Na Moolelo – “Stories of Hawaii”
My first lesson in Hawaii was about dirt. Soil development to be more precise. Like many who experience Hawaii for the first time, from an airplane approach onto the Huehue lava flow at Keahole Airport, I saw barren, black rock. No swaying coconut trees, no Polynesian hula girls, just a two hundred year old lava flow with a few tufts of grass here ...
I like to know the names of things. Whether it’s the weed that leaves flat sticky seeds on my socks or the little worms that eat holes through my books, it drives me crazy if I don’t know their names. And though I often settle for the common name, it’s the scientific one that really catches my fancy. The long-jawed, spiny-legge...
I am the baby of six siblings. Growing up I was often referred to as a pest by my older brothers and sisters. “Mom, he’s such a pest. Do I have to take him along?!” “Quit being such a pest, Robbie.” Never lacking affection, attention or love, this pesty tag never bothered me too much. In fact, looking back, I admit ...
Hawaii’s volcanoes are different from most volcanoes around the world. In other places when a volcano erupts people flee for their lives. In Hawaii we get in our cars and drive down to the lava flow to check it out. In many ways they are gentle volcanoes; they are volcanoes with aloha. Unlike 90% of the earth’s volcanoes, which are l...
Once Hawaii was for the birds. Before the arrival of humans, it was birds, not mammals, which dominated the environment. Today Hawaii’s native forest birds are disappearing. Nearly half of the 140 bird species that were known from historic times are extinct and over 50 additional extinctions have been identified from fossil evidence. Of th...
I love my work. Most days I find myself along a trail in a forest full of birdsong or stepping across cascading streams. Other days are spent in pursuit of hot lava, steam vents, lava tubes, pit craters, and earth cracks in the world-class setting of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. I meet new people everyday. With a few exceptions, they are curi...
Kids need to be out in nature. They need to climb trees, crawl through the bushes, play in the dirt and mud, chase each other across the field, and explore the wild. Too often today children never experience the wonderful land around them. Too many of our island keiki rarely get the opportunity to discover the world-class setting that surrounds ...
I am a book nut. Sometimes I think my fascination with nature is just a highly rationalized excuse to buy books. Anything new that hits the shelves, I get it. Plus, I’m constantly on the search for the out-of-print titles that have anything to do with Hawaiiana. The ones that really drive my wife crazy are the jargon filled scientific tomes l...
Don Francisco de Paula Marin was a productive man. He arrived in Hawaii two hundred years ago after deserting a Spanish naval ship in the Northwest. Marin was an important figure in the beginning years of the Hawaiian kingdom, serving as Kamehameha I’s business advisor, bookkeeper, sometime physician, and interpreter....
"Maybe I should write about crickets?" I asked. "Is there enough stuff to write an article on crickets?" Cindy responded. In answer I pulled down Daniel Otte's The Crickets of Hawaii, a 400 page tome on the Orthoptera of our fair islands. Filled with dozens of pages of cryptic graphs and close-up photos of cricket legs, abdomens, and heads, Otte's ...
The 1935 eruption of Mauna Loa is one of my favorite lava flows. If you have driven across the Saddle Road, you have seen it. It is the smooth, shiny black pahoehoe that surrounds Puu Huluhulu at the Mauna Kea Summit Road junction. Pooled in the flats of the Humuulu saddle it is at once flat and hummocky....
Amidst several years of controversy and contention, the summit of Mauna Kea has indeed stood alone in the calm. Now as a community we must stand together and begin the difficult task of developing a harmonious and balanced stewardship of our use of Mauna Kea. To do that successfully, all of us are forced to turn towards the mountain for guidance. M...
