The liveliest show in town this morning may be in your backyard or in the park down the street because kolea coming back from Alaska are deciding on their territories. Yesterday I saw no less than 12 birds in three different places having four arguments at the same time, all right in the middle of Our Honolulu.

You're not going to see a fight. Kolea are too civilized for that. The ritual they go through must be tens of thousands of years old. It's like a ballet, highly stylized, no violence, just a battle of wills gracefully executed.

According to Phil Bruner at Brigham Young University-Hawai'i, who has been studying golden plover for 20 years, now is the time to see the territory-establishing ritual because adult kolea are still coming back. He said the ballet begins again in September, when the juveniles arrive and try to find a place to live.

What attracted my attention last week in a grassy field on Date Street was a scruffy male kolea making life miserable for a handsome, plump female. He kept running at her. She would run away and then come back.

Sometimes, the male flew at the female and she would fly up, circle and come back to the same area. Why did she keep coming back for more punishment? I realized they were deciding on the boundaries of their territories. I watched for 40 minutes to see how it would come out, then gave up.

A reader in Hawai'i Kai said he saw a couple of kolea behaving like that while he was jogging. He came by again 43 minutes later and they were still at it. Do such arguments ever get settled? Does one kolea ever give in and let the other live next door? Apparently the answer is yes.

The next day in an adjoining field I saw three other birds disputing territory. Two birds tried to chase a third away. One bird got tired but the other kept chasing the third. How long this had been going on, I don't know, but I watched for at least 10 minutes.

Then the third bird began to fly in great circles. I thought maybe it was looking for new territory but it came back again and again, making low passes over the resident bird, who screamed at it. This went on for three or four minutes.

Finally, to my surprise, the bird landed near the one on guard, who made one feeble run, then seemed to accept her neighbor. The ritual was over, the boundary dispute settled.

Yesterday, in two different fields behind Kaimuki High School, three arguments were taking place. I didn't stay to see how any of them came out. But I ran into another dispute between three kolea at Ala Wai Park. Two birds were chasing one. After about five minutes, they went to different sections of lawn and stayed there.

Could it be that the kolea enjoy this kind of duel? Maybe they do it for fun as much as for land rights.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.