The Wanderer and the Tourist

Marge, look at that busy little brown bird.  Just pecking away and running the whole time.  Fast.  Wonder what it is?  It must be some kind of Hawaiian bird.  Like a little roadrunner.  Never saw it back home.

Well, for your information I come to the Hawaiian Islands every year to spend the winter and then return home in the late spring when things get warmer up north.  Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure where I should call my home since I actually spend more time in Hawaii than I do up north.  But north is where I have my family, so I guess that’s what a home is, family.  

What’s the big deal?  Tourists coming and going year-round is what holds up the Hawaiian economy.  Sounds like you’re just one of the millions who fly here each year to vacation.  Like I’m from Wisconsin.

That’s true, I arrived by flying the almost three thousand miles from Alaska.  

Oh yeah, so you’re a “snow bird.”  A lot of you come from Canada and some from Alaska.  Probably get more if your population was larger.  

Wrong bird!!  

Hey, ‘snow bird’s’ just a figure of speech.  Don’t get your feathers ruffled.

You should be more careful in your speech, we’re pretty picky about what we’re called.  We are Pacific Golden Plovers, or as the Hawaiians named us, Kolea!  And I am proud of the fact that I flew here non-stop, 2800 miles, by flapping my wings 250,000 times.  Let me say that again, a quarter of a million times.  And that’s in three days without a rest.  It was faster this trip because we—we fly in a flock—caught a good following wind.  If we’re fighting the weather it can take four days.  Not good since then we arrive with fewer than when we started out since some of us wear out and crash into the sea.  Yes, that’s about one in five of us on a bad trip.

Sorry—but glad you made it this time.  So wait, if I got this figured right, you’re flying about nine hundred miles in a day?  

You got that right.   

Day and night?  

Like I told you, non-stop.  We’re not ducks.  We can’t land on the water.  

Now you got me interested.  And just how high do you fly?  Wave tops or higher?  

Again it depends on the wind and weather.  Usually between three thousand and fifteen thousand feet, wherever the most favorable winds are at that moment.

That’s like higher than Mauna Kea!  And how do you know how to get here?  Hawaii’s just a small group of islands and the sea is so large.  

We’re born with this “map” in our brains and eyes.  We can “see” the earth’s magnetic fields day and night and we know where the sun rises and sets.  Four weeks after our chicks hatch they can fly.  That’s up in Alaska.  We parents leave them to find their own bugs and anything else that’s small and moves to fatten up for their first flight to Hawaii.  We older birds take off a month, even two, before the hatchlings make their first trip by October and November and they are strictly on their own with no one to follow.  

That’s child abandonment!.  

That’s the way it’s always been with us.  We’re like any other returning visitor.  You have your favorite hotel or B and B that you’ll’ll stay at each time you visit?  Well we have our regular wintering grounds that we’ll return to each year.  Parks, backyards, cemeteries, green and grassy, near the shore.  Some people get very attached to us when we come back to their yards year after year.  They’ll even feed us bird seed, which is great although mealy worms would be even better.

You lead a really weird life.  You’re up breeding in the wilds of the Alaskan tundra in the summer and then you come back to this crowded city and resort environment for seven or eight months of the year.  How does your mind adjust to the change? 

I guess we just do or did.  Back before people came, these islands were as wild as the tundra,  except there were nothing here that wanted to eat us.  Then people came and over time there were more and more of them and they started to change the wild nature of the islands.  And I guess our ancestors just gradually got used to living among them when they were here and the wild tundra when they went back north.  Now we’re both city birds and country birds depending on the season.

You said something about things that wanted to eat you in the tundra?  Like what?  

Oh like Arctic foxes and hawks and falcons and snowy owls.

How about dangers here?

Cats mostly and cars.

Well it was great meeting you but we’ve got a luau to go to tonight.  Oh, and what did you say your Hawaiian name was?

It’s Kolea and it mean ‘comes, takes and goes away.’

Very appropriate..  You want our left over Fritos?

No, but those fat dumb pigeons would I’m sure.