Taco Tuesday

Yesterday was our first day out doing work for our individual projects. In the morning the vegetation group worked on the native plant grid and got spectroscopy readings for a plant called wiliwili, we only managed to complete readings on two plants because we were dodging squalls all morning and had to pack up all the gear and run to a shelter every 15 minutes or so.  But this meant that we got to eat some tasty Hawaiian pig. I felt OK about eating the pork (as a vegetarian) because it was a wild pig that had been messing up someone’s garden so they killed and cooked it –  can’t get more sustainable than that!

After lunch we hiked to a heiau (pronounced hey-ow) which is a large pile of lava rocks on the coast that used to be some sort of temple. My group took waypoints with a Trimble GPS unit in specific areas covered in one type of vegetation so we could work on identifying them in images that have a pixel size of 30 or so meters.

Dinner was tasty tacos followed by a lecture on the geology of Kauai.