Surrounded By Turkeys!

This morning I (Mari) decided to do some bird watching from our deck. It is the perfect place in several ways: we are at or above the canopy/power line level where the birds spend most of their time, I can rest my camera on the deck railing and zoom in on the birds, and they are attracted to the fruit and flowers in the nearby trees.


Well, some of the birds don't spend any time on the power lines or in the canopy, but rather in the shrubbery! The past few days we have been seeing these birds that look strangely like turkeys, walking around the neighborhood. This morning, since I was bird-watching, I had my camera available for photos. That's when I noticed turkeys walking up the next-door-neighbors driveway, along the sidewalk, and around his yard! I would say there were four of five of them, all females, I think. A little while later, I happened to look down, and there was a group of them directly below me, in the shrubbery below, and then walking down our sidewalk. Then, I decided to go pick up the two passion fruits on the back deck that had fallen from the vine, and I heard the distinct crunching sound of someone walking around in the shrubbery there. And, guess what? Turkeys!

According to the pocket bird guide, domestic turkeys were the first birds introduced to Hawaii after European contact.

The other birds I saw this morning include Japanese white eye (introduced by Hui Manu, a bird club whose sole purpose was to introduce birds to the Hawaiian islands. Some ornithologists claim it is responsible for the decline of native birds); male and female Northern Cardinals (introduced in the 1930s);

The yellow-billed Cardinal (from South America).

I also saw Myna birds and the ubiquitous mourning doves, a couple of white birds flying down by the water, and some birds on wires that were too far away to identify.

Yesterday I put out the leftover fruit parts from various fruits which I had "juiced" to see if it would attract birds (or just fruit-flies!) At first, it was only the fruit flies, but when I got ready to throw them out, Ron told me he had seen birds out there in the morning. So, I put the fruit back on the deck. The next morning every last bit was gone. When I went to fetch the cardboard box I had been using, a house finch flew up onto the deck where the box had been. Not wanting to disappoint, I placed a few more pieces out there on the box: some grapes cut in half, an orange cut into sections, and pieces of avocado.

The first ones attracted were the fruit flies again, but once the sun was over the mountain, the geckos started showing up. The seemed to prefer the orange juice.

A little later in the morning, we decided to walk down the hill towards Pebble Beach and see how far we could go in a half hour. Since we are on the second road from the top, it would be a nearly 2 mile roundtrip on a very steep road if we went all the way down. (The cross streets in many Hawaii neighborhoods are in alphabetical order, with the "A" road being nearest the highway, followed by a B road, etcetera. Our road, Boki, is the B road. Ama is the A road. The lowest road on the hill is Mapuna Road.) Well, we went to Honu Moe Road before deciding to turn back - on the way up we realized there are TWO H roads in our neighborhood! Huh? We didn't go all the way down, but we did walk up to Ama before coming back home. This was a 1-hour round-trip walk. But not enough to get our 10,000 steps in for the day, so we will probably head out again in a little while.

Our neighborhood is called Kona Paradise. Here you can see it from the bottom of the hill.

Our neighbors have been industrious this morning. The next door neighbor was "mowing" his grass with a string trimmer.

A little while later, some other neighbors decided to run a concrete mixer for awhile while listening to some local "Jah-waiian" music. This is a combination reggae/Hawaiian style music that is one of the favorites around here. 

When it's noisy in the neighborhood, you can't close the windows and turn on the air-conditioner, because most house don't have either of those luxuries. We do have some glass windows, but others only close with wooden louvres. Whereas there is screening to keep insects at bay, there is no glass. This is "natural air conditioning", I suppose. When the ceiling fans are on, it works pretty well.

The louvres cover a screened window - no glass there at all. The ceiling fans move the air pretty well. There are three ceiling fans in the living room-dining room area.