NEON protocols, part 1 (periodic)

It's been a month since my job with NEON ended, and as another chapter of my life draws to a close I wanted to take one last look back at the various data collection activities we carried out. Each of the protocols below had an extensive document describing its execution in detail, which we had to be brought up to speed on before performing the protocol (and would not-infrequently refer to in the field for clarification). I probably don't remember them perfectly so I might get specifics wrong, and also the protocols are always subject to updating and revision based on best practices and experience gained in the field, so don't rely on this for future NEON field seasons!

Of the protocols, there were two broad categories: one type was repeated at a certain cadence – weekly, fortnightly, monthly – while the other was confined to certain windows of time in the year during which we'd try to get it done for as many plots as possible. I'll start with the repeating protocols, as those were the constant background cadence we became used to, then go through the season in chronological order covering the rest in a second post (as this one ballooned to longer than I expected). I've tried to include some photos where I can, but I didn't always remember to take them for every protocol.

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Phenology (PHE)

Phenology (a word I hadn't heard before starting with NEON) is, according to Merriam-Webster: “the study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate, as well as habitat factors (such as elevation).” For us, it involved a weekly walk along an eight-hundred-meter stretch of road and checking on…I think it was some two hundred individual plants along the way. For each plant we'd record various data (though the specifics varied by plant type). Some typical data points would be things like does this plant have any new leaves growing? Are any of its leaves changing color or falling? Does it have flowers? (And if so, how many, and what fraction are fully open?) Likewise for fruit – are any present, and how many of them are ripe?

Thankfully, for our sanity, we didn't have to count every single instance of a flower or fruit on a plant, as the survey divided things up into bins of increasing numerical size:

• <3
• 3–10
• 11–100
• 101–1,000
• 1001–10.000
• >10,000

On small shrubs it'd be easy to say, for instance, that there were only two fruits (<3), while on some large trees (especially ʻōhiʻa) we could easily see upwards of ten thousand young leaves budding at certain times of year. (ʻŌhiʻa leaves come in bunches of a certain average amount, so we could simply count those and multiply.)

For instance, above is a closeup of a pūkiawe plant, one of the species we looked at. It grows as a shrub to a small spindly tree depending on environment, and puts out lots of tiny leaves and fruits. Those fruits are about the size of a BB and a large individual could have over a thousand, not to mention upwards of ten thousand leaves (thankfully those also came in clusters for easier counting). Most species weren't as complicated to measure as pūkiawe (they were definitely on the more time-consuming end of the spectrum), but it'd still take around 4–6 hours to cover every plant.

As mentioned, this was our most frequent protocol, happening every single week. In our tropical climate we didn't see quite such dramatic changes over time as the mainland U.S. would with deciduous trees, but we could still see things like the ʻākala (Hawaiian raspberry) budding, flowering, and fruiting over the summer months.

Beetles (BET)

Happening every two weeks, beetles was another frequent protocol that ran almost the length of the season. We left three ground-fall traps at specific locations around six plots (for a total of eighteen traps) scattered across the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve (NAR), and every fortnight we'd collect the contents of those traps for sorting and identification of any beetles they contained. We were looking specifically for any species in the Carabidae family, a family of mostly-ground dwelling beetles with species around the globe (though the native Hawaiian species are arboreal, funnily enough). We found both native and invasive Carabidae species, with certain plots being known for the distribution either way, or for being the only plot that some species had been found at. While we didn't discover any new species this season, previous seasons turned up two entirely new species, so there are potentially more out there waiting to be found!

At the end of the season, after all the beetles had been identified, we started working on pointing them. Not “pinning” them, as they were too small for that (around 5–6 mm, on average), though the goal is the same: preservation for later viewing. The “det D. Berke” on the label in the photo above signifies that I identified this particular specimen (a common native species), which is pretty neat! We didn't manage to finished pointing all the beetles before us seasonal staff left, but we got through quite a lot of ~240 beetles – I personally pointed upwards of 70 over a few weeks. (I found it quite relaxing after a day out in the field when we had an hour or two left on the clock back at the office, like a miniature arts-and-crafts project.)

