How to Know the Birds: No. 20, Alien Fairies in the Big City

Do you know the five most densely populated urban areas in the United States? According to the U. S. Census Bureau: Los Angeles (1), San Francisco (2), San Jose (3), Honolulu (4), Las Vegas (5).

I’d spent a fair bit of time these past several decades in and around L. A., San Fran, San Jose, and Vegas, but it wasn’t until last month that I set foot on Honolulu for the first time. Soon after arriving at Daniel K. Inoue International Airport, I found myself here, in the heart of the city:

Before we proceed any further, let’s play a little game. Let’s pretend we don’t know where we are. We scan around for clues and we see: Rush hour traffic—check. Pedestrians—check. Palm trees—check. Tall buildings—check. So far, so good. We’re plausibly in any one of those five densely populated cities. Now take a look directly overhead:

Honolulu, all the way. That’s a white tern, Gygis alba, formerly, and preferably, known as the fairy tern. (The name was lost due to a nomenclatorial clash with another species by the same name.) You can see the bird out at sea, but G. alba is really in its element in downtown Honolulu. Like Chimney Swifts and seagulls in skies over city centers on the mainland, white terns are common above the busy boulevards of Hawaii’s capital. Maybe the bird would be better named the urban tern? Or how about this?—the alien tern. Take a closer look:

Awww. Call it, ahem, a fairy tale ending to our time in Honolulu. But here’s the deal—with apologies to anti-bird conspiracy theorists, the real deal: You really can enter a heavily visited park in one of the densest cities in America and see Pacific golden-plovers standing in the grass and red-crested cardinals bopping around fountains and pure white terns perched improbably in a little copse. And every manner of human: the exercisers and meditators, the romancers and wanderers, and more.

For Shakespeare that was a bit too much. The conjoining of nature and humanity intrigued the playwright, that’s for sure, but properly conceived in the realm of fantasy and Join the American Birding Association at www.aba.org!