Plumeria
Tag: Hawaii
Fellows Nudibranch
Drone versus ʻIo
This bird did not like the drone.
I have flown around big birds before. Bald eagles, ravens, seagulls, other hawks… few had taken more that a moments notice of the drone. This attack surprised me, I did not even see the hawk coming, and it came in hard.
I was on the return leg of an exploration into the ʻōhia forest behind Puʻuwaʻawaʻa and having a little fun with the drone. Simple plan… Set the drone to hover and then bike past through the camera view.
I had left the drone to hover for the moment as I moved to the next spot, when I look up to see a flash of white slashing at the drone. It hits and the drone staggers in the air before recovering.
Continue reading “Drone versus ʻIo”Anchialine Pool
An anchialine pond is a brackish water pool near the ocean. The Kona coast of the big island is scattered with such pools.
Near the ocean the water table is quite high, often just a meter or so beneath the surface. These recent lava flows are highly fractured, riddled with cavities and lava tubes. Here the abundant fresh water from the mauna comes down to meet the seawater. The young lava rock is rich in nutrients and life flourishes in the dark crevices and chambers.
Continue reading “Anchialine Pool”A Visit to the Nation of Hawaiʻi
At the back of Waimānalo is a place separated from modern society through an act of sheer will. Here in rainy, windward Oahu is a valley ringed with impossibly steep cliffs, a pali that soars thousands of feet overhead draped in lush greenery. At the base of those cliffs is a place where an older culture finds a place to shelter, a place of refuge.
I am here to attend a tech event, a hackathon where various makers like myself use technology to solve problems. This event has been arranged by the folks of Purple Maiʻa, an organiztion dedicated to tech education. The theme this time? Instrumenting an ahupuaʻa, learning from the land by installing a network of instruments to monitor such things as temperature, water quality, stream flow, and more.
Continue reading “A Visit to the Nation of Hawaiʻi”Geology of Waikoloa
While writing up my visit to Goat House Tube I was again wondering how old the lava tube was, it is clearly old, but how old?
Most of the Mauna Kea lava flows upon which Waikoloa sits are ten to twenty thousand years old, but the Mauna Loa flows that start just south of the village can be quite a bit younger.
Just a few miles south of the village one can find the 1859 Mauna Loa flow, the longest lava flow in the state representing a very long eruption that produced an enormous volume of lava. This is the flow that reshaped Kiholo bay, destroying the large fishponds that could once be found there.
Continue reading “Geology of Waikoloa”Eruption Crowd
Yet Another Hurricane
It has been a wet weekend here as yet another hurricane makes a swipe at the island.
This has meant over an inch of rain and some strong winds at the house. A pair of 14,000ft mauna between us and the oncoming storms has worked as usual.
The windward side took the brunt of the storm, but this was a marginal hurricane. In general there have been no major impacts on the island beyond some localized flooding in the usual places and downed trees blocking roads.
I did deploy a new rain gauge this weekend, just in time for the deluge. An electronic tipping bucket of my own design that seems to be operating quite nicely.
Tropical Stargazing
Awaiting Dark