Beetles sorted out of a trap, ready for identification under the microscope.

Mosquitoes (MOS)

Mosquitoes happened once a month, but was probably the most disruptive protocol we did. It involved three parts:

1. A team would go up in the afternoon to set ten mosquito traps at various location in the NAR. These had to be set within four hours of sunset, and would sit overnight.
2. Another team would go up early the next morning and check all the traps for mosquitoes, taking any catches and resetting the traps. (This checking had to happen within four hours of dawn.)
3. Yet another team would go up in the afternoon and check all the traps a second time after they had sat out during the day, then collect them and bring them and any catches down.

A mosquito trap.

The protocol wasn't particularly difficult, but it did involve some of the more technical work we did, as we carefully calibrated CO₂ canisters to put off a stream of carbon dioxide to attract mosquitoes towards a little fan blowing into a canister. Most of the traps were located near roads (as in the photo the above), though there was one lovingly termed “the long walk” which took nearly 10 minutes to reach. (Which doesn't sound like much, until you're carrying a heavy CO₂ canister and the rest of the equipment down a muddy trail…)

We usually didn't catch a lot of mosquitoes, which was a good thing. Mosquitoes carry avian malaria, which is driving the extinction of multiple native Hawaiian bird species at lower elevations. Mosquitoes can only survive temperatures down a certain level, though, and at the height of Puʻu Makaʻala it's mostly too cold, so birds which can retreat to higher elevations are generally still safe. (Shorter islands, such as Kauaʻi, are watching their native bird populations die out in slow motion without being able to do much about it, as there simply isn't high enough elevation for the birds to retreat to as the atmosphere warms and the mosquito-free range shrinks.) On a typical bout we might catch 0–2 mosquitoes, and usually only in the lower-elevation traps. This is compared to places on the mainland where, with the same traps, they might catch hundreds or thousands of mosquitos – I remember watching a training video for this protocol, where the presenter up-ended a catch cup and a literal pile of mosquitoes several centimeters in height fell out. Thankfully, we didn't have to deal with that, and almost never had to worry about getting bitten during our time in the field.

Leaf Litter (LTR)

Another monthly protocol, this one involved collecting leaf litter from aerial ‘traps’ in the forest and separating it into various components. These traps were pretty simple, just some mesh suspended by PVC pipe – they didn't need to be complicated, just a standardized area to collect what fell from above.

Me, collecting leaf litter from a trap near the end of the season.

Once the litter was collected into bags (from I believe 20 traps in different plots), we'd heat it to dry it out and then sort it into various functional groups. These were things like leaves, twigs, ‘woody’ (bits of bark),  flowers, seeds, ‘other’ (for, e.g., lichen and other rare things that didn't fit other categories) and ‘mixed’, a catch-all term for leftover material. According to the protocol, each bag was only to be sorted for one hour maximum, at the end of which any remaining unsorted material would go into ‘mixed’. This was partly for mainland domains where the amount of leaf litter in fall could be overwhelming, but we found it useful as well when all the easily-identifiable stuff has been sorted out and what's left is just tiny detritus. (Sorting could also end early if the remaining unsorted material was no more than 10% of the mass of the sample, which was usually pretty easy to judge.)

A tray showing an in-progress sort; in the bottom-left is the remaining unsorted material, then going clockwise we have a small amount of ‘other’, some twigs, a little woody material, a lot of leaves, flowers (mostly pistils and stamens from ʻōhiʻa lēhua flowers), and two seeds.

While this litter was a monthly protocol, there was also another type of litter that happens just once a year, around September. This protocol (ground litter) involved gathering litter from areas demarcated on the ground which were larger than the aerial traps. While the monthly litter collection focused on small litter (sticks too large would be discarded), ground litter collection was something of the opposite, only interested in sticks and leaves (such as tree fern fronds) larger than a certain limit.

