I’m a neophyte birder. I give credit for prescience to former Connecticut Conference Minister the Rev. Dr. Davida Foy Crabtree, who gave me Hawaii’s Birds (Audobon, 1997) as I was moving to Hilo. As I’ve said elsewhere, I began learning about local birds in order to tell stories during worship services. Most of the creatures that I grew up learning and knowing about simply don’t live here. On an island with very few native mammals, I turned to birds as the inspiration and characters for these stories. Many of those stories are archived here.
It was only last year that I began formally recording bird sightings through a service of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology called eBird. In 2025 I completed 43 checklists, attaching photos to twelve of them. I took 1,191 photos and 107 videos that I’d be willing to show somebody else. The sightings covered 45 species on three of the Hawaiian Islands and in Connecticut.
That’s not a lot of species for a serious birder, but that’s a part of living in Hawai’i. It is a lot of photo and video material. As the end of the year approached, I realized that I had more bird material than I could include in my annual “A Year” video. The result is the video above, featuring some of the birds I saw and photographed in 2025.
Some of my favorite photos are, of course, in the video, but here they are in a gallery as well.
Enjoy!
Photo Gallery: Birds of 2025
ordainedgeek 
This is spectacular!!! And the predominance of birds is something I learned about in Aotearoa/New Zealand … and the damages to the entire ecosystem caused by Europeans bringing animals in so they could “go hunting.”
Hawai’i literally has no native mammals – it’s just too far from other bodies of land for them to get here without human intervention. That said, people have brought lots of species here intentionally and unintentionally. The birds, however, brought themselves here (or at least rode the wind) and have diversified so magnificently. Hawaiians were more cautious than Americans have been, but there were four species of goose on these islands at one time, and now we’re down to one.
That was exactly the case in Aotearoa with the importing of rabbits to hunt and then predators to kill the rabbits and larger predators … a true mess.
Rabbits are a huge anxiety on the Big Island – and sadly, they’re already here.
To be honest, though, I think that the species other than humanity which has had the most impact on endemic creatures here has been feral cats. That’s my opinion only.
As it was sung and is always true … “when will we ever learn, when will we ever learn.”