Some of the greatest living artisans of the fabled Ni`ihau shell lei will be at the cave Saturday, April 6, including Mama Ane Kanahele and her many descendants.

If you’re on Kaua`i, plan to spend Saturday 9-2 at the cave with our friends from Ni`ihau. In support of the Makauwahi Jobs Program, the Ni`ihau community on Kaua`i will mahalo the volunteers and visitors to Makauwahi Cave with a day of traditional music, crafts, and food. Come learn how to make a lauhala mat with the people who make some of the best in the world!

Proceeds from the event will go to support the jobs program for unemployed Native Hawaiians at Makauwahi Cave Reserve. Bring your lunch and picnic with the staff, volunteers, and visitors at this unique site that combines research into the past with futuristic restoration strategies.

Here’s a snippet from the original nineteenth-century Land Court Awards (“Mahele”) map for the Maha`ulepu area. The cave is clearly marked, and listed to someone scratched out, and “Nahuma” written in. Across the stream that drains out of Kapunakea Pond, note that one of the properties is listed to Keahikuni. If you ever toured the cave you probably know who that is. For his story, go to pages 94-96 of Back to the Future in the Caves of Kaua`i.

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On the Ides of March, hundreds of attendees in the Grosvenor Auditorium at the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC heard Dr. Burney and about 20 other speakers hold forth on all aspects of the emerging concept of “De-Extinction.” There has been quite a media frenzy ever since.

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Every year since Makauwahi Cave Reserve came into being, the Senior Class of Island School in Puhi, Kaua`i has celebrated their graduating class status by spending a day with

us at the site, doing arduous labor! We know from experience what a great group we
can expect, and we have always enjoyed working with Joan Shaw and the rest of the IS staff to put together a nice mix of caving, hiking, picnicking, and service. We give them some pretty serious work, to do, too.

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If you’re on Kaua`i, plan to spend Saturday April 6 at the cave with our friends from Ni`ihau. In support of the Makauwahi Jobs Program, the Ni`ihau community on Kaua`i will mahalo the volunteers and visitors to Makauwahi Cave with a day of traditional music, crafts, and food. Come learn how to make a shell lei with the people who make the best in the world!

Back in October, the newsletter contained an article “Extinct Species – Back from the Dead?” It came out at the end of the month but it was no Halloween joke – scientists from a wide range of relevant disciplines were assembled privately to talk about the significance of advanced techniques that have already successfully produced a live lamb from an extinct ibex. They invited Dr. Burney to speak because the experiments with new conservation techniques such as rewilding and ecological surrogacy at Makauwahi Cave have shown that thinking well outside the conservation box can lead to exciting breakthroughs.

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We always learn a lot from visits to the cave by experts of all sorts, but a couple of days ago we had a special treat: two top experts on extreme tsunami events, Dr. Gerard Fryer, Senior Geophysicist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu, and Dr. Rhett Butler, a scientist and consultant who models the seismic dynamics of large earthquakes and other causes of tsunami waves.

Of course, they were curious, as was Dr. Walt Dudley of the Pacific Tsunami Museum in Hilo when he visited several years past, to see the remarkable evidence from Makauwahi Cave for a huge marine overwash of the site about four centuries ago. In a 2001 publication in Ecological Monographs, one of the most intensely peer-reviewed publications in the field, we reported a 95% confidence interval for a date of between 1430 and 1665 AD for SOMETHING that swept over this site, laying down large stones of several types in “a lens up to 1 meter thick at the lowest point of the sinkhole rim along the east wall, thinning out in the far reaches of the caves as turbidite fans and gravel beds.” (A turbidite fan is a debris field that can form around the edges of a powerful underwater event.)

After we pumped down the Northwest Pit, the tsunami experts donned the requisite helmets, and
carefully followed me down the wet, muddy extension ladder into the “poor man’s time machine” I write about so fondly in Back to the Future in the Caves of Kaua`i. They gasped at what they saw, as have so many others on first seeing this remarkable hodgepodge of basalt, lithified red soil, beach calcarenite, and blasted-apart pieces of the cave walls themselves, even stalactites. Tucked in the crevices between, in a matrix of sand, gravel, clay, and organic matter, are bones of large fish, wooden and stone artifacts, and big splintered pieces of tree trunks.

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Congratulations to Mary Werthwine, as she moves up from “volunteer Volunteer Coordinator” to a new part-time staff position as Volunteer and Outreach Coordinator, thanks to the Hawaii Tourism Authority County Product Enrichment Program. So if you would like to work a little or a lot, guiding, fixing, farming, or just tortoise-watching, or you have a group that would like to visit, contact Mary at home:

Let us know if you have a group that would like to visit!

Here is a tentative calendar of upcoming events at Makauwahi Cave Reserve, sponsored by the Hawaii Tourism Authority and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs:

• Hikes from the Hyatt Hotel to the cave: monthly beginning in February.
• Opportunities to volunteer: available daily; contact Mary Werthwine (see the article about Mary).
• Ni`ihau Festival: Saturday, April 6, all-day event featuring Niihau music performers and artisans practicing traditional crafts such as shell lei making, mat-weaving, etc.
• Archaeological Field School: Come help UH college program with the ongoing “dig” at the cave; M-T-W June 17-July 10.

For more information, contact Mary at home:

One of the best shows on local television here on Kaua`i is put on by His Honor, Mayor Bernard Carvalho. January 24, the Mayor’s staff arranged for the Hoike Educational Television film crew to shoot his upcoming one-hour show with our volunteers, employees, and a group of 45 third-graders from Kapa`a Elementary School.

It was so much fun for everybody. Lots of kids got on camera, being interviewed about their cave trip by the Mayor himself. Our dedicated and knowledgeable volunteers, both regular Sunday tour docents and nine employees from Grove Farm Company, led sub-groups of the students (and the Mayor) through four rotating stations. In two hours, every student got to tour the cave, hike the nature trail, plant trees along the beach, and collect data on the tortoises. The film was done!

The classes especially seemed to enjoy the “Tortoise Hide ‘n’ Seek” game in the tortoise paddocks. They searched several acres of restored native forest for 11 giant tortoises, and noted their shell number on a simple map. For them, it was like searching for huge Easter Eggs with legs. For us, it’s useful time-stamped location and nearest-neighbor data for our ongoing study of the ecology and behavior of these kid-pleasing lawn-mowers.

If you get Kaua`i Cable Television, check Channel 53 over the next few days for the show, which will run intermittently for about a week. Next month, tune in to this newsletter for a link to the show archives on the web.