(While mosquitoes had “the long walk”, litter had the really long walk to get to some of the plots where collection happened, something like half an hour's hike along a fence pushing through ferns.)

Imageomics

There was one additional repeating activity we did, though this wasn't a normal NEON protocol; a number of people from different universities teamed up to use NEON's Research Support Services, where outside research groups can contract to get support from NEON personnel for their research. In our case, they set up a number of trail cameras and audio recorders around the NAR, with the goal of developing machine-learning systems to automatically identify native and endangered birds for better tracking. They set up the system in January of this year, and we mostly just swapped batteries and SD cards on a regular basis to keep things moving (plus uploading data from the cards, and the occasional bit of troubleshooting for cameras that weren't working). I believe they gave a presentation at a machine vision/machine learning conference last month so hopefully the project is going well, but I don't know too much about it otherwise. It was a fairly easy activity, though, and let me see some parts of the NAR that we normally otherwise wouldn't.

I saw these nēnē fairly close up in one of the areas we wouldn't normally be.

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I originally intended to talk about all the protocols in this post but even just the repeating ones turned out to be a fruitful subject. I'll have another post covering our non-periodic protocols soon where we'll wrap up by going over what my field season looked like. A hui hou!

Pyrographic presents

As the end of the season approached, and it came time for us seasonal field technicians to say goodbye to NEON, I decided to make some little gifts for all my coworkers. Between moving and work I didn't have a lot of time to think about it (or make things) so I settled rather hastily on some small wood-burning (pyrography) pieces. Since I get bored of doing the same thing over and over I decided to do a unique design for each person based on what I knew they liked or enjoyed about the work we did. I've grouped them into a few categories below:

1. Plants

ʻĀhinahina (silversword) and Peperomia sp.

I did these for two coworkers who mentioned these plants as being their favorites. On the left is a Mauna Loa silversword (Argyroxiphium kauense), or ʻāhinahina in Hawaiian. We were privileged to see some of these that were outplanted in the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve (out of reach of voracious ungulates!), and they're just as beautiful as the Mauna Kea species.

Leaves of Peperomia sp. from beneath

The disk on the right shows leaves from a species of Peperomia (using the photo above as reference). There are over a thousand recognized Peperomia species (at least twenty-two in Hawaii alone), and there are thought to be more since they can be hard to tell apart and positive identification can be very difficult. While we normally would (and could) identify most plants to the species level with confidence, we simply couldn't identify any peperomias we found to better than the genus level. They're pretty plants, though, with strikingly-colored undersides to their leaves.

2. Beetles

Mecyclothorax neonomas and M. rufipennis

As part of the work we did we collected, identified, and preserved various Carabidae beetles. Members of this large and varied family are found around the world, with both native and invasive species present in Hawaii. Shown here are two native species from the genus Mecyclothorax, M. neonomas on the left and M. rufipennis on the right. M. neonomas was actually discovered just a few years ago at our site from the kind of collection work we did (one of two such species), which is pretty neat! We didn't find any new species this year (beetles in general were scarcer than the previous few years), but there could be more out there waiting to be discovered…

3. Birds

Nēnē, ʻiʻiwi, & ʻalalā

Birds ended up being the biggest category, as we got to see a lot of endangered and rare native birds in the Natural Area Reserve. Nēnē were a very common sight; we would often see between ten to twenty on any given day. (This was the first one of these wood-burnings that I made, so it's a bit less polished than the others as I was relearning it on the fly). In the middle is an ʻiʻiwi, a striking native scarlet honeycreeper with a dramatically curved bill. I modeled this after a photo of one perched on a māmane tree, and while I didn't get its front quite right I like the contrast with the black wing and tail feathers. (The light was at a poor angle for this disk specifically, so I had to play with it a bit in GIMP to get it to look better.)

