Kilauea Iki Trail weather

When I visited Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in the summer I hiked the Kilauea Iki Trail again. On that occasion, I descended into the crater on the western end and came back up on the eastern end. Shortly after I got up to the crater rim I took the top photo.

The trail continues around the northern rim of the crater and I continued walking. Three minutes after I took the first photo, I came to another overlook into the crater and the bottom photo shows the view I got there, an illustration of how quickly the weather can change in this area.

For more information about Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, go to nps.gov/havo/.

Black-crowned night herons

At various places along the North Kona and South Kohala coast there are pools just inland from the coast. Many of these pools are connected to the ocean and serve as breeding grounds for fish. In the larger pools those fish can be quite large. And where there’s a large pool of water with fish in it, herons won’t be far away.

The bird in the top photo was actively hunting, while the other was merely monitoring the situation. These adult birds have the black crowns that juveniles lack and also sport a long, white head plume, that I think is rather elegant.

Black-crowned night herons are considered indigenous because they weren’t introduced to Hawaii, but arrived on their own hundreds of years ago. Thus far, they haven’t changed from their mainland counterparts.

Everyone needs a copy editor

On Saturday, I was finalizing my post for Sunday when I had a copy editor drop in. This baby gecko checked out my typing and seemed satisfied. Then it padded up the screen to the top, perched there for a while, before disappearing down the back.

I usually use my laptop while sitting next to a window in the living room. It’s a long-standing tradition in this house for baby geckos to peer over the edge of the trim above this window, before leaping down onto my head, legs, or computer. This is a drop of five or six feet, which is 60 to 70 times the length of these little geckos. That would be like me throwing myself off a 400-foot-high cliff. The only difference is that I wouldn’t be getting up and going anywhere after that.

Sidewalks these days

This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘City Sidewalks.’ See more responses here. The Big Island is a bit short on cities, but we do have a few sidewalks, even up here in North Kohala.

For many years, Hawi had a Saturday farmers’ market, which was held on a green space, under the banyan trees, near the heart of the community. The Covid virus shut that down and after a while, it was announced that the market wouldn’t return. Instead, once restrictions were eased, a Saturday morning market appeared on the sidewalks downtown. This wasn’t a problem since pretty much all the businesses were closed.

Yesterday’s market was quite busy, with the added boost of the approaching Christmas season. In the top photo, the Kohala Coffee Mill was open for business but still had room for a couple of vendors out front. In the second photo, the space in front of the Bamboo Restaurant is fully occupied. The restaurant has been closed since March, and while limited seating and take out is allowed now, the restaurant has not reopened. A lot of their trade was from tourists so I suspect they’re waiting to see how that develops. They do, however, appear to be planning on reopening.

The third photo, taken farther down the street, was taken a few days earlier and reflects how things are without an event like the market. This building, at street level, was occupied by a gallery and a popular restaurant. Both have not only closed, but aren’t going to reopen. The spaces appear to be in the process of gaining new tenants, though I doubt they’ll open soon since there are still relatively few tourists visiting the island, at least compared to previous years.

The bottom photo shows a covered sidewalk, which complements the street sidewalk. There are several active businesses in this building, but it’s still much quieter than it used to be. I suspect that this year might have reminded old timers of how this part of the island used to be in the days before the tourist boom happened.

The bottom photo is also posted in response to Bushboy’s Last on the Card photo challenge for November. See more responses here.

Poinsettia

This week’s Friendly Friday challenge theme is ‘Red and Green.’ See more responses here.

Poinsettias (Euphorbia pulcherrima) have been associated with Christmas for centuries in Mexico and Central America, where the plant hails from. The plant was introduced to the United States in the 1800s, but it wasn’t until the last century that the Christmas link really took off. This was mostly due to savvy marketing tactics by the Ecke family, which had a monopoly on the poinsettia market thanks to their discovery of a secret grafting method which produced a denser plant and wasn’t duplicated until the 1990s.

The red ‘flowers’ are actually bracts, which hold the fairly insignificant flowers. On the Big Island, their brilliant displays are quite common on the west side of the island, where they can be seen as bushes and trees.