Hawaiian Seahorses

Thursday, October 10, 2024. Waikoloa Beach, HI

Today’s card is the Queen of Cups. The Queen represents someone psychic and empathic; someone who sees visions based on their mystic connection to the cosmos. Sometimes it can signify a tarot reading that's on target. I suppose that it could also be a woman who lives on an island and is connected with water somehow.

Thursday started out with a photo safari to The Queens’ Garden area. I wanted to photograph some white egrets and I’d figured out that they hung out there. Mark stayed behind. When I got to the garden, I didn’t see the egrets at first, so I photographed some plants. A groundskeeper was mowing a lawn on a rider-mower and all the egrets were hopping around in the mower’s wake, sifting through the grass clippings and hunter for food. They apparently loved the groundskeeper, because they didn’t mind him so much; they tended to fly away from me if I got too close. I managed to take loads of photographs without being mowed over. Then I managed to stalk close enough to a kind of lily where I was pretty sure a gecko lived and managed to photograph it before it hid among the leaves.

I was slightly disappointed to learn later that these were invasive White African Cattle Egrets, and not native to the islands at all.  This turned out to be the case for most of the really showy plants and animals we saw; the native species typically were in hiding.

Then it was back to scoop up Mark for a walking tour of the Hilton property next door and grabbing some coffee, tea, and a pastry. The resort next door is very Disneyesque—it has a monorail between three hotels and a boat ride (closed for maintenance). Trails wound around a sea-fed lagoon and a covered museum walk featuring Asian Art.

We saw, sadly, captive dolphins in a “swim with dolphins” program, and more happily, wild rays and turtle swimming in the lagoon (along with humans). While we watched the turtles from a bridge, a very woo-woo woman struck up a conversation with us about water and turtles and elemental affinities—I concluded that she was foretold by the Queen of Cups card.

Then we drove to Kona fora tour of a seahorse breeding program and seahorse encounter. The program breeds seahorses that aren’t quite as picky about what they eat and which aren’t so monogamous that they’ll die of a broken heart if they get separated from their partner. This allows them to be sold to the pet industry, sparing wild seahorses a slow, sad death by starvation. Unfortunately, they haven’t made a dent in the Asian Traditional Medicine industry, which grinds seahorses up to use as aphrodisiacs and potions for fidelity.

Our tour guide was Erica.  This was a different Erica from Dolphin Discoveries, but it led us to conclude that all marine-biologist-flavored guides on the Big Island are named Erica.

The seahorses were very cool. At the end of our tour, which followed seahorse development from fry to adult, we had an opportunity to hold our hands in a tank and have a seahorse wrap its tail around our fingers. Afterward, Mark wondered if I had a connection moment with them. I said that were cool, but I didn’t identify with them like I might with dragonflies, hummingbirds, or bats.

Afterward, we drove to an archeological site and a sea cliff where some folks were fishing.  The place was interesting, but what I was really noticing was that the wind had died down compared to other days and that both the temperature and humidity had gone way up as a result. 

We’ve come to the conclusion that driving anywhere on Hawaii is like driving from Eugene, Oregon to Bend, Oregon.  Firstly, one can pretty much reach any point on the Big Island from another point on the island in two hours; secondly, the arid lava fields look a whole lot like eastern Oregon (only not as old).