back from the big city

yup, just got back from the Hawai'i Conservation Conference, which was awesome. Here's a picture from the convention center there. the conference was great, but they kept trying to feed us these wax apples in our lunches. the first day nobody ate them, so the second day the organizers made an "Unwanted Fruit" table. since there were about 900 attendees, there were about 899 apples on that table. shoulda took a picture of that. they were absolutely inedible.

but anyway. there were cool presentations on monk seals foraging (with nat'l geographic video, awesome), baby sea turtles, spinner dolphins.... oh and stuff i'm doing too, bugs and plants and everything. it was all really cool and i got to get a larger view of the kinds of conservation issues HI is facing. the challenges are many, and the obstacles pretty much boil down to a lack of money/interest from the State and Federal governments. huh. fancy that.

oh, and we took a Lexus taxi to the airport with a large and colorful assortment of little buddha figurines on the dash. there were tv screens on the seats in front of us, and the driver talked on her phone nonstop in vietnamese the whole ride.

i've been a very poor blogger lately. this whole work thing really cuts into my blogging time. i'll have to discuss that with my boss. oh wait, but he's gone to FIJI for two weeks. yeah. fiji. bastard. meanwhile, the rest of us are fixing to get back into fieldwork and set up the plots for my project. so i should be losing about 10 pounds in the next month or so. unless i make up for them in mai-tais.

that's it for now. i'll try to be a better blogger, but the problem i think is how infernally boring i've become. i'll work on that too....

up on de big mountain

i just spent 4 days on Mauna Kea, the "most massive" mountain in the world. (It's bigger than Everest, but in contrast to the big E, "only" about 14, 000 feet are above the ocean. The rest is submerged and is weighing heavily on the crust of the earth, which is usually why we have earthquakes here.) It is above 90% of the earth's atmosphere and the stars were amazing, as were the sunsets and sunrises from our cabin just above the first cloud line.

so yeah, we were taking samples of koa in Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, which used to be cattle land and was almost completely grazed until about 22 years ago, when the park service stepped in and started replanting koa, a native tree lots of birds nest in. Many of these birds are endangered or threatened. I saw my first (and second, and third, and...) 'i'iwi! I also saw wild turkeys and heard Urkel's Francolins, who like to get up really early and start yelling at each other. it kind of reminded me of the chickens outside the hotel Chris and I stayed at in Captain Cook.

so this is sunrise:

and this is sunset:

and ha ha, this little piggy has opposable thumbs and the combination to the lock on the gate!