The third bird is one which I haven't actually seen personally, and isn't currently at the site: it's an ʻalalā, the Hawaiian crow. By 2002 there were no known wild individuals, with just a few remaining in captivity. Intensive breeding and rehabilitation programs have increased the captive populations to the point where some individuals were released into the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve several years ago…where they were unfortunately quickly predated by ʻio, the Hawaiian hawk. One of my coworkers, before joining NEON, was part of this effort and used to track the birds around the reserve, so I made this for him. (Amusingly, he immediately could tell from it that I'd used a reference photo of a not-quite-adult bird ­– something I didn't know – as its head was still a little big for its body.) In some good news, around a dozen ʻalalā were recently released in the wild on Maui where there are no ʻio, so hopefully they'll be able to re-establish a wild breeding population there and eventually bring them back to the forests of Hawaiʻi.

4. Tower

The fourth and final category has just a single disk, but it's probably the one I'm most proud of. I made it based on a photo I took of the top of our instrument tower seen through the trees along one of our trails, and I managed to get a lot of details in there. Here's the photo in question, for reference:

Funnily enough, this photo is now out of date: two weeks ago, during my last week with NEON, some site infrastructure people came out and moved one of the boom arms visible on the left to the other side of the tower to better sample the prevailing wind direction. When the tower was originally built in 2018 it was laid out using data on wind direction from Pohakuloa up on the saddle, and no one seems to have thought to question if the wind patterns were the same for a different site. (Spoiler: they aren't.) Our tower had thus, for its existence, had the wind-sampling equipment off to the wrong side for the prevailing winds. It wasn't a huge problem by any means (the tower being in the way probably wasn't affecting things too much), but it's good that it's fixed now.

And that's it! It was nice to have motivation to pull out my wood-burning kit again; when I originally got it I imagined I'd be doing a bit more than I have (so far it's pretty much just been the two pieces in this previous post). Several people said I should sell these, which…with some more practice…we'll see if that goes anywhere, I suppose. A hui hou! (And if any of my coworkers are reading this, thanks for being such an awesome group of people!)

P.S. Also, after a week of intensively cleaning my old place, I'm finally fully moved out, and can concentrate on things around the new place.

Endings (with NEON) and new beginnings

Phew, it's been a month! As mentioned in my last post, my job with NEON has officially ended as of the 20th. I'm also still “moving,” in the sense that I'm still cleaning up my old place and transferring things over to the new one. Moving while simultaneously working a physically-demanding job has been…a lot! But with the free time on my hands this week I've been able to get a significant amount of work done at the old place, and I'm on track to be completely done and moved out by the end of the month.

So yes, this'll be another short post, as my brain is still a bit frazzled by the thousand-and-one things that all need to get done between moving out and moving in. I've got some projects I managed to squeeze out among everything else the past few weeks which I plan to show off soon, once things have calmed down some more.

In all the hustle and bustle I haven't had much time yet to reflect on the end of my time with NEON. It's had its ups (great people, interesting work) and downs (rain!), but it's definitely strange not heading up Mauna Loa this week. I'll have a retrospective on this job when my thoughts have settled a bit more and I've had some time to recover from the previous two hectic months. By my count this is the eighth job that's come to an end for me, so, while it's never easy, it's something I'm (unfortunately) quite familiar with by now. Thankfully none of my coworkers are planning to move off-island (something else I'm familiar with from astronomy jobs ending), so as a band of fire-forged-friends we're able to keep in touch outside of work.

As per usual, I've amassed several project ideas over the past few months which I've been itching to work on. I'll still be somewhat busy in December organizing the new place and preparing for my family to visit in January, but I should finally have some time to pursue some new avenues. I've found myself interested in checking out Typst, a sort of re-imagining of \(\LaTeX\) from the ground up. I've also recently been thinking about getting into woodworking. The new house has a space that looks like it was used for that purpose, and for various reasons (I needed a lawnmower, and there were some amazing Black Friday sales on) I now own several power tools for the first time in my life. We'll see where that goes, but I'm excited. A hui hou!

A move update

Just a quick update to say that the move I mentioned last time has, in a sense, happened. I say “in a sense” because I've moved most of my furniture (with the help of some friends!) and have been sleeping at the new house for the past two weeks, but since I'm also still working full time I haven't yet managed to completely clean everything out of the old place and am also still working on some aspects of the process (like getting internet access set up in the new place).

