Old Crow

There are random days when the hours in the office run long (1). But when my wife takes one of her six or so trips back to Oregon each year to see the grandchildren, I don't have a lot of motivation to go home to an empty house, so will work until seven or eight in the evening while she is gone. The sights at night in the city are a lot different than a quiet evening in our neighborhood after I turn off the one boulevard that feeds the Annapolis Neck Peninsula. Even though it is Washington, D.C., big city, things are pretty quiet around the National Mall after normal work hours, especially in winter. The way the Whitten Building is lit at night gives it a bit of an eerie look - something like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. But as I walk east on Jefferson Avenue towards the Smithsonian Castle, and then turn onto the Mall towards the Metro entrance, the view north up 12th Street looks totally different - like a long canyon off in the distance, lit by street and traffic lights, people busy doing their after-hours living, silent, life that doesn't hold still.
______________________________________

The Washington D.C. Metro system is remarkable - you can go down into the ground, and then sometime later come up in some other place a long ways from where you were. I have only driven into downtown D.C. a handful of times in four years - why drive when you can ride anywhere all day for $7. The Metro is also amazing because people from all walks of life ride it together. It is the great mixer for society - suit-and-tie kinds like me, maintenance workers, college students with their text books, nervous-looking tourists worried they will miss their stop, government workers of all kinds and colors, loud kids riding to their high schools or returning with supervising teachers from a field trip, young moms with little ones in strollers, uniformed enlisted and officers from every service branch, and the occasional panhandler, evangelist, or homeless person sleeping in a corner seat. In the middle of the day you can catch a train just-in-time, or just miss the one you need and end up waiting 15 minutes for the next one and so for sure be late for your next appointment. You can also not pay attention to what you are doing, and hop on the wrong line and end up going where you didn't intend - but always count on eventually getting to where you want to be.
______________________________________

It was one of those latish evenings when I arrived at the Landover station (2) and emerged to a chorus of thousands and thousands of crows perched in the trees around the parking lot. I should have known something was awry when I first parked there in the morning - the parking lot was more white-wash colored than dark pavement - the white lines blurred by Jackson Pollock-like paint blotches randomly patterned over an asphalt canvas. Even now, more than a month later, the branches of trees which have not yet leafed look like birch - white arms tangled together, reaching to the sky.

It was a scene right out of Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds - potential for urban terror in the Maryland suburbs - a long ways from Bonita Bay on the northern California coast where nature ran amuck (3). The birds in the trees were squawking at the intruding commuters below. Every once in awhile a couple of dozen or so took flights briefly, and then either landed where they just were, or in other trees a short distance away. What were those cinematic evil-reputationed pluckers of Suzanne Pleshette's eyeballs going to do while I walked through the parking lot? I walked calmly to my car, and then slowly drove away to the exit gate and out onto the street, all the while looking into the rear view mirror - were Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren sitting in the back seat?
______________________________________

(1) One Friday afternoon, after I hung up the phone from talking with someone, the message waiting light was flashing - the Administrator of my agency wanted me to give him a call. The first thing he said when I returned the call was, "...don't you know you should never answer the phone after 2:00 on a Friday?" All of a sudden I had a briefing paper that needed to be written by COB - close of business - which means before going home.

(2) Parking at Metro stations is an art. I normally use New Carrollton Station, but if I am going to arrive after 8:00 AM, I know that it is unlikely that I will find a parking place in the eight story parking structure. From experience, I have learned to continue driving west on Route 50 to the East-West Highway exit and then on surface roads to the Landover Station where a parking spot is sure to be found. Alternatively, if arriving around 10:00 AM at any Metro station parking lot, you can park in the reserved spots that are held otherwise between 2:00 and 10:00 AM - it is amazing how many people don't read the fine print on those reserved parking signs and don't park there, even though they are fair game.

(3) I remember first seeing this movie as a kid on television - a creepy black and white story where natural peril lurks waiting around the corner of every scene. It is one of those movies that affects children for a lifetime because there is no resolution in the end, leaving you wondering even as an adult, waiting for the terror to begin all over again.

