What is this? Some kind of animal?
No. It's actually a variety of Heliconia that throws out a drooping panicule carrying a bright yellow hairy flower.
Having spent months digging out Heliconia from my yard and taking it to Green Waste, I'm no longer a Heliconia fan. On Bougainville, I was a fan because I ate the tender unfurled leaves, which were tasty. Here, it's a haven for coqui and basically an annoyance (to me). Some folks love it.
Yesterday our friend Tim took us to a palm nursery up towards Volcano. Bill, the grower, showed us some astonishing palms and cleared up something I'd been wondering about for years: why, considering that every palm I knew to be truly in the genus Areca was single-trunked, does everybody refer to the clustered palms you see through the window here that are everywhere (and particularly on this street) as Areca?
The short answer is that they are wrong. The "Areca" palms are Dypsis lutescans, obviously not part of the genus Areca. Now I know. Now you know. And the odds that anybody but palm mavens in Hilo will start referring to them as Dypsis are pretty much zero.
I'm going to ask Bill if it's OK to link to information about his nursery, and if he says it is, I'll put a link here. I forgot to ask.
Back to the hairy yellow Heliconia. Bill broke off part of the flower and I brought it back here. Technically, today's HDI was made in the yard because the object was physically present here. I suppose that's splitting hairs, but it's my site and I'll split hairs if I want to. How could I not image this beauty? Even at the nursery, even in late afternoon without much light, I knew do this end. It seemed pelican-like to me, except for the canary yellow and the hairs. But you know what I mean.
Here's the entire piece that Bill gave me. As soon as I had some light I took it outside and made this image. With the closeup lens, of course. I do love that lens.