I decided to make the rounds again this morning and look for ripe fruit or veggies to be picked. I also decided we should have a small bouquet of flowers since the birds of paradise are so pretty.
Our first participant was scheduled for 11 a.m. at the Kalapana Sea View Estates. He wasn't the friendliest person when I talked to him yesterday, but he proved to be quite interested in my work, and friendlier today. We talked for a while about the housing market (he's selling his place, and his rental property next door). The Puna district, which encompasses this area, is supposedly the cheapest to buy properties, which makes sense from what we've seen. This participant told me how the main road (which he lives on), used to be used as a landing strip for planes to come in and pick up marijuana to fly elsewhere until the power companies put up telephone polls alongside the road 10 years ago. Apparently the locals would go out with their chain saws and knock down the polls so the planes could still land. Another tidbit this participant shared had to do with people living on the East, versus the east. The people living on the east side of the road are referred to as "tree people", while the people on the west side are considered "lava people". There should be more frogs in the lava people side.
We stopped and ate our lunch before heading to the second participant's house, which was the interviewee from yesterday. No difficulties with this property, so we collected our data and headed out.
We took the more scenic route home, which took us past Mango Rd. Appropriately named, since there were mango trees everywhere! The participant we spoke with yesterday mentioned collecting a number of mangoes along the road, so I was anxious to see if I could grab some too. I ended up collecting 12 mangoes amongst a sea of many more mangoes. I wondered what people thought as they were driving by, but I love mangoes, and they are a bit pricey at the farmer's market, so this worked well for me.
We came back to the apartment so we had a mid-afternoon break, which I filled with labeling data that hadn't already been done (very time consuming!). We had 3 mangoes with our dinner (yum yum!!) and headed out to set up the sound recorders. We saw a fair number of frogs on the tree person's property, and the chorus was really loud.
We took the scenic route home, and amongst the calling coqui, we heard something from our car that sounded like an explosion. From what we could tell, we were hit from a falling mango, as we watched several of them drop onto the road in front of us. I guess I should set up nets around the trees to catch all the falling fruit! I refrained from going out and collecting more fruit, but the large bang on the car was enough to startle anyone.
I set up the sound recorder outside the window at the beach house, so we can gain a baseline related to temp/humidity.
Our first participant was scheduled for 10 a.m. She owns a yurt, and, it turns out, is a reverend. She loves the coqui frogs as they help her get to sleep at night, since they make it difficult for the mind to wander and think about other things that might keep you awake. We chatted for a while and she thanked me for the enjoyable discussion.
Our next participant wasn't scheduled until 1:00 p.m., so we went and sat at the park at the end of this community (close to the ocean) and ate our lunches and read. It was another gorgeous day.
We drove to the 1 p.m. participant's house, but there was a note stating he'd be back closer to 1:30, since he was running late. He had a nice porch with chairs on it, so we decided to sit there and read until he came. He didn't come until closer to 2, but it was fine since he was really pleasant and we didn't mind reading for a bit. He is a landscaper, so he knows about certain types of vegetation that seem to attract the frogs, and he's hoping researchers like myself will be able to figure something out that can be applied island-wide to help control the frogs. I made no promises, of course, but obviously that's the goal of the work.
After his property, we picked up the insect traps from the previous day and we did a couple of errands before heading back to the beach house. We sat out on the picnic table by the ocean where Seth read and I worked on labeling a large number of research pictures. We made some dinner and headed out to do our night-time measures.
We did the yurt property first, which had a couple of frogs right on her yurt! One was calling, and the other was a good 3 meters off the ground. Crazy little guys! We heard other frogs, but then the other one I saw was in the bromeliads on the edge of her property. They seem to like these types of plants that retain water and have a broader/flatter leaf surface.
The second house mostly had frogs along the periphery, though we did see cane toads at both places. After we were done counting frogs, we drove back the shorter direction and saw the glow from the flowing lava at a distance. Pretty neat.
Our one participant today was not scheduled until 6 p.m. so we had most of the day free. The car we are using for the summer really needed to have an oil change and safety inspection done, since the inspection was going to expire the end of this month. We scheduled an appointment for 3 p.m. up in Hilo and headed out that direction to do some errands.
After our errands, we decided to continue on and drive up to the Mauna Kea Observatory and the Keck Observatory. We didn't have a lot of time to explore once we got up there, but the views were gorgeous along the drive up, and we plan to come back and stay for a sunset and telescope viewing at a later point. We stopped by the visitor center at 9000ft to get acclimated to the elevation change and eat our lunch. We didn't have much time to lounge around, so we headed up to where all the telescopes are.
