Every fall, small golden-brown shorebirds appear on lawns, golf courses, and cemetery grounds across Hawaiʻi, and every spring they vanish. The birds are kōlea, the Pacific golden-plover, and their annual disappearance is one of the more remarkable feats in the bird world: a nonstop flight of roughly 3,000 miles across open ocean to breeding grounds in Alaska and Siberia. On Tuesday, October 13, 2026, from 5 to 6 p.m., the Princeville Moʻolelo free lecture series will host biologist and author Susan Scott for a talk titled "GPS Tags and Kōlea: What a Study Tells Us About Tracking Hawaiʻi's Shorebirds," at the Princeville Community Center, 4334 Emmalani Road. Admission is free.
The talk centers on a question that has quietly nagged at plover researchers for years. Scientists have long wanted to know where kōlea go and how they get there, and the tool of choice has been the GPS tag -- a tiny transmitter, often described as a backpack, fitted to a bird's back. But attaching hardware to a bird that must fly thousands of miles without stopping raises an obvious worry: does the device itself harm the animal? A study recently published in the journal Wader Study, led by Dr. Oscar Johnson with colleagues including members of the Hawaiʻi Audubon Society, set out to answer that question as rigorously as possible for the Pacific golden-plover. Scott worked with Johnson throughout the study, and her presentation will walk through what the team did and what they found.
The research was conducted at an unlikely field site: the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl in Honolulu. The cemetery's manicured, open lawns have made it a favorite wintering ground for kōlea, and it has become something of a laboratory for plover science.
That earlier work is part of a broader research effort. A separate study published in Wader Study documented the migration of Pacific golden-plovers caught and fitted with GPS tags at Moorea, in French Polynesia. The Hawaiʻi birds, by contrast, tend to fly their roughly 3,000-mile route directly to Alaska, a trip that takes three to four days without a stop. Kōlea nearly double their body weight before departure to fuel the journey.
The speaker bringing this science to a Kauaʻi audience has an unusual résumé for a bird talk. Susan Scott wrote a weekly column called OceanWatch for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser from 1987 to 2020 and is the author or co-author of 12 books about nature in Hawaiʻi. Two recent books -- one on kōlea, one on the manu-o-Kū, or white tern -- led the Hawaiʻi Audubon Society's board to elect her president of the society in January 2022. Her latest book, in production at the University of Hawaiʻi Press, is titled Hawaiʻi's Backyard Birds: A Guide to the Islands' Introduced Species. A former registered nurse, Scott earned a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and graduated from the university's Marine Option Program, where she studied marine journalism. As a decades-long volunteer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, she has counted albatrosses at Kuaihelani (Midway Atoll), tagged coconut crabs on Palmyra Atoll, and rescued monk seals and sea turtles at Lalo (French Frigate Shoals).
The Moʻolelo series itself has become a fixture on Kauaʻi's North Shore. It is a partnership between the Princeville at Hanalei Community Association's events committee and the nonprofit Friends of Kauaʻi Wildlife Refuges, and it draws on the islands' deep pool of wildlife biologists, cultural practitioners, and historians. Past installments have covered topics ranging from the endangered ʻalae ʻula, or Hawaiian common gallinule, to the history of Nihokū and Mōkōlea Point. The events are held at the Princeville Community Center and are free to the public, part of an effort to connect residents and visitors with the natural and cultural heritage of the region. Scott is a returning presenter, which the series' organizers note in their announcement.
For anyone who has watched a kōlea patrol a patch of grass and wondered where it spends the other half of its year, the talk offers a rare chance to hear the answer from someone who helped produce it. The birds' migrations are among the longest undertaken by any animal their size, and the question of whether human tracking tools interfere with that journey matters not just for the plovers but for how scientists study migratory species everywhere. The presentation begins at 5 p.m. on October 13 at the Princeville Community Center on Emmalani Road. It is free, and no registration is required.