Ever more students from all grades and all schools on Kaua`i have been able to participate in site visits, work days, and educational exercises at Makauwahi Cave over recent months, thanks to generous support from the Grove Farm Foundation to help defray the costs of student transport. By sponsoring the buses and also providing some of their employees as volunteers, Grove Farm has made it possible for our staff and volunteers to work safely and efficiently with even groups of 200 or more at a time.

School administrators have long preferred that we take larger groups, as the “economy of scale” applies to school trips like anything else. Our usual approach with very large groups is to divide them into subgroups that rotate through a variety of activities, with trained volunteers and staff on duty at each station. There is just enough time in a school day, if the buses roll in on time, for each student to have a turn at touring the cave, tending native plants and Polynesian crops, hiking the Makauwahi Cave Trail, and a “tortoise hunt.”

In the latter case, students enjoy an educational game in which they search out each of our now 14 large tortoises, note down their shell number and their location on a simple map, and observe their behavior. Kids and even adults get a thrill out of this exciting variation on the Easter Egg Hunt, while learning orientation skills, animal behavior, and plant-animal interactions. And we get useful data on tortoise territory, movements, and feeding behavior.

So far this year, we have hosted 13 school groups, a total of 418 participants, from schools throughout the island, as well as educational groups from neighbor islands and the mainland. We have five more scheduled for May. Mahalo Grove Farm!