Friday, 1 Nov 2002

HALEAKALA, Hawaii

Party time. Our SCA is leaving tonight, so this is her last day on the job. She will be going back to school to finish up her undergraduate degree. To show her our thanks, we are having a little party for her this morning with muffins and pastries before we go out for the day’s work.

SCAs are great. That’s how I started out. SCA stands for Student Conservation Association. Working through the organization is a wonderful way for people to get experience in environmental jobs and see if environmental work is what they really want to do. My SCA position brought me to Maui with the same project that I am working for now. After my four-month stint as a resource assistant with SCA, I fell in love with Maui and my job — and decided I was going to figure out a way to stay. I ended up working for another endangered species project for a year before a full-time position opened up at Haleakala; when one did, I grabbed it. After we thank our current SCA for the past 16 weeks of hard work she has done for us, it is time to get back to work.

Our next SCA began on the job last week and is still learning the traplines. Today, I will be taking her out on the trapline that starts at about 9,500 feet and goes along the park fence line back to the office at 6,700 feet. We get dropped off and slide down the cinder, checking four traps before we get to the fence line. Once we reach the fence line, we follow it down the rocky slope checking not only traps, but also the fence line to make sure there aren’t any holes or spots where goats or pigs could get through. It’s nice introducing the trapline to someone new. I pick up the traps, and our volunteer puts the bait in them. We make our way down to Trap 33 and then the fence turns, heading toward the office. We follow along it. We come to a trap that has a mongoose in it, but this one is already dead and has begun to decay. Unfortunately, it is past the point for us to get any information from it except the sex and whether or not it was an adult. This one was an adult male. We take it out of the trap, which we then reset.

Along this portion of the fence are seven inn traps we use to monitor the numbers of alien wasps in the area. As the volunteer checks the large, metal traps, I check the small inn traps. After counting 254 worker wasps, I rebait the inn trap with a wasp attractant and hang it back on the fence. We follow this pattern for the next six stations, and then I go back to lifting the larger traps.

This trapline has three gulches along it. As we approach the first one, we hear a goat. Luckily, this one is on the outside of the park. I have found goats with their heads stuck in the fence by their horns as they try to reach the green foliage on the park side. I let our volunteer know that if she encounters this problem, she should push the heads back through the fence. No goats in the fence today, though, and as we climb out of the third gulch we approach a hill to climb. Our volunteer looks at me and asks me to please tell her we don’t have to climb that. Unfortunately, we do — but luckily, it is downhill from there and only 17 traps back to the office. We make it up the hill just fine and back to the office for a late lunch. Time again to transfer data and then process other data until the workday is done.

Well, that’s a week in my life. Make sure to head up to Haleakala National Park if you ever make it over to Maui, but make sure you bring a rain jacket.

Pau (finished).