By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Start watching your kolea closely this morning. It is all dressed up in its tuxedo plumage for the trip to Alaska. The journey could start any minute. Don't be caught napping.

Last year, the snow birds started migrating around April 10. Who knows, your kolea might be the first to take off in 2003. Wouldn't that be something to tell your grandchildren?

More important would be a discovery that kolea are leaving earlier, a sign that global warming affects Hawai'i.

Or that they are not, and it does not.

Last year, the Pacific golden plovers left in groups, during a period of about two weeks. How long it takes them to make the annual flight is still in question. Dr. Wally Johnson, a kolea expert from Montana State University who studies the birds, is attaching radio transmitters to track the kolea.

The shortest interval last year between a radio report from a bird in Hawai'i to another in Alaska was 70 hours. But the bird could have delayed its departure or rested somewhere in Alaska before its signal was picked up.

Johnson said it probably takes kolea about 50 hours to make the trip, flying 50 to 60 miles an hour. That's two days and two hours nonstop. Amazing. Kolea are smaller than pigeons.

This year, I've gotten interested in how fences affect their behavior. After they came back in August, two kolea spent every morning pacing on either side of a chain-link fence by the Ala Wai Park rec center, as if they were magnets drawn together by suspicion.

On the other end of the park, by Manoa Stream, workmen put up a temporary fence in a playing field. Immediately, two kolea began feeding on either side of the fence. When workmen took the fence away, the kolea stayed, daring each other to cross the line.

You can easily recognize kolea at this time of the year because they look like they're wearing tuxedos, all black and white. They skitter around on spindly legs with their necks erect — unlike myna birds, whose heads bob as they waddle.

The Kolea Watch at the Hawai'i Nature Center is taking data on this year's migration. Their Web site, at www.hawaii.edu/bird, has information about recent kolea discoveries and a place where you can enter data.

If you have questions, contact the center's senior environmental educator, Mary Roney, at mary@hawaiinaturecenter.org or 955-0100.

Wally Johnson will be in town beginning today to tag birds with transmitters and try to find out where they stage their flights. Two places he suspects are Kualoa Beach Park and Puahala Marsh in Waipahu.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-0873.