#'io

Avian August days 9-12

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Avian August is here but I for sure don't have time to do a bird every day, sadly. I made sure to make time at least for the 'Io, today's scheduled bird - Hawaii's endemic hawk and one of the cutest birds on the planet.

"Dietrich Varez (28 March 1939 – 14 August 2018) was born in Berlin, Germany, at the start of World War II. His father was Friedrich Donat, an architect and engineer of Lithuanian heritage, whom Varez has said was a Nazi who worked on military construction. His mother, Ursula, was a Polish-Swedish translator of English. As the war ended, Varez's father left his family to fend for themselves and he went into hiding from occupation forces, a period Varez has said was "pure misery". Ursula divorced Donat in 1947. In 1948, she married U.S. Army Sgt. Manuel Varez, who adopted her sons, Dietrich and Christian, and brought the family to his home in Oahu, Hawaii." [Wikipedia]

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Only one hawk lives and hunts in the forests of the Hawaiian Islands, and its the ‘io, commonly referred to as the Hawaiian hawk. The ‘io is a small, broad-winged raptor found nowhere else in the world. While they only breed on the Big Island, they have been spotted on Maui, O‘ahu, and Kaua‘i. In traditional Hawaiian culture, the ‘io is believed to be an “‘aumakua” – a family or personal god in the shape of an animal. In 1967, the hawk was put on the endangered species list due to various threats such as habitat destruction. Thanks to public and private conservation efforts for the past couple of decades, the hawk now has a stable and healthy population and has recovered. The hawk was recently removed from the Endangered Species List under the Trump Administration by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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