Hawaii: Days 5 and 6 (with terns)

To continue with my vacation snaps, I first show the best place to get plate lunch I know of on Oahu, the Highway Inn (there are two branches, but the one shown below, in Waipahu near Pearl Harbor, is much better and has a more local clientele than the downtown branch on Ala Moana Boulevard. The portions are bigger, the food is better, the waitstaff is friendlier, and there are no tourists.

I’ve written about the place before, but it bears seeing again. It’s a modest-looking place in a strip mall. Nothing fancy about it, but the Hawaiian food is superb.

My lunch (from lower left going clockwise): pork lau lau (wrapped in taro leaves), macaroni-potato salad, raw onion with salt, pipikaula (beef), haupia (coconut gelatin, very good here), and a big bowl of poi (my favorite!)

A dissection of the lau lau, showing the pork within the steamed taro leaves. You’re supposed to douse it with a vinegar-chili concoction:

My companion’s lunch: pretty similar but with kalua pig instead of lau lau, and lomi salmon instead of “salad”:

The local clientele (it’s too far from the center to attract tourists). There is usually a wait for a table, but we went early:

Dessert was a strawberry pie (to take home) from Anna Miller’s, a nearby restaurant famous for its pies (especially the strawberry). Food on Hawaii costs more on the mainland, but their pies were a bargain: only $16 for an entire strawberry pie, and not a small one.

It was almost all strawberries—large, luscious, and ripe ones—with a thin layer of custard beneath and piped with fresh whipped cream. Along with the lowbush blueberry pie at Helen’s in Machias, Maine, this is one of the two best commercial pies I’ve ever had. It’s available only in the summer when ripe strawberries can be had. The pie looks small because the strawberries are HUGE, but it’s a full-sized pie.

The pie case at Anna Miller’s. The other non-strawberry pies are even cheaper (the macadamia nut cream is also famous):

A nearby orthodontist with a weird name. Presumably the owner is Chinese:

And now to the white terns (see today’s earlier post for a bit on the biology of this beautiful bird, or you can read more here). The species (Gygis alba) is widespread throughout the southern Pacific but in Hawaii nests only on Oahu, and only in cities where there is rat control (rats can eat the single eggs laid by a pair). In Hawaiian it’s called the Manu-o-Kū, or “bird of Kū”, who is Hawaii’s warrior god.

It is the official bird of Honolulu, and you can find it right in the middle of Waikiki, where it lays its eggs on the trees along the main streets, as well as on those near the Zoo or by the Royal Palace

Here are pictures of chicks, adults, and an adult with chicks taken on a 1.5-hour tern walk, sponsored by the local Audubon society, that we took yesterday. These wonderful photos are by Nilou.

First, a tern in the garden of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, where our walk started. It was an adult holding a squid it caught out at sea—they forage as much as 120 miles out—and brought back to its single young. The young bird had already fledged and was off on its own, perhaps learning to fish. (The birds hunt by skimming the surface for fish, shrimp, and squid; they are unable to dive or land on the water and take off again.)

Our guide told us that sometimes adults will wait for several hours with a fish or squid to feed its young.

Close up. Note the extremely pointed bill, which is sometimes used to spear fish.

An adorable chick. As I mentioned earlier today, incubation of a single egg laid on a branch is about 35 days, and then the chick, sans nest, holds on to the branch with its huge, clawed feet for six weeks until it’s able to fly. It then goes back to its branch periodically to get fed. (Of course some eggs and birds get blown or fall to the ground, but a fallen chick can often be rescued and restored to its parents.)

White tern chicks are among the cutest of all baby birds:

Many of the birds shown below were perched in the bizarrely named (for the Trump era) golden shower tree, Cassia fistula, which was in bloom. These trees line the main street of Waikiki, Kalakaua Avenue. Most tourists walk by them and never notice the birds above.

A blooming golden shower tree:

An adult sitting on a chick (you can see the baby’s beak protruding from beneath the wing):

Mother (or father) and offspring (underneath in the first photo). The birds are thought to mate for life—not a lot is known about individual behavior because not many of them are banded—and are monogamous during the breeding season, with both parents incubating eggs, fishing, and feeding the offspring.

Parent and child in various poses:

Grooming the chick:

Down in the adult’s bill from grooming the chick:

The adults sometimes return with two to eight fish, all lined up in their bill (I have no idea how they do this), or sometimes just one huge fish that is hard for the chick to swallow.

I’m told that the fish can be bigger than the chick’s gut, in which case the chick sits on the branch with the tail end of the fish protruding from its beak, waiting to digest the head end before it swallows more.

Here’s a Honolulu chick processing a huge fish (not my photo). This looks painful!

I’m still palling around with my cat BFFs Pi and Loki. Pi has started sitting on my clothes and in my suitcase, as if he knows I’m leaving (but I’m not—at least for two weeks):

Loki, once an outdoor cat, looks hungrily at the freedom outside the window: