The Wandering Tattler

This morning we awakened to blue, sunny skies. We drove west along the south coast of Kauai about 20 miles and then turned onto a road that climbed into the interior along the west wall of Waimea Canyon, Kauai’s “Grand Canyon.” As we drove upward and away from the coast we began to encounter fog and clouds. We stopped at several scenic overviews and were treated to intermittent views of dramatic scenery – steep green canyon walls, tall waterfalls, and here and there, a white-tailed tropicbird floating buoyantly throught the canyon. If you’ve ever witnessed the flight of a black-shouldered kite, you will have some sense of the aesthetics of the tropicbird. Tropicbirds, however, have long streamer-like tails and live in some of the world’s most dramatic scenery – tropical cliffs, canyons, and volcanos near an ocean. I managed to snap a quick picture of a distant tropicbird as it passed below us in the canyon (see accompanying images).

Mostly, however, we saw thickening fog and had to strain to discern the edges of jagged escarpments and ghostly ohio trees through the mist. We drove onward to Koke’e State Park, the place where one is most likely to encounter several of the endemic Hawaiian honeycreepers (closely related but wildly divergent and very colorful forest birds). We parked at the end of the road and began to walk down a trail along which we were virtually guaranteed to sight these remarkable birds. As we walked, the fog thickened and soon we were walking in a steady rain. We couldn’t see anything through our binoculars, as their lenses were covered with drops of water. We put on our raingear, but after 20 minutes we realized the downpour was not abating, and even though we could hear the songs of abundant birdlife and might have been only a few meters away from an I’iwi or an Elapaio, we had to give up the quest and return to our car. As we drove back down the canyon toward the coast, all the scenic overlooks where we’d caught glimpses of the canyon were now completed obscured by clouds and rain, and so we realized we’d seen all we could of one of Kauai’s most celebrated landscapes and had not seen any of its vanishing birds (other than the most common honeycreeper, the Apapene). We did see an Erckel's Francolin, a partridge-like bird from Ethiopia that has thrived in Kauai since it was introduced many years ago. It's quite different in appearance from the Gray's Francolin we saw in Mauna Lani on the Big Island. And in Kauai, as in all parts of rural Hawaii, the Red Jungle Fowl roams parks and roadsides. It is the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken, and one of the most obvious differences is that its chicks are mottled brown, not yellow.

As we approached sea level, the skies cleared and we encountered brilliant sunshine. It remained clear and sunny all day today along the coast. Still, a backward glance showed that the canyon was still filled with rainclouds. We returned to Poipu and spent some time on the beach and a site where we watched a humpback whale spouting and swimming parallel to the shore, about a half-mile out to sea.

Tomorrow we’ll try to see Kauai’s most famous scenery – the Na Pali coast on the island’s northwest shore. We’ll catch a catamarin out of a nearby port and spend 5 hours cruising the coastline. It’s the only way (other than by helicopter) to see these steep coastal mountains, since there are no roads on that side of the island. As I write this, at 10 pm, it has begun to rain steadily in Poipu (of course).