
This photo doesn’t look much different in black and white than it does in color. Happy Halloween!

This photo doesn’t look much different in black and white than it does in color. Happy Halloween!

These two bulls reside in a field beside the road to Upolu Aiport. I’ve never seen them more than six feet apart from each other! The cattle egret was just taking a break on a blustery day and took off soon after I took the photo.

This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Fences.’ See more responses here.
Here on the Big Island, fences tend to be of two kinds – chainlink and painted wood. Walls and hedges are possibly more popular. Walls don’t need as much maintenance and hedges fill in easily all by themselves, though they do require trimming if they’re not to take over.
These fences are ones that have seen hard times. The top photo is the chainlink fence around Upolu Airport. Someone managed to take out a section of this recently. Not sure whether they got distracted or were going too fast and lost control, but several sections of fence got destroyed. Judging from the trail of damage, the vehicle can’t have fared well either.

The other two photos are of fences around Kohala Ranch, a subdivision in Kawaihae. These photos were taken after August’s big brush fire. The tidy white fences surrounding the property have been rather battered. Fixing the damage will be a significant task, though I think most of the folks living there were probably happy to have been spared more than this largely aesthetical issue.


There are four reasons why I took this photo and why I like it. The ears!

This photo is from a while back but it could be right now as Tropical Storm Calvin approaches the Big Island. The storm was a hurricane while in the Eastern Pacific, but it weakened as it neared Hawaii. Yesterday afternoon, the storm strengthened again with winds up to 60 mph. Who knows what will happen to it overnight, but I’m scheduling this ahead of time in case the power goes out.
Hurricanes here have been a mixed bag. Hurricane Lane, which hit the island in 2018, stalled off the west coast of the island, bringing gray skies but little wind or rain to the west coast. The eastern part of the island had a different experience. They had 54 inches of rain in three days!


The Sunday Stills Monthly Color Challenge theme is ‘Blue.’ See more responses here. After sorting through some photos, I found a cluster of abstract blues that I like so here they are.





At Upolu Airport, there’s a mock orange hedge and through it grows a passion vine. The hedge used to be trimmed once in a while, but the flowers attracted to all kinds of insects and was teeming with life. Passion Vine Butterflies laid eggs there and their caterpillars ran amok munching on leaves.
These days the hedge is kept trimmed and is the poorer for it. It’s basically lifeless. I see the odd butterfly, an occasional caterpillar and that’s it. So Passion Vine Butterflies, which I used to see all the time, have thinned out considerably in that area. However, I did spot this one feeding on Blue Heliotrope flowers not too far away.

Heading down for my walk at Upolu, I saw this cow on the loose. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence, but the main road is a mile up the hill and the escapees rarely get that far.

This one gave me a suspicious look as she passed. Perhaps she was trying to get rid of the ever-present cluster of flies on her back!
