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