Shreddin', Brah

...as in, "we went to west Maui yesterday and were shreddin' some gnarly waves dude!"

Gotta love the surfer talk! Yep, we have officially started surfing. But first let me back up to our last trip into the field...
So we've been following this one pair of parrotbill in particular, and after about 6 days of watching them and feeling close to finding their nest, the weather turned bad. Ugh. The wind started to pick up first, then the mist blew in and the temperature dropped. It was difficult to sleep at night because the wind makes the vinyl walls of our weatherport tent flap rather violently, creating some pretty loud noise. After a couple days of yucky but not awful weather, we awoke to heavy rain and SLEET! Yep, it can sleet in Hawai'i (at 7000' at least)! That night, we had front row seats for one helluva thunderstorm - because we were essentially IN the cloud, the thunder and lightning were at our level. It was so crazy! The thunder even sounded different, more resonant. Luckily, it was all around us but not too close to be scary. The next morning, the wind began to die down and we started seeing the sky again, and it got better each day afterward. So we "weathered the weather", so to speak, but the poor parrotbill weren't so lucky. The other study site had 4 nests going into the storm, but none of them made it. Sigh, poor little guys. But hopefully they will start rebuilding new nests, and maybe we'll actually be able to find them this time around! (at our site at least :-)
We celebrated St. Patrick's Day at Frisbee Meadow with a few green beers (a true delicacy in the field, green or otherwise!), a green cake, and an irish dinner of corned beef hash a la Ruby. Also, I finally mastered the art of baking cookies in our crazy little oven - you should see this thing, then you'd understand what an accomplishment this is! At the end, we were lucky and didn't have to hike out of the field - we got to fly out in the helicopter! The usual 6-7 hour trip was sliced down to a mere 5 minutes, it was truly a thing of beauty.
Out of the field, we've been spending a lot of time at the beach and in the ocean. On Saturday, our co-workers Hanna & Ruby were yard sale shopping and came across a beat-up surfboard for $10. It looks like it can barely float, but Brad optimistically bought it and made some repairs. After an Easter brunch, six of us from the crew headed over to the beaches on west Maui to go surfing. We had five boards between us, and three of us who had never been on a board before! So we rotated around throughout the afternoon, trying to get a feel for catching a wave. I should mention here that Brad's board, named The Dude, not only floats, but it can ride a wave too! Brad was able to stand on the first day and ride a wave almost in to the beach - it was awesome!! I got up to my knees, but never really stood, but oh my gosh it is just so much fun! I love being on the water anyway, but in this case, you not only get to try to surf, but in between waves, we had sea turtles swimming right by us and we could see whales breaching further out, the sun setting behind the island of Lanai - it's pretty incredible. That first time out, I could barely even balance well enough to sit on the board in the water. We've gone a few more times since then, and I'm proud to say that yesterday I officially stood up several times and could even steer myself a little! I'm using this huge 10 1/2 foot board that can be hard to maneuver when you're paddling, but it's nice and stable once you're standing! We call it "The Tony"...I guess somebody on the bird crew a while back donated it to the project, and his name was, well, Tony. So anyway, I can't wait till the next time we're out of the field and can go surfing again!
Yesterday, we also went to one of the most beautiful spots I've ever seen. You may wonder why there is not a single photo of this gorgeous place on the page, but we'll get to that in a minute. It's called the Olivine Pools over on the west coast of Maui - when lava was flowing into the sea, in this spot it dried into somewhat of a flat platform that juts out into the ocean. There are actually quite a few of these along the coast, interspersed between the sea cliffs and rocky shoreline - there are no sand beaches on this part of the island, so it's very rugged. This one particular place, however, has 4 large pools of varying colors of turquoise, green, and blue. All are deep enough to swim in, one being about 7 feet deep. Brightly colored fish were swimming around between pools, the waves were crashing on the rocks around us, Brown Noddies and tropicbirds were flying overhead...ahhhh. I shit you not, it was completely phenomenal. We were taking our last few photos, when suddenly we hear this boom and crash of a wave behind us, so I hunched over to try and keep the camera dry as a small splash of water came down around me. I was thinking, oh, this really isn't as bad as I thought - but the water kept coming, and got stronger too! It was just like getting stuck under the waterfall on Thunder River!! Which would be a lot of fun, except that I was holding our rather expensive digital camera...there were a few people there who saw it, and at first they were all laughing and cheering that we got soaked. Their loud "aaahhhhh!" turned into a softer "ooo" when they saw us scrambling to get the camera turned off and battery out. So, it seemed fine when we got it turned off - mostly I think it just got a little splash on the outside, but I'm still nervous to turn it back on! Hence the lack of Olivine Pools on my page. Perhaps next time we come out of the field I'll get up the nerve.
So, we head back to Frisbee tomorrow - we're hiking in, should be hiking out on the 6th. I can't believe it's almost April! Anyway, hope everyone is doing good and enjoying spring wherever you are!