A New Eye for Detail

When my folks retired and moved off the farm to town five years ago, I acquired all of the color photographic slides my mom had taken since 1950. The intent was for me to scan them into a digital format and share them with the rest of the family. When we were young, once a year we would set up the old metallic-smelling projector and screen in the living room and have a family slide show - lots of family stories were locked into my memory at those times. Some time well before the move, my mom organized all of the slides that had been held in orange-colored Kodak slide boxes - twenty to a box - into carousel holders - an intermediate antiquated technology before digital. Just before Christmas, I sampled a half dozen or so slides from each of the 15 carousel trays to scan and load into a digital frame we were giving my folks as their gift - a 60 year swath of family memories. As I did so, I was struck by how much horses and the Sierra Nevada mountains were a part of my family - trips to places like Horse Coral, Funston Meadows, Roaring River, Painters Camp, Garfield Grove, Big Wet Meadow... Later, there were trips of my own - backpacking with a map in my pack to places like Mineral King, Hamilton Lake, Eagle Lake, Valhalla, Big Arroyo Canyon, Kaweah Gap, Sawtooth Pass, Kings Canyon... My dad could never figure out why I would walk rather than ride a horse - "at least take a mule with you to carry your pack." (1)
_________________________________________

My Dad loves horses and the mountains. I am sure he farmed because it was more profitable, but deep down, he was always a cowboy and a mountain man. In Smith of Wooton Major, a young boy, not-so-much-by-luck, ingests a silver star baked in the Great Cake of the Feast of Good Children. As a result, the star becomes a part of his forehead and later allows him safe passage through the Land of Faery as a man, until his time had passed and so another may follow. And so it was for my dad - like Starbrow - when in his 70's he lost his star on a pack trip to the high country. He had a serious reaction to the elevation, and so like Smith from Wooten Major, he knew that was his last journey and that he wouldn't return - it broke his heart to sell his mules and all of his pack gear - there was no going back again. (2)

For me, there was much less drama when my time had passed, or just slipped away. I haven't done any serious backpacking into Faery country for more than 30 years, and it is unlikely I will ever try to again for a combination of reasons over time - too many kids with too my sports events to go to, too out of shape, a bad back, too little time on my hands... As we prepared to move east three-and-a-half years ago, I found that after years of neglect my Jansport Trail Wedge tent's rain fly had disintegrated, as had the padding around the rim of my Kastinger hiking boots, and my walking stick - the one Colin Fletcher insisted one must have for trekking - all into the dumpster. On one of the many trips to the Goodwill Store while still cleaning out the garage and basement, I donated my Mountain Master backpack - a huge external frame contraption by today's standards that from behind looked like a semi-truck going down the trail. It was funny how the college'ish aged fellow who sorted our stuff took note of the pack - he remarked, "it's a classic"... I said, "I know." (3)
_________________________________________

At last he found a road through the Outer Mountains, and he went on till he came to the Inner Mountains, and there were high and sheer and daunting. Yet in the end he found a pass that he could scale, and upon a day of days greatly daring he came through a narrow cleft and looked down, though he did not know it, into the Vale of Evermorn where the green surpasses the green of the meads of Outer Faery as they surpass ours in springtime. There the air is so lucid that eyes can see the red tongues of birds as they sing on the trees upon the far side of the valley, though that is very wide and the birds are no greater than wrens.

Roaring River

On the inner side of the mountains went down in long slopes filled with the sound of bubbling waterfalls, and in great delight he hastened on. As he set food upon the grass of the Vale he heard elven voices singing, and on a lawn beside a river bright with lilies he came upon many maidens dancing. The speed and the grace and the ever changing modes of the movements enchanted him, and he stepped forward towards their ring. Then suddenly they stood still, and a young maiden with flowing hair and kilted skirt came out to meet him.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Smith of Wooten Major, 1967
_____________________________________________

A year ago this past February, my wife and I flew to Missouri for the retirement party of a close friend. Paul and I go back to undergraduate and graduate schools days together - Fresno State, Oregon State. We also did collaborative research together for decades. We flew into St. Louis and then drove to Columbia for the party - only Charlotte, Paul's wife, knew we were coming. Thus starts the next phase of generational experiences....retirements in my age cohort.

Recent photo by my friend Paul

We spent the night after the party at their home, had a leisurely morning together, toured their Boone County property - the farm, and then rushed back to the airport after lunch for our return trip east. With soon-to-have-plenty-of-time, Paul was planning a High Sierra adventure for this past summer and invited me to join him - of course, not having found the silver retirement star in my cake and not-soon-to-have-plenty-of-time on my brow, I had to pass on the offer. Months later I got an email from Paul, and attached was a photograph of what I missed. When I opened the image, I was struck by the diversity of plants in the scene - years ago I would have never noticed.

