Summer Highlights

Our kipuka in the distance

My summer in Hawaii is coming to an end, so here are some highlights from the last few months. The biggest thing was going to be our summer research – a kipuka project. Kipukas are hills or areas of land that are surrounded by lava flows (so basically isolated pieces of old growth forest), which is ideal for scientific studies because multiple kipukas can act as replicates. Some other researchers were just finishing up a 3-year rat trapping study, so half of the kipukas were rat free and half still had rats. Our project was going to be looking at the effects of ecosystem health (in terms of the presence or absence of rats) on bird stress levels. We were going to jump in there and try to do some bird banding and blood collection in a variety of rat-filled and rat-free kipukas. Unfortunately one of our permits was delayed, so we spent a week making our equipment and sorting all of our gear.

Hammering mist net poles together.
Boogie boards as seats... only in Hawaii.

Hauling gear to the kipuka with
Mauna Kea in the background

The next week was a whirlwind. Our boss had a certain timeline in mind so that we could get our data collection completed relatively quickly as the rat trapping was no longer occurring. The longer we waited, the more likely it was that rats would slowly start to infiltrate the rat-free kipukas and mess with our findings. The idea was to spend a half day setting up our nets and banding site, 2.5 days of banding, and then a full day of taking down our equipment and setting up at the next kipuka. There lies problem number one: instead of a half day of set up, it took us over a day and a half. First, it took almost an hour for four of us to haul all of our mist net poles and gear over aa lava (the rough kind) to our kipuka. Once we got there, it was way more difficult to get around in the kipuka than we expected, and finding areas to set up 12m long nets was next to impossible. It would have been a bit easier if we were allowed to cut vegetation to clear net lanes, but the main tree species in there is Ohia, which is EXTREMELY slow-growing. Seriously. It grows something like one millimeter or one centimeter a year, so cutting off a single branch is decades of growth gone in 30 seconds. Instead we tied back the vegetation, which took a lot of patience and a lot of rope. After two days we got most of our nets up and decided to give banding a shot on day three. We were much more successful than we were expecting – FOUR BIRDS! That was a decent start as the target was something like 10 birds per kipuka. However, day two brought problem number two: we didn’t catch any birds. That was a bit of a let-down as we could hear them flying around, but our nets just weren’t high enough to catch them. Day three our boss came out with us to help us set up some additional angled nets (the middle bent around a pole to create an angled net). These were a bit easier than the long straight net lanes, but even with those additional nets we only caught two birds. By noon that day our boss realized that we weren’t catching our quota and it was requiring WAY more effort than initially anticipated, so we should probably just cut and run.

So that was that! Our month-long kipuka project lasted a measly five days. But it was nice that he realized early on how infeasible the project was turning out to be, rather than making us bust our butts only to not get sufficient data. It was also a good experience watching a project burn to the ground. I’ve definitely been dragged around on past projects where my bosses were so desperate for data that they didn’t think about things practically. Massive thunderstorm rolling through? Maybe you can check nests when it’s raining lightly. Tornado heading our way? We can still get a couple hours of work in. So yeah, this was refreshing to see someone be realistic about a failure. Instead we’ve spent the summer banding at Hakalau every other week to continue our telemetry project. We put radio transmitters on individuals to track their movements, so it’s been nice getting into the field periodically. It’s MUCH slower than during the spring – there are far fewer birds in Hakalau right now (hence the telemetry work – we gotta figure out where they’re going!). We spent our office days catching up on data entry from the spring, organizing all the samples we collected (including picking out and identifying seeds from the hundreds of poop samples we collected), and I completely edited our 80-page protocol and have been working on writing our ageing and sexing guide for Hawaiian forest birds. It’s nearly done at this point, with the exception of some missing pictures that next year’s crew will have to take. After next season our boss is going to try to get the guide published, so that will be really cool!

The Overlord surveying the battlefield

Okay, enough of work. Another highlight of this summer was our Descent campaign! George lived in Hilo with a group of guys who all like board games. One of them – Dom – owns like 100 board games, only about 30 of which he has with him in Hilo. One of them is Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition. You can play it as a single game, or you can play it as a campaign, where each quest leads to another one, and you keep your character, skills, money, etc from quest to quest. The campaign is made up of 9 quests, and each one takes about 3 hours, so that’s 27 hours of board game fun! (My dad was horrified and thought I was taking after my brother by playing hours of computer games on end. Um, no! This is with face-to-face interactions! Way better.) The main players were myself, George, and Dom, and then their other two roommates (Matt and Alex) would join in when they were around. Trying to coordinate a 3-hour game night when everyone has their own schedules is impossible. Fortunately George, Dom, and I were pretty much always down to play, so we just needed to get one of the others to join in, which was often easier said than done. When we couldn’t wrangle one of them, Dom always had other game options for us, so it was a very game-filled summer. I played Merchants and Marauders, Dominant Species, 7 Wonders, Kemet, Nanuk, Castaways, Wiz War, Evolution, Wildlife Adventures, Citadels, Ticket to Ride, and learned about a handful of others. It’s been great! But yes, the campaign – Dom played as the Overlord while the rest of us were Heroes. The Overlord and the group of Heroes had goals in each quest, so there was a winner for each quest (which generally meant getting money or special items), but the winner of the finale determined the winner of the campaign. Sadly, it was the Overlord. We had 27 hours of game play and we got thrashed in like 30 minutes. Poo.

Even Dakine wanted in on the fun

I took this 2 minutes before Matt died (the
stressed-looking one), 8 minutes before
George died, and 15 minutes before I died

I'll stop here for now. Plan on another update tomorrow. Don't worry - I definitely have the time. You'll know why in the next post.