Located in the central flyway, Port Aransas, Texas boasts hundreds of native and migrating

species with a gorgeous island backdrop.

With six sites along the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail, the island offers up-close vantage

points to marvel at the magnificent migrating birds that consider Port A the ideal restop.

Get your tickets to the Whooping Crane Festival and celebrate their annual return to their

wintering habitat. Go to visit portoransus.com slash birding to plan your visit.

Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association.

I am Nate Swick. It has been quite the weather and natural

disaster-rich summer and one of the more dramatic and troubling examples of that were the expansive

wildfires in Hawaii this summer, predominantly on the island of Maui, which, as many birders and

bird conservationists know, is the island home to a number of endemic and critically endangered

Hawaiian songbirds, notably Akoi-Coi, and Kiwi-kiyu, alternately known as crested honey creeper

and Maui parrot bill, respectively. As far as I know, and folks can, of course, feel free to

correct me if I'm wrong, but the fires mostly, if not entirely, avoided the forests on the leeward slopes of

Haleakala in the east of the island where the birds are found, thankfully. But one critical

bird conservation site that was under threat was the Maui Bird Conservation Center, which is the

site where a couple bird species, Al-A, which is Hawaiian Crow, Aki Kiki are housed and protected.

Alala are extinct in the wild, and Akikiki very nearly so.

The site hosts about 40 of each, which is a significant percentage of the population of these two species.

They are being held in the hopes that they or their descendants can be eventually returned to the wild.

But a fire caused by fallen power lines and fueled by the current drought on the island

came incredibly close, about 10 or 15 feet, the width of a gravel road from reaching the

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