A first notice of trees

Immediately I was taken back to August 1969 when I had my first trip up in the Sierra with my dad and brothers - on horses with pack mules, not backpacking - and how I was not all that enthralled with spending hours, bored, sitting on a horse getting-to-where-we-were-going and knowing how long it would take. It was somewhere along one of the worn trails in the Kern River Basin when all of a sudden I realized there were more kinds of plants out there than green - trees, grass, and ferns. That was a pivotal moment for me, the starting point that would eventually take me on my own treks to Faery - setting me off in directions through places that led me to the classes I later took in college with their own strange languages that can describe another faery: Botany, Plant Physiology and Biochemistry, Systems Ecology, Autecology, Plant Geography, Rangeland Ecology, Seed Technology - and dialects used where I work today: Sustainability, Organic Agriculture, Food Systems and Rural Development, Renewable Energy and Biofuels, Systems Architecture. Strange words to others' ears, but ones that are a part of the star on my forehead that let me pass into foreign lands.
______________________________________

(1) I don't know whose blog link this is, but the places in their photographs are the same places I have been, just a lot of years earlier - everything looks the same, but I wouldn't want to drink the water right out of the streams any more, as we did then from a tin cup hooked on our packs.

(2) All of the mules went to a pack station near Kings Canyon National Park - my dad's hobby had been breeding the palomino-colored mule string he took to the mountains each year. Back down in the Valley, he would occasionally ride a mule when checking the cattle out on the remnant prairie pasture our family had leased from another family for 80 years. The story goes that once when out looking over the cows and their new calves, his mount wyley took a sudden side-step that left Dad with hang-time in mid-air momentarily, before crashing to the ground - like in a Roadrunner cartoon. After gathering himself up - broken ribs and his pride - he deftly picked up a stick, thrashed the mule in between the ears to show who was still boss, and then remounted for the ride back to corral without further incident.

(3) When I bought the Mountain Master pack, it was the top rated backpack in Backpacker magazine. I remember it was manufactured in Fresno by Denali. A quick check on the Web showed that packs (modern ones) are still manufactured under the Denali brand, but I could not find the place where manufactured - probably Thailand.

Parallel Botany - Avatar

I had the same feeling walking out of the theater after watching the James Cameron movie Avatar in 3-D as I had when seeing Star Wars when it first came out in 1977 - I wanted to fly. But what to do with the scenery made up of the plant life growing upon strange landscapes on Pandora - I wanted to be there. A complimentary book has been published that catalogs all of the flora and fauna and culture of this distant world: Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora, but is not that great - the movie is better than the book. Also, this is not a first-of-a-kind attempt to create a pseudo-authentic compendium of life.

Leo Lionni's Parallel Botany predates James Cameron's world by 32 years, and is just one year younger than George Lucas'. I read a new book review of Parallel Botany in Time Magazine while just starting graduate school, and then went to a local Walden Books in Fresno to order a copy. I am sure it wasn't more than ten dollars new at that time, but when the store called to say my book was in, I couldn't bring myself to go pick it up and put down that much cash for an impulsive purchase of what seemed like a frivolous purchase when serious text books were a greater priority. Ever since, I had always had it in my mind to get a copy some day, and that's what I did last year - ordered a used copy from a parallel seller on the Amazon Website. I was disappointed when it turned out to be a former library copy, but it was still the real deal (1).

What is unnerving about Parallel Botany, is that its narrative reads like a classical science text book as serious scientists would write in times gone by - but not any different than how serious scholars still speak at scientific conferences today, about things that may or may not be real. Unlike the feeling I had after watch Star Wars and Avatar, I didn't know what to think as I began to read the last chapter On Fairy Stories in Tolkien's Tales from the Perilous Realm - at first I couldn't tell whether the essay I was reading was a serious discussion about previous literature on the topic, or one made up as in Parallel Botany'esque style - or is serious literature about fairies just like those serious science texts - new and old? But even more strange are when elements of the parallel world are blended with those of the real - where the separation of the two worlds becomes less distinct - but pretty nice to look at, regardless.
______________________________________

(1) I have had the same regret for not picking up a copy of Jefferson Starship's Blows Against the Empire album since I ordered it at the Montgomery Wards department store in my hometown when I was a freshman in college - there is a pattern here. My favorite song on the album is Have You Seen the Stars Tonight? which sounds like Pandora looks. My friend Ken, whom I had know since middle school, and I would trade albums regularly. I had his copy of the album when Ken died the summer before our senior year in high school. I returned the album to his family, and haven't had a copy of it since.