I've also been doing some interesting things at work as we begin to wind down for the season. We finished our beetle collection earlier this month and have started mounting all the beetles we caught this year (~240) for preservation. I've never mounted insects before, but it's a satisfying arts-and-craft sort of activity in the lab. I've been enjoying it, and once things calm down a bit more I hope to have some photos of the process to show. My last day at work will be November 20th, so I'll have some more free time on my hands before too long (which I am definitely looking forward to, trying to move while also working full time has been…rather exhausting, to say the least). A hui hou!

A move, and a Hawaiian cheesecake

I haven't mentioned it until now, but I'll be moving tomorrow to a new place about 15 minutes' drive outside of Hilo to the town of Pepeʻekeo. It's been a more drawn-out process than moving usually is for me, which is partly why I hadn't mentioned it; it involves moving to a house my parents bought in advance of retirement and, for once, I've been able to set my own time-table. I've been shuttling small loads of stuff to the new place the past few weeks, but tomorrow marks the big move of furniture and changing where I sleep. I'll never enjoy moving, but at least I get to pick when I need to be out by, and can do the moving and then come back and clean (and perhaps finish moving non-essential stuff) after a week settling in rather than needing to get it all done at once.

That's mostly just to say that it might be a bit quiet around here as I get moved in and go through the excruciating process of readjusting all my routines that moving always entails. I don't want to end this post without pointing out something I baked last month, though!

This is an ʻōhelo berry cheesecake I made for a social gathering. The ʻōhelo are present in the form of a compôte on top of a basic cheesecake, and it came out quite well. Even after making this and the pie from before I still have a few cups of ʻōhelo berries in the freezer, so I'm still thinking about what to make with them. There are lots of recipes involving blueberries out there (muffins, perhaps?), so we'll see what I come up with! A hui hou!

Visiting Hakalau Natural Area Reserve

A few weeks ago on September 13 I had the opportunity to attend the annual Find Your Wild open day high on the slopes of Mauna Kea. This event happens only once a year and is limited to 500 people, but it allows members of the public to access the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge (part of the Natural Area Reserve System, or NARS) and see the rare plants and birds found there. Since we work in a fellow Natural Area Reserve and know many of the people working at Hakalau, most of us from work went as a group.

There were a variety of events going on over the course of the day, with the mains ones being a several-mile-round-trip hike through the woodland in the process of being restored, a tour of the greenhouse where plants are propagated (though we missed out on that), and lots of booths from various conservation organization around the island and state. Judging by the photography equipment a lot of people were there to see the rare native birds, such as the ʻiʻiwi, ʻapapane, ʻakepa, ʻakiapōlāʻau, and ʻelepaio (and others I'm forgetting). We see those birds occasionally in the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve where we work, but on the older slopes of Mauna Kea where the forest has had more time to turn lava rock into nutritious soil the sheer number of birds we saw was incredible. These birds no longer exist at lower elevations (where most of the island's population lives) due to mosquitoes and the deadly avian malaria they carry, so few people get to see or hear them without taking trips to high-elevation woodlands.

Part of the hike. Other than a few trees the entire area was clear-cut just a few decades a go.

Speaking of plants, we also got to see some rare varieties of those. Some of them appear at Puʻu Makaʻala, but again there were some Mauna Kea-specific species which I hadn't seen before. We got to hear from a conservationist there about one particular plant in the mint family, Phyllostegia brevidans, which was first described in 1862 and then disappeared from the record and was thought extinct for around a hundred and fifty years. Sometime earlier this century a single specimen was found by an exploring conservationist. He took some samples, which took six years to be identified from leaf samples in the Bishop Museum collection, after which he was able to return to the same individual plant to try to collect seeds. The plant was half-dead, with a single bunch of moldy fruit, but the seeds he got (remarkably) sprouted, and with some care and attention (and an ungulate-free enclosure to grow in) the plants were returned to the wild and many individuals are now thriving.

