Most visitors blow past the Hosmer Grove turnoff racing for the summit, which is exactly why we send our guests there. Just past the park entrance station, at 6,800 feet, a half-mile loop wanders through a hundred-year-old experimental forest where Maui’s native honeycreepers still feed within arm’s reach. Stand quietly at the forest edge for ten minutes and there is a very good chance a scarlet i’iwi lands close enough that you will not need the binoculars.
Hosmer Grove birding: i'iwi, apapane and friends
The stars are the honeycreepers. The i’iwi is the one everyone comes for: brilliant scarlet with a long, down-curved bill built for sipping nectar. The apapane is crimson too, smaller, with white under the tail, and it moves through the canopy in restless little flocks. Bright green amakihi work the same trees, and if you are patient you may pick out a Maui alauahio creeping along the branches. These birds exist nowhere on Earth but Hawai’i.
The technique could not be simpler. Go early, walk the loop once to find the flowering trees, then stop moving. The birds come to the blossoms, not to you, so the flowers are the whole game. Listen for the i’iwi’s odd, squeaky-hinge call above you. Binoculars help for the canopy, but plenty of guests come back with phone photos of an i’iwi ten feet away. It is a different kind of birding than the stilt and coot show at Kealia Pond down the road from us — smaller, redder, and rarer.
It matters because these birds are refugees. Mosquito-borne disease pushed Hawai’i’s forest birds out of the lowlands generations ago, and they survive mainly in cool, high forest like this. The vast Waikamoi preserve next door protects tens of thousands of acres of that habitat but is closed to unguided visitors, which makes this little loop the everyday birder’s window into that world. Seeing an i’iwi here is genuinely seeing something the lowlands lost.