I Like Children's Stories....

....and even better yet, well-made children's movies. I bought a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe while I was in graduate school, but didn't read the book until we had moved back to Oregon, with four kids, and saw the first hour of the story on Oregon Public Broadcasting television one Saturday late afternoon. I read the entire book before by the time the second part of the movie was on the next Saturday. This kids story blew me away - that is for another blog. I had read last year that Disney had dropped production of the theater version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. After seeing my son's 100-days-to-graduation count-down blog - I checked out the Web to see what was posted about the third Chronicles of Narnia story, only to be pleasantly surprised to find out that Fox had picked it up, and that it may be released in December this year - this should be good news. Of the original BBC movie adaptations of the C.S. Lewis stories that were broadcast on PBS - which were remarkably close to the narrative of the original books - the Dawn Treader was my favorite....plenty of fantasy to go all around....sailing to the end of the world....enchantments brought to an end....sorry to see the story end. I hope that there will be enough momentum with this film to finish the series - three down, four to go. Maybe some one will figure out that it would be worth it to make an animated version of The Horse and His Boy, release it at Christmas time, and some how get to The Last Battle in film.

Amelia

The opening ceremonies to the Vancouver Winter Olympics featured the works of Canadian artists and composers. After recognizing Joni Mitchell perform Both Sides Now, I began blogging about an effort to save the last sugar farm in Hawaii - but in the meantime, also came across this old song I hadn't heard before. As usual, the lyrics bring images to mind, so I posted some of those images with the lyrics below, as well as a link to the song (1).
_________________________________________

I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain
It was the hexagram of the heavens
it was the strings of my guitar
Amelia, it was just a false alarm


The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue
Of picture-post-card-charms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm



People will tell you where they've gone
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself
you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Other's just come to harm
Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm

I wish that he was here tonight
It's so hard to obey
His sad request of me to kindly stay away
So this is how I hide the hurt
As the road leads cursed and charmed
I tell Amelia, it was just a false alarm








A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm


Maybe I've never really loved
I guess that is the truth
I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude
And looking down on everything
I crashed into his arms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm




I pulled into the Cactus Tree Motel
To shower off the dust
And I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust
I dreamed of 747s
Over geometric farms
Dreams, Amelia, dreams and false alarms

Joni Mitchell, 1976
_________________________________________

(1) This piece among the best of Mitchell's work - the lyrics are poetic, the performance haunting - I love the pedal steel guitar in the background. If you didn't select the link above to hear the song Amelia, you can also select it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bFgxKov8Ts

For a short biography of Amelia Earhart, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Earhart

Also sprach Zarathustra - Montana

In my mind - not all that long ago - the Dakota's were at the top of the Earth. Maybe I was just cartographically challenged, but it wasn't until I made a work trip to the Agriculture Canada research station at Beaverlodge in northern Alberta's Peace River region and looked at an airline route map after flying from Salt Lake City to Calgary to Edmonton to Grand Prairie and then realized that my "Top of the World" was actually half way to the Gulf of Mexico from there.

Jump forward to a year-and-half ago when I was visiting a research group in Sidney, Montana and saw some of the upper reaches of the Missouri River and the surrounding farmland that was once long grass prairie where ancient Pleistocene megafauna such as giraffe and horse, as well as giant short-faced bear and mammoth once roamed, and Bison bison and some brown bear then and now still do - the places where Native peoples, Lewis and Clark, fur traders, Cavalry soldiers, drovers, and Teddy Roosevelt came and went. The only images that still exist other than the land itself, are paintings like this one that hang in the the MonDak Heritage Center and Art Gallery - showing the landscape near the confluence where the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers meet, and where the buffalo once roamed and wolves watched (1).