However! P. brevidans was previously pollinated by the nectivorous ʻiʻiwi, whose long, curved bills perfectly fit the plant's long, curved flowers. But its numbers had dropped so low for so long that ʻiʻiwi simply passed it by when it was replanted; they likely hadn't seen any in generations, and had completely lost the part of their cultural knowledge that told them it was edible. Thankfully, after some years they eventually figured it out again, and as of a few years ago are once again feeding from (and pollinating) their long-lost symbiotic flora. I can't tell it nearly as well as I heard it, but it was a truly inspiring success story of conservation.

I couldn't get a good photo of the several ʻiʻiwi I saw, so here's a gorgeous 3D-printed one! (Life-size.)

Overall it was a really interesting experience, and was a great way to see some rare and endangered birds and plants. It's a long drive to get there along Mana Road, but it offers some great views that I hadn't seen before. We'll see how often I get to go again (as it requires signing up before slots fill up), but I enjoyed the experience a lot. A hui hou!

A Hawaiian pie

It has been a very busy month here for me, which is why it's been so long since my last post. Some of the busyness has been pleasant (birthday parties!), some…more neutral (being in a hotel while my apartment building was tented this week), but all of it left me with little downtime or drive to write.

One exciting development is that last week I finally managed to make the pie I've been meaning to since about May! The idea was sparked by a comment from a coworker about how one could theoretically bake a pie using ʻākala (native Hawaiian raspberries) and ʻōhelo (native Hawaiian blueberries). The ʻākala ripen earlier (around May/June), so while I had some in the freezer ready to use for a few months it wasn't until late August/early September than the ʻōhelo really started ripening in significant amounts. Once they did, though, I was able to pick a lot – easily a few cups of berries in a quarter-hour's work. I ended up with so many that I didn't even use them all up making the pie, and will have to find some other use for them…

Thankfully, the pie came out well! I used the recipe I mentioned in my previous post (where I made it with raspberries and blueberries), and only added about a fourth of a cup of additional sugar. It wasn't an especially sweet pie, but it wasn't tart as I had feared the ʻākala would make it. (It's interesting to me how red the filling is – while related to blueberries, ʻōhelo are generally more red or reddish-purple in color.) I ended up making it after a particularly draining day at work (an arduous protocol that involved much tromping through the forest, under a sky that rained off-and-mostly-on all day) so I didn't get too fancy with the crust, but I did scratch the unofficial D20 logo into it. (It was also our last day doing that protocol this year, so it served as a nice celebration for finishing it.)

Anyway, just a quick post today as I'm technically still lodging at the hotel even though my place was cleared for re-entry this morning – the gas company won't come out to turn on the gas until Monday so I don't have any hot water or stove. I've got some interesting photos from visiting the annual Hakalau Natural Area Reserve open day last week, so look forward to those when I finally get a chance to catch my breath (hopefully this week!). A hui hou!

Checking out the new USGS building in Hilo, with drones!

There's a new building under construction on the UH Hilo campus (near to several places I have worked/am working), which when completed will house the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) and the USGS Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center (PIERC). It's replacing a previous HVO building which was located in Hawaiian Volcanoes National Park and was damaged in Kīlauea's 2018 eruption; this new one will be closer to staff who live in Hilo and students from the UH campus. Preparation of the lot started last year but construction really picked up this spring, and since I drive by it most days I've been able to watch its progress. And as a construction site not really near lots of people, I felt comfortable bringing out my Avata for some FPV exploration.

Along with my Mini 3 Pro; the video below contains footage from both. This was recorded on the 4th of July weekend, though I had to go back and reshoot the FPV footage on a different day because I was still figuring out which lens profiles worked with Gyroflow for post-production stabilization. (Note to self: It's the Wide profile that works, not Normal or [as you might think] Extra Wide). It's a slight shame since the weather was absolutely beautiful the first day, but the FPV footage I got the second time was better overall so it all works out.