Seth was really excited to tour the Keck Observatory, so we headed up there. We saw a short video on the telescope, looked at some displays, but the door to the actual scope was locked. Bummer. It was supposed to be open at this time. So, we headed out. We got lucky, as on the walk back to the car, two workers were on their smoke break, and we mentioned the door. They unlocked it for us, checking first if there was work going on and that was why it was locked, though there wasn't. He explained how they've had to put up plexiglass over the viewing area, as people were sneaking through the bars and exploring previously! We had a nice cold viewing of the 36 hexagonal mirrors making up the 10m wide primary mirror. They cool the domes to nighttime temperatures so there is no fogging or changes in adjustment when they open the domes at night. This was definitely a neat room to be in, and we'll be back.
We drove to our oil change/safety inspection a little late, but we called and they said it was fine. We dropped off the car around 3:30, walked to a nearby park and waited. The car ended up taking until after 5:00 p.m. as they were a bit slow with some of the safety inspection paperwork.
We arrived at our 6 p.m. participant a little after 6 (not bad!) and she was there and ready to chat. She was a very interesting lady who had visited the nearby yoga/spiritual retreat area, loved Hawaii, kept visiting, and decided she needed to buy here. She doesn't mind the frogs at their current volume, and they help her to sleep and are almost like a symphony. We surveyed her property as the sun was setting, then drove to the previous day's properties and picked up the bug traps. I saw a number of frogs in her guava tree, but it wasn't terribly noisy compared to other properties on the other side of the main drive in this community. We drove home, enjoying the glow from the lava.
We didn't have any participants scheduled for the day, so we were going to drive around and try to recruit from the next community. When we were ready to head out, we realized we had a flat tire. Uh oh. I guess we lucked out it wasn't on a day where we actually had an appointment scheduled, or we would have been REALLY late. It was a team effort to remove the tire and replace with the spare. It took us a while to figure out where the lever to the jack was stored (under the rear passenger seat), and then I jacked up the car. Seth removed and replaced the wheel, while I unjacked the car. We headed up the road to the tire place to have them fix up the flat. We left it with them while we headed off to do some errands.
As it turns out, the valve had been loosened, so there was nothing physically wrong with the tire, thank goodness. They said this happens sometimes, and wasn't likely caused by Midas where we had our oil change, unless it was deliberate sabotage. They were really busy when we came back, so we took the tire with us so we could replace at the beach house.
We drove back to the Kalapana Sea View Estates to pick up the sticky traps from the previous property, and to try and recruit another person, and check in with a person who said he'd participate later in the week. We got the number for one potential participant, which we're supposed to call on Saturday morning. Many other people were renters, and didn't want to upset their landlords by letting us on their property (rightfully so).
After we got back to the beach house, Seth worked on building a fire while I worked on switching out the tires. This time, I did the whole thing on my own- lots of fun. The timing worked out well, and after I was done, we worked on grilling some brats, making a fruit salad (complete with fresh coconut plucked from a tree here and sliced open with Seth's machete), and eating by the ocean. Afterwards, we made some cookies and finished off some wine we had opened a few days prior. Seeing as it was almost a full moon, the night was quite gorgeous and bright.
This morning we had some important business work to take care of, so we got a later start that we had anticipated. We decided to drive back to the second community we had surveyed, in order to try and recruit the last participant we needed. The first few people were nos, then no answers, then finally we had a nice guava farmer say yes. He had a long and narrow 3-acre plot, complete with dogs, cats, chickens, and pigs. The smell of the guava was enough to overpower, and became less than pleasant as we worked. We finished up around 6 and decided to drive to a nearby road and sit and eat and read. He had given us some lychee to try, so we partook in that as well.
I heard lots of frogs in the guava, but the only frog I saw on this property was in the old tires they had laying around on the property. The frogs in the guava trees were above my head, so that might have been part of the problem. There were lots of cane toads, centipedes, giant snails, ants, and slugs around as well. I was also attacked by a giant moth (size of a bat) as I was walking back up to pick up the sound recorder.
We got back fairly late and headed to get some sleep.
I called the woman whose husband I spoke with the other day about participating, and she sounded quite interested. We'll be meeting with her at 5 p.m. today. We headed out in the early afternoon to try and recruit participants from our last community on this side of the island- Kapoho. We were successful at recruiting 4 of the necessary 7 people, but time was ticking and we needed to head over to Kalapana to recruit one more person there prior to our 5 p.m. appointment. The Kapoho area has lots of vacation rentals, so it makes it a bit trickier to recruit participants, but we're confident we can get those last 3 somehow.
