 Welcome to Lackable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Post Ethan Allen. Thanks for joining us here on Lackable Science where we try to show that plants is all around us everywhere, every day, part of our lives. With me today is Susan Scott. Welcome Susan. Thank you. Susan's back here. This must be your third appearance here. And talking about her new book, Hawaii's White Turns. Beautiful book about a beautiful animal. So Susan is an amazing person, author of this and seven other books or something, I think, eight other books. Okay. Biologists volunteer for various biological projects out in the northwest Hawaiian islands. Right to weekly column that you may have seen, the Ocean Watch column. Nine books, yeah. Lectures on marine biology, registered nurse. Person of many talents, obviously. So maybe you can tell us sort of what peaked your interest in these animals. Well, I was working as a volunteer for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2003. And so I was working at Turn Island in French for the Kills which now does not have any more biologists because I cycle and knock down all the buildings. A couple years ago. But my job there, I was assigned the White Turns, monitor the White Turns to count the eggs and count the fish and see how long it took to hatch. And so one of my jobs was to go around and look at who was laying eggs. And so, but in my room, we were in a Coast Guard barracks. There were White Turns in the window sill. I could see them from my room. So I thought every day I could see them every hour. And so I walked around the outside and first picture will show you what I saw. It was an amazing thing that the White Turns parents love those window sills. And so the problem was they would lay an egg and the window sill was just a bit slanted for the water to drain the water off. And so they would sit on the egg and nine times out of 10, they would just roll off onto the ground and break. A female can lay up to six eggs one at a time. They only raise one chick at a time. And so she would lay again and it would happen. Sometimes they'd incubate them for a couple of weeks and so there'd be a half-formed chick struggling, broken, and so one day the Refuge Manager and all of us felt really terrible about that. So we went around with a chisel and a hammer and he chiseled out little indentations in each window sill around our room, around the whole barracks. And so the chicks did much better after that. And they had a much higher excess fletching rate there than in other parts of the world because I think because of that. Excellent. And that actually is an interesting thing about these birds, right? These birds have really adopted or adapted, I should say, to human habitations. They've adopted human buildings as nesting sites. Yes, they have and that's one of the great things along with our colea, our plovers, and some other animals that are adapting to people and I think in this era of our planet, the ones that adapt to human things are gonna do much better. Yeah, their advantage. Right, and so that's what happened with the white turns is in 1961, there was one pair that a bird are found on an egg near Cocoa Head. And so over the years, they sort of expanded from, that was out near Cocoa Head, not into Waikai, but more into Keppelani Park. And so people were watching them and they did some studies in the 80s and now we're up to, the last count was 2,300. And they are only nesting in, they don't actually build a nest. So I say nest, you know, not really a nest, but they breed in between Waikai and Hikomiraflora. And then nowhere else, they've not come over to the windward side or any other parts. And so no one really knows if they are, chicks that have fledged and are coming back to breed where they were born, or if there's other birds coming from other places, recruiting, because the species is indigenous to the world. But this is the only place where they've urbanized. The only city where they've settled in. Yeah, we're the only city that has them. And they're our official bird. They were made the official bird of Honolulu in 2007. Yeah, that's wonderful. And they're beautiful. Yeah, they're beautiful and they're, and since they don't have a nest, it's really easy to see them. So they, you can go to international marketplace. And there's eight pairs in there right now. One of the researchers told me, and so you can go up the escalators there. I don't know if you've been there lately, but you can see them at different levels. And the nice thing is you can just look eye to eye and the chicks aren't in, the one chick that the parents are raising aren't in a nest. So they're out in the open, sitting on a branch. And one of the reasons the researchers think they like Honolulu so much is because we have about 250,000 trees, most almost all introduced species in Honolulu and they're constantly being trimmed. And so those trimming scar, those trimming leaves go around scars and it's the perfect place to lay an egg that won't roll off. That was a hard sort of, you know, windowsills. Yeah, windowsills and ledges. And so yeah, throughout the book, we have pictures of birds laying eggs in weird places. But the great thing is people can just look