Tuesday, 29 Oct 2002

HALEAKALA, Hawaii

Today is Stairmaster day. For all of you out there who have ever worked out on a Stairmaster, imagine doing so for eight hours. That should give you an idea of what I do when I check Uau burrows. The Uau is an endangered seabird that spends its day out over the ocean feeding and then flies up to the top of Haleakala each night. Using its wings and feet, this bird burrows six or more feet into the lava rock and cinder to build its home.

The Uau at home.

Before seeing one of these birds myself, I always imagined them to be very agile, since they can dig so well. As it turns out, they are anything but, at least on the ground. Once they have landed, they flounder around on the cinder and rocks; you could never call them graceful. They also need wind to take off again, which is one of the reasons the slopes of Haleakala Crater is such a great nesting place for them. The crater rim usually has at least a small breeze blowing across it and sometimes the winds can reach up to 60 mph or more. Not the best time to be out checking burrows — even in 35 mph winds, I’ve thought I was going to get blown off.

Luckily that’s not a concern today. There is slight breeze and the sun is out, and I’m setting out on our bimonthly burrow checks. There are about 1,000 known burrows throughout the crater, which we mentally separate into eight colonies along the rim, three colonies on the floor, and a handful of miscellaneous burrows here and there. Given the size of the crater, it would take a whole month to check every single burrow. Instead, before each petrel season starts in February, we go through the database of all the burrows in each colony and randomly select a certain number to check.

An Uau chick.

These randomly selected burrows are called project burrows, and we check them every month. Toward the end of the season, in September, we go through the data from the current breeding season to see which burrows have been active. The ones that are active and have signs of a chick are checked every two weeks — thus, the bimonthly checks.

Today, we are starting with one of the smaller colonies, which has 10 burrows that need to be checked. Because of its small size, it will be one of the easier ones to check, but we still have to hike downhill and sideways and back uphill multiple times — all on loose rocks and cinder, mind you. Walking on cinder is like walking uphill on sand — one step up and a two-step slide back down. Even splitting up the burrows with the volunteer who’s helping me, it still takes us an hour or so to check them all.

Once we get to a burrow, we play detective. We look at the burrow to see if it has been entered — which means looking to see if the toothpicks we placed there are down. If all the toothpicks are still up, we move on to the next one. If the toothpicks are down, the fun begins. We lay down on the cinder and rocks (not always comfortable, I might add), shove our heads into a tiny hole, and use a flashlight to look inside and as far down the burrow as possible. We are looking for shells or shell fragments, down, feathers, droppings, diggings, bones, vegetation, tracks, or odor — anything that will tell us something about the burrow’s inhabitants.

After checking those 10 burrows, we make our way along the crater rim to the next colony. When we’re finished with the second one, we still have time for a third, but at the end of that one, it’s quitting time. We head back to the office and transfer the days’ data and go home. Three colonies isn’t bad for a day’s work.