Saturday was a Kohala Watershed Partnership volunteer day, cutting back ginger and banana poka on Pu'u Pili at Kahua Ranch in North Kohala. The weather was quite good for the summit of Kohala, with occasional sprinkles and canopy drip from the trees catching mist and fog. We continue to work on the thick ginger in a small area that is also plagued by feral cattle and pigs. There was ample evidence (cow pies and trampling) of feral cattle near where we were working. The work days are frustratingly short, with only a small area of ginger cleared each day, and a lot of mud churned up to do it. It would be satisfying to be able to spend an entire week clearing a large swath of them.

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While exploring just the bottoms of some of the gulches we saw a few of Pu'u Pili's interesting flora, including its large cyrtandras, labordias and cyaneas. We finally got to see Pu'u Pili's cyanea tritomantha population. There was also an exceptional abundance of native snails, including the very colorful spiral (philonesia?) snail shown in the photo gallery.

The birds were fairly quiet. The pastures had 'io, kolea and sky larks. I didn't see any cattle egrets at Kahua Ranch today despite several large herds in the pastures. The forest had the usual common natives and aliens - 'apapane, 'amakihi, 'elepaio, white-eye, leiothrix, and northern cardinal. I only had time to do two counts, but they were typical of what I heard all day.

On the way home I stopped at Kalopa State Park in Hamakua, just because I haven't been there in several years. I did the "native forest" loop trail, which is a sad muddy area of mixed canopy forest whose most notable feature is the high fraction of kopiko, hame and kolea trees in the lower canopy. There is very little understory aside from ferns and weeds. There are many alien trees in the little "native forest", and it is surrounded by alien eucalyptus plantations. The birds were all aliens - mostly white-eyes with scattered hwamei, house finch, myna, northern cardinal, leiothrix and kalij pheasant. There were a few mongoose nosing around under the pheasants.

Bird Counts: (Species Codes Here)

station	time	APAP	HAAM	ELEP	JAWE	RBLE	NOCA	Notes
Pu'u Pili	1045		3	1	4		1
Pu'u Pili	1200	1	3	2	5	2	1
station	time	APAP	HAAM	ELEP	JAWE	RBLE	NOCA	Notes