BirdNote

CURWOOD: It's Living on Earth, I'm Steve Curwood. [BIRD NOTE THEME] CURWOOD: And now let's head to the sun-soaked beaches of Hawaii for today's BirdNote. Here's Mary McCann. MCCANN: "Tropicbird." The name alone evokes a warm breeze and a place where green islands dot a shimmering blue ocean. [MUSIC: Aloha Wau la Oe by P. Cosma. Performed by the Hoopii Brothers, from Aloha From Maui: Mountain Apple Company: 1999] MCCANN: Picture a streamlined, sparkling white seabird, with a red spear of a bill and luxuriantly long tail-streamers. With the strong, direct flight of a falcon, a tropicbird can catch a flying fish on the wing, or plunge like an arrow into the sea andwith its serrated billcapture a squid. Red-tailed Tropicbird in flight (photo: Matt Knoth) [RED-TAILED TROPICBIRD VOCALS] MCCANN: Birds of such elegant natural design seem creatures of myth. And in fact, their scientific name links directly to Greek mythology, as tropicbirds belong to the genus Phaeton. Phaeton, the son of Apollo, hurtled through the sky in the chariot of the sun, only to plunge into the River Eridanus. Myth, sun, and sea theres that warm ocean breeze again. [MUSIC: Aloha Wau la Oe by P. Cosma. Performed by the Hoopii Brothers, from Aloha From Maui: Mountain Apple Company: 1999] Red-tailed Tropicbird (photo: Scott Henderson) Maybe its time for a trip to Hawaii. Visit the island of Kauai, and you can easily see one of these near-mythical birds, its glistening white form floating in the air just beyond a sea cliffs edge. Tropicbirds have ranged through most of the tropical latitudes of the worlds oceans for 60 million years. Im Mary McCann CURWOOD: There are photos of these gliding Tropicbirds at our website, LOE.org. [Written by Bob Sundstrom Call of the Red-tailed Tropicbird provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by C. Robbins. Aloha Wau la Oe by P. Cosma. Performed by the Hoopii Brothers, from Aloha From Maui: Mountain Apple Company: 1999. Ambient waves by Kessler Productions. Producer: John Kessler Executive Producer: Chris Peterson 2014 Tune In to Nature.org January 2014 Narrator: Mary McCann]