I'm pretty happy with the resulting video. I couldn't really figure out a way to make a single long FPV shot look good, but I like the cutting between wide establishing shots and the more interesting individual fly-throughs. The music actually does stop like that halfway through (though I extended the pause slightly), and when I saw that collision in my footage I thought it was too funny not to sync them up. The recovery makes me smile, as I had basically nothing to do with it – the Avata can sometimes autonomously recover from collisions when you'd hardly expect it to.

It turns out I got that footage at pretty much the optimal point in the construction process as just the next week they started filling in the walls, making the main building less see-through and (probably) harder to fly through. I hope I get a chance to visit when it's complete, as they're going to have some amazing views of Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and the Saddle between them from that north lanai. We'll see how it goes! I don't know how much longer construction will take, but I'd imagine it'll finish sometime next year. A hui hou!

Tsunami (2025 edition)

Well, it's been a while since I last used the tsunami label on a post! Looking back I used it six times between 2010 and 2014, then…not until now. The first three years I lived in Hawaii each had a tsunami alert (two important enough to use the sirens), which primed to me think of them as roughly annual events. But then I haven't experienced one since 2014 (I don't think there were any while I was away in Australia), so when we started hearing tsunami watches (and then warnings) on the radio on Tuesday the 29th while working up at the Natural Area Reserve it was something of a blast from the past.

Thankfully, much like the others I've experienced living here, this one proved relatively uneventful. I've seen a reported wave height in Hilo of 4.9 feet, which was enough to flood some parking lots (and probably the first floors of some buildings) along the coast, but not enough to cause major damage. The wave was initially estimated to arrive just after 7 PM; it was still just light enough (right after sunset) that I put my drone in the air for about twenty minutes to see if I could see anything in the bay. The actual arrival happened around 8:30 PM, though, when it was far too dark to be see anything. (I also saw another drone in the air while I was up there, so I wasn't the only one with that idea.)

This was the largest tsunami alert since 2011, large enough that the sirens were activated – and since Friday was the first of the month, they also got activated for the usual first-of-the-month test, so I got to hear them twice in four days. Since I'm (decently far) out of the evacuation zone where I live it ended up being a relatively normal evening for me, but it's a good reminder that life's never boring when you live on a volcano in the middle of the Pacific! A hui hou!

Zoo, part two

I mentioned back in May how I went to the Panaʻewa Rainforest Zoo just south of Hilo for the first time on my birthday, and how that happened to be a rainy day. While I did enjoy my visit and the lack of crowds caused by the rain, I wanted to go back at some point when it wasn't raining to get more photos of the animals. I finally went about a month later, in June, which is about a month ago from when I'm writing this post as it's been pretty busy for me in the intervening weeks.

I found myself drawn back to several of the same animals, as the change in weather had some clear effects on their behavior or look. The red iguana above already looked good in the rain, but positively glows in the sunlight with an iridescent sheen. (And also appears to be enjoying itself from this angle.)

Similarly, I once again ended photographing the bumblebee poison dart frogs, which were much more active this time. Whereas before they were pretty much motionless, this time I saw several climbing or jumping around the enclosure. I think they were being fed, as this little group kept bobbing their heads forward and darting their tongues towards the mesh.

I did end up with a few photos that weren't just repeats, such as this one of the alligator in its enclosure.

I also got a nice shot of this golden crowned crane, native to Africa and the national bird of Uganda. I had to get in position with my phone then make a little noise to get it to look at me, but it worked out!

Overall it was a fun time. It was interesting to see how the animals' behaviors changed (or didn't) with the weather, and the lighting let me appreciate various colors better. There were a lot more people there with the sunny weather, but not enough to feel too crowded.

This is a little unfortunately timed, in that the zoo will begin charging a small admission fee in August, so this weekend is one of the last times to visit for free. I can see the reasoning behind it, and there's a relatively cheap annual pass so it shouldn't be too hard for people to continue going, but it's still a bummer. We'll see how it goes, I suppose, perhaps the revenue will allow for expansion and renovation (there are a few places noticeably empty at the moment which could have animals in them). A hui hou!