out their office window or look out their condominium window and see, watch a parent raise a chick. And I think the next picture has a good picture that I took from the international marketplace. And that's just standing on the upper ledge and one parent was there and another one came in with a fish. And that's the other cool thing about these birds is they don't follow the fish and regurgitate it like a lot of birds, but they feed them the whole fish. And so researchers can see what the species are. They didn't take the fish. Right, you talk in here about they found some species of fish that were quite unusual in this area. Yeah, yeah. They seem only essentially the white terns are basically located there. Yeah, they're locating them and then they're bringing them back and hanging them out of their mouths so we can see them. And the amazing thing is they can apparently have one fish in their mouth and still fish further without losing the first one. It's amazing. And they can stack multiple fish at times. I think the record is 16, some small ones. And those are slippery little things. They're slippery little things. And so I was really curious and I heard they have ridges in their beaks and so I know a researcher from HPU who was at some dead birds that he was going to dissect for his graduate students and he said, I could come over and look at the inside of the beaks. So we took some pictures of these ridges and they're almost like teeth. Right. And the tongue is really flexible and bends and so I think the tongue holds the first fish up against the teeth. They're all ridged backwards. Backwards and so they can't fly forward. Because you can't imagine how they can hold for like eight fish and still catch an eye. Yeah, still have. You think as they open to be wider, something's going to fall. And they don't dive. They just sort of they're just... Just grab them off the surface sort of. Yeah, they're just different. So they often actually are found in conjunction with where there's larger predatory fish being blow right and that's pushing the little fish up to the surface. Right. Yeah, the Polynesian voyagers really love them. And the fishermen like them, white turns as well as some other species because they all congregate in what they call bird piles. And that's where the big fish are driving small fish to the surface. So the fishermen like them because that's where the tunas and mahi mahi are. And the navigators like them because the white turned parents don't go more than a hundred miles or so offshore to catch fish to feed their chicks. So if you're in that planet, find an island and you see a white turn with fish and it's easy to know you're within a hundred miles. If you have some general idea of which direction. Yes, a really big moment. So everyone's watching the white turns. Excellent, excellent. No, they're really wonderful birds. They were revered by the Hawaiians in the past, right? Yes, historically there's not much in the Hawaiian legends and lore about them. But one of the early birders in Hawaii, I forgot, in the late 1800s I think, asked people on Niihau if they would kill one because that's what they did in those days as a specimen and they said, oh no. So no one really knows if they nested here but they were here historically. But were the only island, Oahu's the only island and Honolulu's the only part of Oahu where they nested. But people have a great view of them so that they're getting really popular. Really, that is they're not on the big island or Molokai or Maui or that they're out in the free of case. Maybe offshore, yeah, maybe offshore but not in the Northwest Hawaiian islands have a lot. Midway has about 50,000 individuals and there's a lot of ironwood trees that were in trees there. So what the hurricane that came through recently and really hit pretty hard in the Northwest Hawaiian islands that must have changed the ecology there. Is that disruptive to the population? Yeah, it knocks the chicks down and the eggs, rolls the eggs off but the females can lay up to six and the birds in the Northwest chain usually have a peak breeding season in the spring. We have two in the spring and the fall and our success rate are meaning the ones here in Honolulu is much higher than other birds. So they have probably have really good fishing off the city front and they have those pukas in the trees to lay their egg and the other theory is that there are not as many predators in the city as in the countryside because people, you know, they're on feral cats running around in the city as much and people trap rats around the restaurant so we don't have the kind of predators that probably are more in the winter or lingered. That's great. Yeah. Why don't you move on? I think you have another photo or two here. Yeah. Again, show how beautiful these animals are. They're so beautiful and they're really fun to watch because you can hear it out in the open, you know, unlike birds in a nest, but also they're nesting in the monkey pod and kukui trees that are outside of people's eyes and condos and office building. So one woman wrote me that she had watched and photographed parents raise a chick and she'd made her own picture book of it and everyone in the office would