Channels of the Hawaiian Islands 7 miles. ʻAlalākeiki means "crying baby." The Kealaikahiki Channel is the channel between Lānaʻi and Kahoʻolawe. It literally means "the road to Tahiti"; if one takes a bearing off of Kealaikahiki Point on Kahoʻolawe while in the channel and heads directly straight, one arrives, more or less, in Tahiti. In practice, however, Polynesian navigators probably did not quite ply a straight route to Tahiti. The channel is 17 miles wide. The ʻAuʻau Channel is one of the most protected areas of ocean in the Hawaiian Islands, lying between Lānaʻi and Maui. The channel is also protected by Molokaʻi to the
Hawaiian gallinule Hawaiian gallinule The Hawaiian gallinule ("Gallinula galeata sandvicensis") is an endangered chicken-sized water bird in the rail family. It is also variously known as the Hawaiian common gallinule, Hawaiian moorhen, Hawaiian common moorhen, mudhen, locally in Hawaiian as the `alae `ula (“burnt forehead” - for its prominent red frontal shield), and sometimes misleadingly as the Hawaiian red coot. It is a subspecies of the common gallinule that is endemic to the tropical Hawaiian Islands of the north-central Pacific Ocean. It is dependent on freshwater wetland habitats with dense emergent vegetation for nesting. Once found on most of the main islands