I'm on a Tear this Month

I'm on a tear with blogging this month. In the first 10 days of the month I've posted 29 entries. LiveJournal actually offers the more lucid view of my posts this month. If you're allergic to LJ the same posts are indexed on my DW January 2022 page, though not as well organized visually.

For context, the rate of 2.9 posts per day (29/10) is way over even my stretch goal of 2/day. And if I maintain this rate for the full month I'll exceed my record of 2.67/day in September 2020.

What am I so busy writing about? Well, unlike September 2020 it's not a trip. Most of my posts that banner month were about an epic, 3,000+ mile road trip  across the desert southwest and back. This month it's been... well, a mixture of everything. A few posts wrapping up things from our Hawaii trip last month (with one more still to come!), a few posts with end-of-year retrospectives. Several posts about streaming shows I'm watching (primarily WoT and GoT). Posts about the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic Posts about current events. Posts about things I've seen or done.

Will I keep up the rate of nearly 3/day for the rest of the month? I don't know. It's a lot! But honestly I thought a week ago that I'd drop from 3/day to more like 1.5, yet here I still am.

Birds in Hawaii

Okay, no, I'm not actually caught up on writing about our visit to Hawaii 2½ weeks ago. There's one more thing I've been meaning to blog about. It's been waiting until I had time to prepare the pictures: Birds!

I've already written about all the wild chickens in Hawaii. This post is about other birds we saw, particularly two I saw on on our loop around the Windward Side.



We stopped at a beach where we saw a bunch of these little guys (and gals) hopping around in the grass. From their bright red heads, crest feathers (this bird's crest is matted down in the photo) and the shape of their beaks I figured they were some kind of cardinal. I grew up in an area where the Northern Cardinal is a backyard bird and has bright red feathers over its whole body. ...Well, at least the males do. And the shape of the beak is the same.

At the time I figured these were "Hawaiian Cardinals". After all, Hawaii is an island thousands of miles from any continental land mass. It's going to have its own distinct species of animals, right? Then later in the trip I was reading an information display at another park and learned this is called a Brazilian Cardinal. ...Well, that's an informal name, apparently. Officially it's a Red-crested Cardinal. And it's native to Argentia, Bolivia, Uruguay, and a few parts of Brazil. It was imported to Hawaii. I don't know why, though the birds seem to be doing okay here.



Speaking of imports, another bird we saw in plentiful numbers on the windward side is this Cattle Egret. I could tell right away from the shape of its body it was an egret/heron. We see egrets when we hike the various baylands near our house. This variety was shorter and stockier than what we see around the SF Bay. Was it a Hawaiian Egret, I wondered? Then I saw this....



And this...



...And I was like, "It's a Trash Heron!" 🤣 But no, it turns out it's a Cattle Egret. The bird gets its name from ranchers finding that it liked to follow their cattle around. It would eat the bugs attracted to their big, stinky bodies; it would even pick them out of their fur. Cattle ranchers then cultivated these birds as helpful partners to keep their herds healthy and brought them to Hawaii when they brought cattle here.

...And now that there aren't so many bug-infested cattle to follow around for food, apparently these birds go to the next most bug-infested place. Trash cans.