come in every day and see what was happening. Yeah, I've heard of people setting up falcon cams in like New York where the falcon falcons would adopt a building and they'll suddenly, yes, outside of some office in the 50th floor, they'll set up their nest and pigeons. And then people can watch it, you know? And yeah, then people set up cameras. And there's a white-turn cam at KCC, Capulonic Community College, that the students have set up wonderful. So we can watch it. You're lucky you can see the parent come in and take a chick. That's super. And they feed the chicks fish that are almost too big for them. So if the chick can't quite get it in its mouth, you know, if it's like hanging this, the parent will hold up the tail and put it in the mouth. And then the chick sits there and digests the first half and then sometimes it takes a couple hours. But it's pretty cute to watch. Yeah, I used to keep large constrictors. I would eat things that are much bigger around than they were. Yeah, yeah. It's always impressive to see what they could get in. It is, and the long it takes. Yeah, right. Exactly, it's a somewhat same kind of idea. So how long did you work on this book? Well, I write a weekly column for the Star Votizer and readers would start asking me questions about the white turns and I didn't know the answers. And so I would talk to some people who were doing research and the literature was pretty piecemeal. And since the birds are found in the Atlantic and Australia and around the world in the tropics, there was literature in journals from around the world. So I joined, there was a Huey that got together and said, hey, well, this is our city bird and no one's really paying a lot of attention to that. Let's get together and get the information out. So this Huey is teachers and BLNR, state, federal, and people like me, just all joining together. We have meetings every few months of what we can do to help this. So I joined the Huey and that's when we decided that there was enough literature to probably put a book together so people who love these birds can find things out and look them up. And so it took me about a year to do it and University of Hawaii Press designed it and published it. And the royalties to me are going to the Hawaii Audubon Society. We're trying to raise money to buy a satellite bag, probably only one at a time. They cost about $2,500, but they talk to the satellite so you don't have to recapture the bird to get the information. And those are the more expensive ones because if we can catch an adult in the first place, which is really hard because our monkey pod trees and other mature trees are really tall and even the trimmers can't always get up there, you'll never catch it the second time. It'll be wise to do it. If I say you have to lose the tag, put it on its leg in a biodegradable manner and then let it fall off. Interesting. And we're going to dig more deeply into the white turns here when we come back. I'm told we need to go to a quick break. Susan Scott, author, biologist, adventurer is here with me in the studios. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, and thank you for joining us likeable science. We'll be back in one minute. Hey, loha. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii, live from the studios. I'll bring you guests. I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe, your family safe, keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me because Security Matters. Aloha. I'm Jay Fidel of Think Tech. Our flagship energy show among the six energy shows we have is Hawaii, the state of clean energy. It plays every Wednesday at 4 PM. Come around and see us. Learn about energy. Keep current on energy on thinktechhawaii.com. Aloha, and welcome to At the Crossroads. I'm your host, Keisha King. You can catch me every Wednesday, alive at five. I'll see you there. And welcome back to Alegable Science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. Thanks for coming back to learn more about white turns. Susan Scott is here in the studio. Her new book, Hawaii's White Turns, has just recently come out. And it's a beautiful book. It's a lovely book filled with all sorts of good information, lots of pretty pictures. Tremendous gathering together of the knowledge that these almost mysterious animals, where bits and pieces have been known from different places at different times, but hadn't really ever been pulled together. And you've done a remarkable job there. We were talking a little bit on the break, this hui you mentioned just before the break, this gathering of people who are interested in who want to support these birds. This is sort of, it's almost an orphan project, right? That is, there is not a lot of big focused attention on it. And this group has come together and tries to bring some attention, raise funds to get these things you were saying. They want to get a satellite tag, a tag. They'll beam signals up to satellites. They can really track more accurately how one of these birds actually, where they go and when they go. Right, the hui has a lot of really interesting people from different walks of life. And one of the great things about it is there's a man named Rich Downs who's retired, but he's