We drove through Kalapana and were headed towards one of the people who said they'd call me later in the week, but hadn't, but the road we were on didn't go through. We decided to stop by one of the houses on the way back to see if they'd be interested in participating. We lucked out, as the woman was interested, so we went ahead and interviewed her. She didn't know much about the frogs, but had seen some when she lived in Orchidland, but felt they weren't as bad around here. Her mom had suggested putting salt out, as that's what she uses in CA to take care of snails. I hadn't heard that suggestion before, and wondered if it would really have an effect, but guessed it might be similar to all the other suggestions out there for frog control. We finished at her property right at 5 and drove to the next participant.
This second participant was super friendly. She was working on her MS in a distance-learning program, and appreciated that someone as young as myself (in her opinion) was already working on my PhD. She knew a lot about the frogs and claimed to have a lot on her property. She was right, as I think this property won the prize for the most frogs we've seen. We saw them all over the place, especially in Ti plants, the ground, and even on some old cars. One male was even calling alongside the side view mirror on one of these cars. He looked pretty silly, but was at just the right angle that I couldn't get a good picture of him. On the way out, we saw a number of cane toads- the most we've seen anywhere as well. We saw all different sizes, and, from the looks of it, both juveniles and adults. Pretty cool.
We made the drive up to Orchidland to pick up the sticky traps from the property the night before. We were already wet from the light showers we got at the Kalapana properties, but we had a bit of a wild goose chase at this property, so got even wetter with the light rain (we did have our rain coats on). The owner had moved a couple of the posts, which made it trickier to find them in the dark. Not sure why he moved them- maybe to play a trick on us (just kidding). I'm guessing they were in his way slightly, so he took care of moving them.
We stopped by the waterfill station on the way back to the beach house to fill up some of our water bottles, and then took care of unloading things, putting the insects away, and going to sleep.
Our first appointment is at 1:00 p.m. in Kapoho, and then we're going to try and recruit another one for later in the afternoon, and hopefully two more for later in the week.
I think we are going to miss our apartment here as we head to the drier part of the island on Friday, as the location was awesome. We were right along the ocean, on a secluded road, with a huge space to call our own. Not to mention, a great greenhouse full of tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, beans, squash, etc. It will be nice to have an address that mail can be sent to/from once we're in Kona, as this place is not an area where mail delivers to:
We had been working on rooting pineapples we've bought while on the island with good success. I decided today would be a good day to plant the ones that had started rooting. We have a recent pineapple with no roots, a slightly older pineapple (longer since we've eaten it) with short roots, a medium length rooted pineapple, and a pineapple with long roots. I planted them all in the landlord's small patch in the laundry room (she gave permission via email). These pineapples look even better than the two we have growing indoors in Utah. We plan to have a pineapple party when it actually produces fruit, as it takes something like a couple years to produce fruit.
We were successful at recruiting the 3 more participants we needed. We interviewed the second participant around 3 p.m. and I ended up having a group discussion with three people, which was interesting, and will make transcribing difficult. One of the participants lives there full-time (a neighbor) and then the other two own the property, but live on the mainland. They spray heavily with lime, or their neighbor does, which we got to encounter that evening. They were really excited about talking about the coqui, and Seth and I even had our picture taken as we were taking measurements (they asked if they could). I guess we were really curious creatures to them! They rent their property out most of the year, so they also gave me a tour of the place, for future reference, and all of their contact info for the rental. Their property was certainly one of the more entertaining ones to do, simply for the fact that they thought we were so curious and interesting. The woman came out while we were taking measurements, after the interview, and said that she was thinking about her own profession (I guess she's a midwife) and wondering if there could be something applied from that profession to the frogs, and she wondered if we could make the frogs sterile, or alter their reproductive ability. I said that is something plausible, and people should be (if they aren't already) working on that.
After we finished our measurements, we headed back to Kalapana Sea View Estates to pick up our sticky traps from our last two participants there. We then decided to stop on a road pullout on the way back to eat our dinner. The view was gorgeous, especially as the sun was setting.
We drove back to Kapoho and collected our nighttime data. We saw a TON of frogs on our first property, and hardly any on the second one. The second property was the property that was almost completely white from being coated with lime, so it's not surprising to see fewer frogs. We still saw some, though, so the lime didn't get all of them, which is part of the problem with using things like it.
We were running low on gas on our way out, but decided to fill up the following day before our 1 p.m. appointment