We went to the island of Hawaii in February to the Big Island of Hawaii and to Maui. While I didn’t get to log as many birds as I would have liked to, I did get to list some new life birds.
I never thought I’d get excited about seeing a goose as I did when I saw the Nene Goose, or Hawaiian Goose, which is Hawaii’s state bird. We saw a few throughout the island, but the first one we saw was in the rural hills just outside of Hilo where we stayed.
On our first day, we were in Kona, and I logged five life birds: Zebra Doves, a Yellow Billed Cardinal, a Saffron Finch, Common Mynas, and a Nene Goose.
I also saw Pacific Golden Plovers and Common Waxbills, which were life birds for me, and the only other life bird I recorded was a Hawaiian Stilt on Maui.
The most frequent bird I saw was the Common Myna – they were everywhere, and there were birds I could not identify, and if I would have had more time, I eventually would have.
I also saw House Sparrows, Cattle Egrets, and Black Crowned Night Herons. I want to go back to the islands because there was so much I did not see in the time we were there.
While there, we also saw birds we didn’t expect to see. I was disappointed in the main app I use to identify birds, iBird Pro, in that many of the birds we saw and had to identify were not listed as being in Hawaii. I was also disappointed in the Merlin Bird ID app since it could not identify birds by sound, even though I downloaded the packet for the Hawaiian Islands. It was worthless and could not identify anything, except for a Northern Cardinal, which I could identify on sight anyway. I had to resort to buying a local conventional field guide, which was extremely helpful.