in the red stripes of some king snakes and the pinkish orange of Gila monsters. ...

As a child in suburban New Jersey in the early seventies, summer fears were numerous: shark attacks down the shore, thunderstorms that kept you housebound for longer than an hour, and going to federal prison for killing a praying mantis.   In reality, shark attacks were almost unheard of until the blockbuster "Jaws" fed the rumor they were a regular occurrence, while our neighbor's wrap-around porch provided a safe and dry playground in inclement weather.   And the idea that the praying mantis was so endangered or such a valuable tool in the fight against agricultural pests was just an urban myth.  It seems that fact wasn't disproved the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, as I just discovered the information on Snopes.com, the well-regarded fact-checking website.  Praying mantises or mantids  show up at my Prescott home late every summer.  In fact. this past week exactly three individuals appear...

There may be no more entertaining way to see a wide variety of North American mammals up close than at Bearizona, northern Arizona's wildlife park.  Sprawling in a corner of the state's vast ponderosa pine tree forest, the site offers several ways to see many native animals like bobcats and black bears, along with several species of birds, through a drive-through safari, a meandering zoo, and scheduled performances starring its non-human residents.  Writing about my first visit initially tempts me to draw comparisons to a Disney cartoon as some of the critters are just so darn cute and approachable.  Isn't that black bear lazily sprawled in the dirt, with his outstretched leg resting on a tree trunk, Baloo from "Jungle Book?"  And that red fox in the zoo looks as adorable and happy as any of the frolicking canines in "The Fox and the Hound."  Are these animals going to cut loose and actually sing?  Well, almost.  I had to think of P. T. Barnum as w...

It's the surprises in birding that are often the most exciting: finding white pelicans wintering in Phoenix; snapping shots of rose-breasted grosbeaks as they make a quick stop in your yard during spring migration north; and, like I did this week, encountering a brand new bird, a roseate spoonbill, on  Watson Lake in Prescott, Arizona,  hundreds of miles from its normal range. Vagrants are not unusual in many species of birds. After all, they have the ability to fly, so they can often easily travel great distances if successful in finding food and the climate is agreeable.  But the spoonbill is a coastal bird, common in the United States along the Gulf of Mexico in Texas and Florida.  However the juvenile that showed up in central Arizona may have come from a closer location, somewhere along the Sea of Cortez or the western coast of Mexico where the bird is also a resident. Making the arduous journey inland and so far north may have been aided by summer monsoon s...