Saturday was a Kohala Watershed Partnership volunteer day. We returned to Kanea'a on the north rim of Honokane Nui valley for the first time in 2-3 years, cutting ginger in the abandoned Ponoholo Ranch pastures that are being reforested along the valley rim. The reforestation area is several miles in, and we drove a long ranch road through many paddocks alongside the Kehena Ditch to get there. The weather was partly cloudy and dry until we arrived, but fog and then rain developed soon after we started working on the ginger.

Kanea'a is snail country, and this area is billed as a snail preserve. We found partulina physa tree snails in the scattered 'ohi'a trees, and a few succineid snails on the ginger. There is very little plant diversity in the pastures. Scattered 'ohi'a dotted the pastures, each tree was like a little oasis of epiphytes in the sea of pasture grass. (Occasionally the ginger was growing in the trees, as well.) Stream cuts sheltered a bit more plant diversity, with various common native trees and smaller plants sheltered along the steep banks. We removed a nasty jasmine shrub from the stream bed. The rim of the valley is partially forested, but constant landslides and erosion undercuts large trees eventually. It's possible that the pigs and ginger have increased the rate of erosion. There were numerous clermontia kohalae among the trees along the edge, but the tree diversity along the rim is much greater along 1-2 kilometers downslope.

Birds were few and far between. Along the ranch road the cattle, pasture grass and stock ponds attracted sky larks, mynas, cattle egrets, and night herons. We did not observe any ducks on the ponds today. In the preserve itself we only heard occasional small clusters of red-billed leiothrix and japanese white-eye.