Bird lover and amateur ornithologist Alexander H. Isenberg (1901-70) was the son of H. Alexander Isenberg, the managing director of H. Hackfeld &Co. of Honolulu, and Virginia Duisenberg Isenberg of San Francisco, and was the grandson of Kauai sugar industry pioneer Paul Isenberg.
During his childhood years spent on Kauai, he became intensely fascinated with birds.
At the age of 8, he set up his first aviary in a former Lihue Plantation tennis court. As a teenager in 1918, he began assisting his aunt, Mary Dorothea Rice Isenberg, in her quest to introduce new songbirds into Hawaii.
With Mrs. Isenberg’s financial support, he brought the Chinese thrush, western meadowlark, white-rumped shama, greater necklaced laughing thrush, northern cardinal and red-crested cardinal to Kauai. Of these, the colorful, white-rumped shama is considered by many to possess the most pleasant-sounding song.
By 1920, he was keeping birds in several aviaries in Honolulu, and following his move to California in 1926, he established aviaries in Atherton that housed 112 birds of several species.
Then in 1936, he relocated his aviaries from Atherton to Portola, California, where for many years he maintained the largest private aviary in the United States.
Set in a spacious garden of approximately a quarter acre that he transformed into tropical thickets enclosed by a fence, his Portola aviary was home to more than 650 birds of some 350 species, of all colors and sizes, representing six continents, in which 180 birds flew free, with the remainder being billeted in cages.
Although he was not a commercial operator, he supplied birds to zoos throughout the world, including Honolulu’s, and fellow ornithologists and zoo directors frequently called at his aviary.
Isenberg was a founding board member of the San Francisco Zoological Society, established in 1954, which received many birds from his Portola aviary before and after his death.
He also founded the Durant Insulated Pipe Co. in 1935 and operated it until he retired in 1965.
His wife, Madeleine, also loved birds, and they had four daughters: Judy Isenberg, Alexa Hovig, Renny Alvarez and Roxanna Auger.
•••
Hank Soboleski has been a resident of Kauai since the 1960s. Hank’s love of the island and its history has inspired him, in conjunction with The Garden Island Newspaper, to share the island’s history weekly. The collection of these articles can be found here: https://bit.ly/2IfbxL9 and here https://bit.ly/2STw9gi Hank can be reached at hssgms@gmail.com.
