PIC and Hamakua Marsh

This week was absolutely crazy. The Pacific Island Committee Conference was finally here, after a month of planning. This was a conference with all US Pacific Islands, including Guam, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, American Samoa, and the Marshall Islands. I had an epiphany a few days before the conference that I would be doing registration, which involved me having to hear peoples names, and mark them off on whether they paid or not. And I struggle with accents. This was going to be interesting. Fortunately once registration got into full swing, I was left doing parking validation and receipts, which suited me just fine. We were working most of the morning and therefore wasn't really able to listen to the lectures till the afternoon. The afternoon lectures were about the effects of climate change on Pacific Islands, something I am extremely interested in. I even got to see a couple of people I had met at the Hawaiian Conservation Conference I had gone to over the summer.

The next day was going to be an even longer one. Not only did we have a day at the Conference, but also an evening event we were hosting for the visiting islanders. I had been working with Kokua Kalihi Valley as our location to attempt to get some donations for the dinner. This had resulted in me making Craigslist ads for coconuts and writing interdepartment memos asking for coconuts, firewood, and ulu (breadfruit). The people at KKV had planned to do an imu (cooking in the ground) complete with salmon, kalua, venison, and some veggies. I spent the afternoon driving everyone around to get enough vehicles to drive 40 people into Kalihi Valley, and then we ended up having far too many cars. Once we arrived, we could see two tents with twinkling lights and appetizers of smoked salmon, venison, fruit, and ava. Dinner had fruit salad, hau soup, taro bread, poi, chicken, kalua, and many other delicious things! It was really great to have a traditional Hawaiian dinner with good company.

The Spread

Day 3 I helped set up for the Society of American Foresters Conference, which involved putting out displays of boxes from each of the states. Around the world, countries were partaking in this project to have a box show the best things about forests from their home to celebrate the International Year of the Forests. The other benefit was that other groups that had been setting up had left out all their give away items and while I wasnt going to the conference (far too expensive) I did get a lot of cool swag. Add in the cool stuff from the Forest Service for helping at the PIC and I have tons of cool US Forest items.

My swag!

Since everyone was at the SAF conference, I went to fill my time doing some field work at Hamakua marsh. We had been told we were going to be pulling pickleweed to help make it a better environment for the wetland birds. While previously I had been not looking forward to this, it ended up being tons of fun. I don't know why I have yet to learn that with the right crew of people and a nice steady pace, field work is actually really fun. I had been promised use of atvs, but instead got to learn how to use chainsaws. I have this tendency to agree to do things without thinking and this was definitely one of those times. I agreed to be the first one to try it without remembering how dangerous I am near deadly items. I believe my clumsiness plays a large role in my decision making, and it apparently wasn't remembered till the blade was going. Fortunately, I did not drop any branches on myself, fall on the blade, cut anyone else, and actually gained some confidence in doing some really awesome things like face cuts! No, not cutting someones face, but the legit way of cutting trees where you cut a wedge on one side and tap it on the other so you can manipulate its fall. It was really awesome. I also got to see some cool birds: stilts, coots, and moorhens.

The Marsh

Our fun crew, Katie, Arthur, and James

And to cap off my week, how about some GIS. GIS stands for Geospatial Information Systems and involved combining maps with data. The cool thing I was going to learn about, was how we could include the web in all this. ESRI, the group that releases all the main GIS programs was putting on a seminar on how to outreach your maps to the public using the internet. A few weeks before I had gone to a seminar where they discussed how to do this, and now I was going to a workshop to put it all into action. It was really fun and surprisingly easy (which is truly shocking for GIS, the last project I did took me 5 hours just to get it right), and I have already begun thinking about how we could use it in a couple of our projects! So heres a quick map I made in 5 minutes at the seminar showing a couple of locations of my favorite places.

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