Endangered

Living on the edge is precarious. Our main activity today (day 3 on Hawai’i) was a 2 mile hike from about 6,000 feet up to 7,000 feet to find the Palila Forest Discovery Trail on the west slope of Mauna Kea. This trail was completed and opened last year among the diminishing mamane forest and we were there to look for the Palila, the last living example of a finch-billed honeycreeper endemic to Hawai’i. The Palila is categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as critically endangered and of high risk of extinction.

There is certainly a fine edge between life and death, but that edge is far more profound when it is between death and oblivion. Most deaths do not represent the end of a blood-line or of a gene-pool. I am not sure I quite grasped until today the enormity of the difference between death as continuity and the finality of oblivion. So it was with a certain awe that we waited on the trail for the appearance of the Palila, a reverence similar to that which we experienced when visiting one of the Monarch Butterfly sanctuaries in Mexico. (The photo above is not ours–but we wanted folks to know how beautiful the bird is!)

And after a long wait among the mamane trees we were graced with a very clear sighting. It was not the first sighting this day of a yellow bird; the Common Amakihis were all over the place. But the size and the clear demarcation of the yellow head from the wings and underside made the distinction obvious.

What made the siting even sweeter was that in the same mamane tree we spotted our first Iiwi (pronounced e-e-vee), dipping its incredible beak into the mamane’s yellow flowers. (Again, the photo is not ours!)

In the 3 days we have now been on Hawai’i, we have enjoyed snorkeling, as well as passing over the edge between the dry western side of the island and the wetter eastern side. We have picked our way over hard, black lava on a western beach, and hiked down a steep, lush valley slope just 30 miles away. The demarcation between wet and dry is incredibly obvious throughout.

We have really enjoyed our stay in Wimea with Kathy, our airbnb host. When she welcomed us, she showed us to our room. On the wall was a world map and she asked us to place pin on it where we were from. Since we do exactly the same with our international renters at home, we felt an immediate kinship. And to add another of God’s giggles (as one friend calls it) Kathy is a dual national–yes, you guessed it–she also holds a New Zealand passport!