Long-gone are the endless seas of mixed grasses with rhyming names:

Pseudoroegneria spicata
Festuca idahoensis
Bouteloua gracilis
and Hesperostipa comata

Bromus marginatus
Bouteloua curtipendula
Nassella viridula
and Elymus lanceolatus

and the grasses whose names rhyme less - though no less poetic - and which are also now only island patches surrounded by an ocean landscape of farmland:

Poa ampla and P. secunda
Achnatherum hymenoides
and Andropogon gerardii

Schizachyrium scoparium
Panicum virgatum
and Pascopyrum smithii

Replaced now by coal mines with piles of spent shale and farms with waving sheaths of wheat - and new pioneers with dreams of Camelina fields. Yellow-flowered oil seed crops growing above oil wells - a short step from being changed through chemical engineering into JP-5 or JP-8 jet fuel or F-76 marine diesel, fueling newer kinds of prairie schooners that sail the seas of air overhead or the waters of the bounding main below - a promise of a renewable future for these lonely prairies - a new kind of home on the range, up in the big sky as well as down in the dark brown earth of this high plains place.
__________________________________________

Home on the Range, Anonymous

There's a land in the West where nature is blessed
With a beauty so vast and austere,
And though you have flown off to cities unknown,
Your memories bring you back here.

Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play.
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day.

Where the air is so pure, the zephyrs so free,
The breezes so balmy and light,
That I would not exchange my home on the range
For all of the cities so bright.

How often at night when the heavens are bright
By the rivers were sweet grasses grew
Where the bison was found on the great hunting ground
And fed all the nations of Sioux.

The canyons and buttes like old twisted roots
And the sandstone of ancient stream beds
In the sunset they rise to dazzle our eyes
With their lavenders, yellows, and reds.

Oh, give me a land where the bright diamond sand
Flows leisurely down to the stream;
Where the graceful white swan goes gliding along
Like a maid in a heavenly dream.

When it comes my time to leave this world behind
And fly off to regions unknown
Please lay my remains on the great plains,
Out in my sweet prairie home.

Home, home on the plains
Here in the grass we will lie
When our day's work is done by he light of the sun
As it sets in the blue prairie sky.
__________________________________________

Navy Launches Green Hornet
By Greg Grant Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 3:26 pm
DoD Buzz - Online Defense and Acquisition Journal

The Navy intends to deploy an energy efficient “Great Green Fleet” carrier strike group consisting of ships powered either by nuclear energy or biofuels with an attached air wing of fighter jets fueled entirely by biofuels. The “green” strike group was part of an ambitious energy efficient agenda that will include a radical restructuring of the way the Navy and Marine Corps awards industry contracts, laid out today by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, at the Naval Energy Forum in McLean, Va (2).

The Navy conducted the initial tests yesterday of a biofuel powered engine for a new F/​A-​​18 “Green Hornet,” Mabus said. He vowed the new plane would fly within three years. Hybrid electric power systems using biofuels will power the sensors, weapons and other electronic systems onboard the green strike group’s surface combatants. The strike group will demonstrate local operations by 2012 and will be fully operational by 2016.

Mabus said the Navy and Marine Corps intend to reshape their approach to awarding shipbuilding and weapons contracts to favor companies that provide the most energy efficient products. From now on, he said, lifetime energy consumption costs and the “fully burdened cost of fueling and powering” all ships, planes, weapons and buildings will be a “mandatory evaluation factor” used in awarding contracts.

“We’re going to hold industry contractually accountable for meeting energy targets and system efficiency requirements,” Mabus said. “We’ll also use the overall energy efficiency and the energy footprint of a competing company as an additional factor in acquisition decisions.” All new surface combatants will be built from the ground up with energy efficient systems installed, he said.

The Navy also plans to convert its fleet of 50,000 commercial vehicles at its many bases to electric and hybrid power by 2015. By 2020, half of all the service’s shore-​​based installation energy use will be powered by alternative fuels as well as solar, wind and geothermal sources. While readily acknowledging that biofuel prices are high, Mabus said prices will go down as biofuel production increases and that the military’s shift to greater biofuel use will incentivize more biofuel production.

Improvements to the traditionally fueled F/​A-​​18 engines will increase the fuel efficiency of each aircraft by three percent, Mabus said. Those improvements will not only allow the planes to fly further on the same tank of fuel but could potentially save 127,000 barrels of fuel per plane per year.