pretty much given a second career of monitoring them. And he set up a website called whiteturns.org. And there's lots of information on that about how you can help. And so he has also started, he's done a lot of work. And he's done a citizen science group. So people who have a white turnout by their office window or their condo can join the citizen science and tell him where it is. And when there's a white-turned family in a tree, they're federally and state protected. So it's against the law to cut down that tree or the limbs that, or disturb it. And so he has gotten from BLNRs, picked in, and made this blue tape that goes around the trunks. So if you see blue tape in the city of Yolani Palace and the city center, that's where the turns are. Yeah, I was just walking really the other day. It's a wiki-ki on a tree just by one of the condos there. I had this big blue tape around. I wondered what it was for. I saw some writing on it, went up and looked and it said, whiteturns nesting there. And there were trimmers to be very careful not to disturb it. And the website's on there, so you can do that. But the phone number on there is a rescue. So if a bird falls, a chick falls, if you can't get it back safely yourself, safe, you can call that number. And there's a team of people who will try to either take it to a rehab rescue center, a bird center, or get it back in the nest. If you can put a bird back in the nest, and the parents will feed it. Right, of course, I have no nest, so it'd be hard to tell where it fell from. I keep saying nest to that. I mean breeding sites. Actually, if you put it on even a nearby branch, it'll be okay. I was going to say, I would guess the parents must be sort of flexible. Yeah, they are flexible. And as long as it can balance on their hatch, it's really huge feet. So the chicks hang on. That's how they're adapted. An intriguing piece of their biology, right? Because they don't do any nesting. So literally, they're all on these bear branches. The chicks are incubated there. The chicks are born there. And somehow must have some very reflexive, instinctive, ripping. They do. And one of the theories, a couple of theories of why they've evolved that way is that they don't get nest mites that are in the nesting material. There's no parasites to infect them. And another is that they nested traditionally in cliff. So they didn't need nesting material. Right, nesting material, they don't make nests. But now they're nesting in artificial cliffs. Yeah, or artificial cliffs. Or artificial cliffs. Or building, yeah. They nested in the Hawaii State Art Museum. And there was an $8 million renovation planned. And so when there's a white-turned family there, no one messes with it. And they put that off until it's wedged. That must have made the contractors a little edgy. I think it does. But on the other hand, the tree trimmers are into it. So they like the blue tape. So they know there's a family in there to look out for and not trim that tree. And the tree trimmers have really come on board. It's good. Yeah, because the family would always come back a few months later and trim the tree. Yeah, and they don't want to hurt the birds. They just didn't know where they all were. So Rich's blue tape and his citizen science of, I think I have a picture of them where he shows them on the website where they all are. Well, that's the proclamation. Yeah, and that's the one. So each pinpoint is where there's a nest and the different colors are whether there's a chick or a chick or a chick of the age. So he keeps track of that. You can see it's between Hawaii Kai and, you know. Yeah, with a nice, dense area along Wai'kei. Yeah, nice, dense area. And the university, I gave a talk at the university on this week, and there were white turns all over the place. So people knew them there. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. Well, that's great. And so people can get to that website. They can get to this hui if they want and join it. And active supporters become citizen science. Yes, and there's been fantastic professional photographers who have joined. There's lots of different kinds of people there, and they contributed greatly to the book. So the book has really nice photos. Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah, all donated, which is very nice. And so these birds almost pose, you know, and act really cute for the pictures. So they let the pictures stop feeding the chick. And then you're actually donating profits from this book to the Audubon Society, right? To the Audubon Society, yeah. So this is all doing a lot of good for a lot of good organizations. Yeah, and they get-togethers are pretty fun. Oh, well, that's right, yeah. New people from different countries. Right, because these birds, particularly because of their urban adaptation, will draw sort of different kinds of people, people who just haven't had them outside their office or outside their condo or whatever. Right, and teachers are teaching. There's a family of several white-turns, I think, at the moment. Oh, OK, so it's a great way to engage kids and all. There must have been that the original settlers, the original ones who came and did this were probably abnormally, we say not