A few days ago, motion drew my eye to the window. A bird was hopping around in the butterfly bush. Nothing unusual about that, but this particular bird made me do a double-take:

What was going on? Had I been transported to the Island of Dr. Moreau? Was someone in the neighborhood doing weird experiments on the local bird life? Please tell me that is not really the head of a black finch transplanted onto the body of a cardinal . . . .

A Google search soon informed me I wasn’t the only one who had seen such a sight and wondered about it. The bird in question is definitely a cardinal, but it’s a bald cardinal, with no feathers on its head.

Opinions on what causes cardinals to lose all their head feathers are mixed, but most seem to involve mites and seasonal molting. It is agreed the condition generally takes place after the breeding season, that it isn’t permanent, and that the feathers grow back.

I have to say though, that a cardinal with a head as bald as a vulture’s is a rather disturbing sight.

When I was ten years old and living in Waikiki, my school teacher showed us a film about a tsunami in Japan. I don’t remember any details–it might even have been animation–I just remember the lasting terror that film instilled in me. It felt personal, because my Dad was in the process of moving us to the north shore of Oahu, where we would be living in a beach house set back about 12 feet from the sand. It didn’t take much imagination to think that we might all be crushed and swept out to sea–and indeed there were some terrifying moments living in that house, when the surf turned gigantic, running through the yard and throwing spray on the windows–but thankfully the tsunami never showed up.

The danger is real though. Hawaii has suffered severe tsunami events in the past, and statistically we are way overdue for another.

So when a friend called at 6am on Saturday morning to make sure we knew a tsunami warning had been posted, it wasn’t exactly a shock. My husband already knew about it, but I had gone to sleep before the Chilean earthquake. Our own home wasn’t in any danger since we live way up the side of a mountain, but if Maui’s harbor was damaged there would soon be a shortage of supplies and gasoline on our very non-self-sufficient island, and if the power plant was damaged, who knows how long we would have to go without electricity?

So we joined the lines of people at the gas station, made a quick run to the grocery store (rice & spam are golden in our culture if a shortage is expected), and finished our circuit at the ATM machine.

Then it was home to watch the TV and Twitter coverage.

As you probably know, the actual event was anti-climatic, and for that we are very grateful. We know it won’t always be this way–and our hearts go out to the people of Chile, who have suffered so many terrible earthquakes in the past.

Okay, okay, winter in Hawaii isn’t much compared to most of the mainland, but where we live at 3400’ it gets cool enough that we have a distinct winter that most of the garden recognizes . . . but so far as the plants are concerned winter doesn’t last long.

Years ago we were given a handful of freesia bulbs. Over time they’ve naturalized and multiplied, but they persist in surprising me every year with their sudden appearance in February – and sometimes earlier. These are just the early bloomers. There will be a lot more to come.

Now and then my husband and I actually escape from the mundane weekend world of yard work and the occasional movie and do something interesting. At the end of June we went on a hike on the dry and austere south side of Haleakala. Starting from Piilani Highway, we hiked down a jeep road to the coast, and then for some miles through the lava fields along the “King’s Trail” to La Perouse Bay (Keoneoio). The King’s Trail is an amazing story in itself, built 150 years ago over extremely rough a’a lava flows — but this blog entry is about the groves of wiliwili trees we passed on the way downhill.

This area was once dryland forest, now long gone, with only some remnant native trees left. It’s still amazingly beautiful, but sad as well. Presumably when it was forested the rainfall was higher — studies have shown that forests on high elevation island slopes do seem to affect the net rainfall. At any rate, our hike was at the end of June, in very dry conditions.

Wiliwili trees (Erythrina sandwicensis) are probably the most common of the surviving native species. In dry areas they will spend much of the year in a leafless condition, producing leaves and beautiful flowers only when there has been a good deal of rain.

On this hike, I was very keen to see how the wiliwili trees were holding up. A couple of years ago the islands were invaded by a tiny gall wasp, which rapidly destroyed almost all non-native wiliwili trees that are commonly used for landscaping. The native trees are also attacked, but I’m happy to report that the trees in the area of our hike are still holding on. Their remote location may offer them an advantage, as well as their habit of dropping all their leaves.

Wiliwilis are legumes, and their seed is a good-sized orange bean. I picked up a few from the ground under a tree that clearly served to shade cattle on a hot day — so there was no hope they would have sprouted in their native habitat. One of them sprouted right away, another a couple of weeks later, and the rest have recently taken off after I cracked their seed coats. Here is a picture of the first to grow:

The seedling reminds me a lot of the sprout in the movie Wall-E. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who walked out of the theater after that movie feeling rather depressed. Yes, the movie was cute, sweet, and entertaining, but the Earth does not recover from ecological damage like that, at least on a time scale that matters to the human species.

At any rate, I hope the gall wasps don’t figure out that I’m harboring a wiliwili nursery in upper Kula, and I hope that whitish spot on the leaf of the seedling is not the first sign of something bad.

Here are a few photos from the hike:

A grove of wiliwili trees, leafless under dry conditions

That’s me, hiding from excess sunlight, as always.

It’s an austere landscape.

A panoramic of the south slope. The lone green tree is a native, Reynoldsia, I believe. The brown leafless trees in the distance are wiliwili, though they’re hard to see at this image resolution. That’s the island of Kahoolawe in the background.

I sat next to a bodhisattva today, on a twenty minute inter-island flight. I had an aisle seat, she was sitting beside me, and her companion had the window. It was impossible not to eavesdrop on an energetic and animated conversation that began with a deep examination of their personal emotional needs, their experience with channeling, insight on her past lives, their struggles to find the perfect romantic partner, and other subjects that discretion suggests I not repeat here.

Then, perhaps halfway through the flight, he leans toward her and asks her to accept what he is about to say with an open mind. “I truly believe you are a bodhisattva.” She laughs pleasantly and agrees. The talk moves on.

Far be it from me to claim expertise on any religion, but I do happen to know that a bodhisattva is a Buddhist figure, commonly conceived as one who is on the way to becoming a Buddha, but “delays his own final and complete enlightenment in order to save all sentient beings out of his enormous compassion.” (dictionary.com) So a bodhisattva is a very powerful spiritual being. As an example, the Dalai Lama is considered by many to have this status.

I admit I tried to sense a spiritual aura… just in case. Perhaps I am just deaf to such things. Still, I imagine spirituality as something conveyed more in emotion than in words. The talk-talk-talk of the bodhisattva and her companion was quite incredible to me — both for its simple abundance, but also that such confessions and discussions should be made in a public place.

Perhaps in their enthusiasm, they simply forgot I was sitting beside them. But even enlightened beings might do well to remember the value of a little discretion.

We aren’t used to major forest fires on Maui — after all, there just isn’t that much land, and most of the forests are rain forests — but there are also large areas in the mountains that are dense with imported eucalyptus trees, black wattle, and even redwoods. That’s what’s burning now. The fire started a few days ago, and seems to have gotten quickly out of hand. The photo at right shows only the northern end. 600 acres had been burned as of yesterday; a lot more has burned since then.

I’ll admit feeling a little nervous today when I looked from my deck to a distant ridge to see great pillars of flame at the edge of massive clouds of smoke. Everything seems calmer now. Several helicopter runs might have slowed the advance on the northern side, while at higher altitudes, it looks like the fire might have reached the edge of the forest, slowing down in the scrublands and volcanic barrens above 8000′. (It’s hard to see past the smoke and afternoon cloud cover.) The predicted weather calls for rain tomorrow afternoon. Let’s hope so.