You’ll see them within an hour of landing. A loud brown bird with a yellow eye-patch strutting across the rental-car shuttle parking lot. A small striped dove walking under your beach chair, calmly picking up crumbs. A bird with a flame-red mohawk hopping across a hotel lawn while you eat breakfast.
This Hawaii common birds field guide is for visitors who want to know what those are. Travel guides cover the volcanoes and the snorkel spots. They almost never tell you that the brown myna outside your room originally came from India in 1865, or that the cardinal with the red crest is South American.
Here’s the part that surprises most visitors: most of the birds you notice in lowland Hawaiʻi are introduced, not native. Native Hawaiian forest birds, including the famous ʻiʻiwi and ʻapapane, mostly live above 4,000 feet in remaining native forest, often on Big Island and Maui (per the National Park Service profiles for Haleakalā and Hawaiʻi Volcanoes). What you see down at sea level is mostly a global mishmash of cage-bird escapees and biocontrol experiments, with a small number of genuine natives — mostly seabirds and shorebirds.
This is a visitor’s field guide to what you’ll actually meet. We’ve covered the feral chickens of Kauaʻi in their own post, so they don’t get a section here. The common lowland birds do.