shy, abnormally tolerant of disturbances near their nests. Because, apparently, sometimes they'll be doing major construction right near these trees and they'll seem to bother the birds at least at most of the rays. They're not bothered by 24-hour light either because they have ticks on top of light poles. And Rich says there's traffic and commotion there in Waikiki, of course, the birds. And they don't care about the light or the traffic or the noise. And so predators are a big thing. So one of the things that we can do to help them is to try to get them to the cats' doors. I think the trend is to ask the cats' doors. Actually, better for the cats to do the cats' doors a lot longer. It is better for the cats and definitely predators. Cats are predators. Oh, yeah, they've devastated. There are stories, I know, on the Outer Banks North Carolina, of cats bringing in every specimen of a particular species of bird that's ever been found. And apparently eliminated the species of bird off the face of the earth. And they also carry toxoplasmosis, which infects the monk seals. So that's a really big problem. We have now a couple, several hundred monk seals in the main Hawaiian islands. And they're really worried about that. So it's another issue. This isn't for how they're talking about birds. You go, yeah. Cats. Well, it's all connected, right? This is a nice example of how nature is all around us now. And we're all part of it. We connect to them. And especially here on the islands. Yeah, these small islands are particularly vulnerable. Their connections are usually very close. And they're easier to study because it's an island. There's an edge to it. They can't go too far. So they probably, you say they only fly maybe 100 miles for food. But then do they migrate seasonally at all? Well, that's a good question. That's one of the reasons that it would be really nice to get a satellite tag where it could get a healthy adult and see where they go, because no one knows. Ninoa Thompson said they go 110 miles. That's the furthest that he's seen them in the voyaging, glaya. And researchers think they fly 1,000 miles off shore. But having sailed a lot that distance off shore, thousands of miles off shore, well, I've never seen a white thing like that. But it doesn't mean they're not there. It's this global distribution. But they have a global. It does suggest that they're pretty good flyers. Pretty good flyers. They get around. Yeah, they get around. But they're on offshore islands in Australia and the Ascension and Atlantic. And so they've gotten there. And the reason they're mostly only on islands, offshore islands, in those parts of the world is pretty good. Right, right. They would be very vulnerable. Yeah, they're vulnerable on that. And they're not that big. They're not that puffer bird, basically, right? No, right. Although they'll attack dogs in the city. They've been seen. Dive bombing dogs. They're better. They don't have a lot of defense, but they're plucky. That's good, that's good. I got poked in the head. It didn't hurt me, but when I was taking a picture of one one center and I opened it. That's right, I recall you have a story in this book here. Excuse me, sorry. You don't want to truth. Let's see, we have another image or two, or was that it? Maybe that was it, OK. Yeah, and this was when the Mufi Hanuman made it. Yeah, OK, there you go. This was Nainoa Thompson's mother. Laura Thompson worked with the Mufi Hanuman and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Keith Wendell, to make this the official city bird. And so that was 2007. And of course it still is, but we're trying to make more people aware of that. I think we do have one more image that we saw before. I guess. That's the home website of the Pui. Honoku is the, and that's interesting. These birds, just for people who've lived here a long time, are what we used to call fairy turns. And I called my original book title was the Tinkerbell of Sea Birds. And I did that because people don't know always that white turn is the same as what was fairy turn. But there's an international society of ornithologists that name birds, or common name, English common names. And everyone agrees on that. And so there's a fairy turn in Australia, so our turn became a white turn. It's a very confusing thing all in biology. They say an animal is called by different names all around. And I used to think, oh, why can't we just call them fairy turns? But we don't have that for fish. But so where you could go as much as I travel, the same fish is called all kinds of names depending on where you are. So it's kind of. Well, thank you so much for being here, Susan. I've learned a lot, as I'm sure our audience has. Again, Susan Scott's new book, Hawaii's White Turn, a lovely book, truly beautiful, truly great images, great texts, very informative. And this has been an enlightening and fun conversation here. I enjoyed it. Thank you for coming back. Thank you for having me and letting me continue the white turn talk because it's really fun to help people. Excellent. Well, thank you for coming. I hope you'll come back here to Think Tech Hawaii for a likable science next week. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. Till then.