Incredible Wildlife Encounters in Hawaii: Whales, Dolphins, Birds, and more.

A huge, 80,000lbs humpback whale leaps out of the ocean in a tremendous breach.

I spent last week on a weeklong expedition cruise through the Hawaiian islands. One of my major focuses was on wildlife photography. I had my Canon 5d with an L-series 100-400 lens ready at a moments notice. And we scored. There were humpback whales, different species of dolphins, rare birds, then even rarer birds, octopus, and more. Check out the photos and descriptions and enjoy coming along for the adventure!

The shallow ocean waters around the island of Maui play host to thousands of humpback whales every winter. They come to have babies and make babies. We think these breaching behaviors are part of their communication. Although perhaps just for fun.

We can identify individual humpback whales using the unique white patches under their tail, which you can see here. There is an online database called HappyWhale.com, that you can upload your ID pictures like this to, and it will let you know if the whale has been seen before. This whale has been sighted, and uploaded to HappyWhale, 25 times! Yet only from the breeding area in Hawaii. So we still don't know where this whale goes to feed.

This was a hard bird to identify, but I believe it is a juvenile red footed booby. They are deep ocean sea birds that we rarely get to see on our Hawaiian travels.

This bird is an even rarer find. This is the Hawaiian Hawk, or I'o. It only exist on one island in the Hawaiian Island chain. I spotted this guy perched in a tree when we were hiking about 6,000ft up on the slopes of Hualalai volcano.

This beautiful red bird is an endemic Apapane, only found in Hawaii.

The Hawaiian Hawk!

Another red footed booby.

Pantropical Spotted dolphin, leaping out of our wake.

This spotted dolphin's beak is perfectly breaking the water for a hydrodynamic re-entry.

It took a couple of tries to get this picture timed just right, with the dolphin fully out of the water. I was pretty pumped when I saw this one!

I switched over to my GoPro to snag this photo of a manta ray, circling under our lights, at night.

It was a tough night for photos, but a wonderful night for manta ray close encounters!

One of the hardest photos to get when whale watching, this breaching behavior is the ultimate back flop.

This whale had good form and nice symmetry on his breach.

One of my crewmates saw a flash of grey, just off of our swim step, and thought it might be a shark. So I grabbed my snorkel gear and jumped in. Turns out, it was this pod of bottlenose dolphins. This one came over to me as the rest swam off into the blue.

The one went out of its way to come over and check me out.

Then it powered off to find its family.

This was one of the most obvious octopus finds I've had while snorkeling out here in Hawaii. It was sitting motionless on top of this coral. I'm not sure why it was out in the open, but my guess is that it relates to mating.

This is the same octopus, moments later, after it changed colors when I came near.

They are one of my favorite animals on the reef.

This was an unusual sight on our volcano hike, a Khalij pheasent. These were introduced to Hawaii to hunt. Now they roam the islands, looking beautiful.