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!