While Mabus said the Navy and Marine Corps have an obligation to do something today to reduce their impact on the environment, the Navy is particularly mindful of rising fuel costs as oil prices climb above $70 a barrel. To fill the 450,000 gallon fuel tank on the Navy’s DDG-​​51 destroyer today costs $643,000, said RADM Phillip Cullom, who heads the service’s Task Force Energy. That’s an improvement over last summer’s $1.8 million cost to fill the destroyer’s tanks when oil prices soared above $100 per barrel.

Additional fleet-​​wide energy saving initiatives include tests of a new anti-​​fouling coating to be applied to ship’s hulls and the installation of stern flaps on amphibious ships intended to increase fuel efficiency, Mabus said.
__________________________________________

(1) The MonDak is that area shared by Montana and North Dakota at the top of the center of the United States. There is a ghost town named Mondak in Roosevelt County that flourished about 1903-1919. More details are found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondak,_Montana#cite_note-0

(2) This official Navy photograph is remarkable in that the joint naval exercise shown is of two Japanese ships in procession with U.S. ships. This 60 years after the memorial plaque to the USS California shown in the preceding blog entry (Birds of Ford Island - Pearl Harbor).

Birds of Ford Island - Pearl Harbor

With the drop of a hat, I had to schedule a work trip to Hawaii this past week. A quick browse of my birding books at home made it clear that even though Hawaii is a part of the United States, at least from the perspective of Roger Tory Peterson, David Allen Sibley, and the National Geographic Birder's Journal, Hawaii is not a part of North America. So, after catching my flight from Baltimore to Dallas to Honolulu, and meeting up with colleagues at the Hotel lobby for dinner, we made a trip to Barnes and Nobel where I picked out A Photographic Guide to the Birds of Hawai'i - The Main Islands and Offshore Waters by Jim Denny.

My meetings were on Ford Island which is a part of the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. I have discovered that history and modern function go hand-in-hand on military bases. Each morning when we pulled into the parking lot of the meeting center, we faced a plaque commemorating the resting place of the U.S.S. California that lies just off sea wall. A little further to the right is the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial - much smaller in perspective to the harbor than I expected, and with modern destroyers and cruisers docked in the distance with the U.S.S. Missouri, newly painted, off to the left. I wonder whether the officers, and sailors, and civilians who work here have to force themselves to conscientiously think each day where they are, like I do when I come up out of the Smithsonian Metro stop onto the Capital Mall - into a place of living history.

I had little time to myself the three days in Hawaii, so the only real opportunity I had for viewing and identification was the walks to and from the cafeteria in the Air Museum on the base. What struck me most was how easy it was to notice that there are different birds there, even though there were familiar birds as at home - the House Finch (G), Rock Pigeon (H), and House Sparrow (I). But for what was exotic, a quick review of the Hawaiian bird book indicated were intentional introductions that have greatly influenced the local fauna. The Cattle Egret (D), Saffron Finch (C), Common Myna (E), Red-crested Cardinal (F), and Nutmeg Mannikin (B) are are all firsts for me, but aliens to Hawaii. Being a novice birder, I double checked over two days of quick viewing to try to figure out whether what I was seeing was the uncommon Black-bellied Plover (A) and not the common Pacific Golden Plover - I won't feel comfortable with this identification until I return and have an expert's help. There were others I was not sure of their kind - was that or was that not a Blue-winged Teal, and were those Mourning Doves or Zebra Doves that just flew by? These will remain mysteries for now.

Regardless, there is much more time for birding that needs to be scheduled in for any future trips, at least for the roadside kind. My travel partner from work (1) was pretty accommodating for the little bit of birding I did while he was with me. The only time he protested was when I was about to whip out the binoculars at breakfast one morning while sitting at an open-air restaurant patio overlooking Waikiki Beach - something about some guy might get the wrong impression that I was watching women walk by and not really looking at birds. Well, we didn't really have that much time for me to gaze up in the trees looking for new-to-me tropical discoveries. Maybe next trip I will be able to see the "real" Hawaiian birds - not migrants or aliens, but the ones of only now imagined woodlands and highlands.
______________________________________________

(1) Can you tell in the lower photograph of Waikiki Beach which is the flightless bird that migrated to Oahu on an American Airlines flight from Louisiana? Hint, he is the one whose long-sleeved-shirted plumage is distinctive from the native flightless birds of similar kind but with their distinctive floral print plumage.