For The Birds

This is the Honey Badger.  No, wait, this is the Honeycreeper.  Sorry, wrong animal.  That video still cracks me up (see Honey Badger by Randall on Youtube).

No, I haven't taken up squishing defenseless little birds.  I started volunteering on a project being conducted by the U.S. Forest Service on various species of the Hawaiian Honeycreeper birds.  I think the one pictured above is an Amakihi.  I'm still trying to get all the names down.

We started out the day by driving up the Saddle Road between the volcanos Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea to about 5000 feet above sea level and identified the Kipuka we were to work at for the next two days.   A Kipuka is basically an area of forest within an ancient lava flow that wasn't consumed by fire and molten rock.  So, as you drive up the Saddle Road, after a certain elevation on either side of the road you generally see vast expanses of hardened black lava, except for a few of these "islands" of forest (Kipukas) that appear up through the blackness.  When the lava flowed down from the cinder cones it flowed around the Kipukas and they were spared from total destruction, meaning that many of these areas are very old-growth forests.  The Hawaiian Honeycreepers have taken up residence in many of these Kipukas, but at lower elevations they've been dying off due to malaria transmitted by mosquitos.  The Forest Service is researching the populations of Honeycreepers within the Kipukas so that they can try to prevent them from going extinct.

When we drove as far as possible we could see the Kipuka about a mile out into the hardened lava.  On the Hawaiian islands there are two types of lava:  A'a (say it like The Count from Sesame Street would) lava and Pahoehoe (Pa-Hoy-Hoy) lava.  If you happen to be hiking on lava, hopefully you're hiking on the relatively smooth and stable Pahoehoe lava, but today's lava was A'a.  A'a is composed of very sharp, very hard, and very poorly distributed basketball to car sized lava rocks piled on top of each other.  The razor sharp rolling hills of lava rocks, with gaps between some of the rocks perfectly sized for a foot to slip between, were extremely unstable.  One rock would be solidly pinned against the next and then the following rock would be teetering on an unbalanced one underneath.  Each step was an adventure.  We carried all of our supplies over this rock for about 45 minutes or so.  No one was seriously hurt, but after two days of walking through the A'a lava my trail shoes were pretty shredded up.
I've edited this post and added a picture of the A'a lava (below).  I didn't think to take any pictures as I was walking through it, so I had to "borrow" this picture from "Mike Watson's Diary" blog.  I hope he doesn't mind.  I've never met him, but his blog looks pretty cool so I'll give it a plug as well http://mikewatsonsdiary.blogspot.com/2008/04/hawaii-2008-with-birdquest.html.  Thanks Mike.

 

But in the end, it was all for the birds...

I'm not sure what species this one was, but they were all pretty cool looking and fun to work with.  They were definitely annoyed, but surprisingly patient with us as we tagged them and documented various observations and measurements.  I'm holding this bird in what they call the "photographer's grip", probably named so because they're easy to photograph like this.

Below, an I'iwi (E-E-Vee) is caught in one of our mist nets.  They're carefully removed and then tagged before releasing again.

You can see that the various species have different sized and shaped beaks and different coloring.  Each has evolved to suit its own unique method of survival.

I have to say that this was the most physically demanding work I've done since my days of working construction.  Props to the U.S. Forest Service Kipuka Team.  They're the Honey Badgers of the U.S. Forest Service. From left:  Olga, Jessie, and Nolan (Sonia not pictured).  I hope to be back soon!