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From the moment we saw it , we knew the position held many great secrets . We had been looking for new fogy sites on the south side of the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1992 with our confrere , Helen F. James and Storrs L. Olson of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington , D.C. , along with their kid , Travis and Sydney , and our own , Mara and Alec .
And what we found was a cave — once a Pleistocene dune flying field , and afterward a swallow hole with pickling - jarful powers — that may be the full-bodied fossil site in the Hawaiian Islands , perhaps in the entire Pacific Island area .
The Makauwahi Cave in Hawaii may be the richest fossil site in the entire Pacific Island region, loaded with bird and fish bones and ancient Polynesian artifacts.
Sixteen geezerhood after our discovery , we have excavated seed , pollen , Polynesian artifacts , thousands of boo and Pisces bones , and more from this half - Akka piling of sediments spanning many millennia . The web site has bear up some of theisland ’s long - stay fresh secrets , telling of a metre when the gravid land fauna here were flightless waterfowl , such as the turtle - jawed moa nalo ( Chelychelynechen quassus ) . Moreover , it document the keen changes that occurred when first Polynesians , and by and by Europeans , Americans , and Asians , arrived with boatloads of invasive alien species .
The first boats began arrive roughly a thousand years ago , kick off the first of three stages of extinction on Kauai . In the first microscope stage , Polynesians belike overhunted the turgid flightless birds , while introduced rats , chicken , and humble pig disrupt their remain nests . Later , but beforeCaptain Cook arrivedin 1778 , the agriculture of a growing Hawaiian populationwiped out more specie . Finally , Europeans make it and bring Capricorn and other livestock that finished the line of work .
In 2000 we learn the long - lost 19th - one C name of the cave , Makauwahi , thanks to a local archaeologist , William K. " Pila " Kikuchi , who recover the name from an essay write by a high school scholar more than a century ago . It means something like " roll of tobacco oculus . " That may have been in credit to Keahikuni , a mid - nineteenth - century native diviner who read the future tense in spirals of smoke rising from the swallow hole .
The narrative struck a resonant chord , as we had begun call up about Makauwahi Cave as a preserver of the time to come at least as much as the past times . In 2004 , we were granted a lease on the cave property , include the circumvent seventeen acres of sand dune , wetlands , and forsake ploughland , by the owners , Grove Farm Company . Using the fogy as a guidebook , we determine out to inhibit flora innovate in the last two 100 and to favor those that evolved here or were brought from other Pacific island by the first human dweller .
The most strange patch of land is on several acres of weedy thicket formerly used for cane and corn farming . After only three years of renewal , nearly a hundred species of native and Polynesian trees , shrubs , and ground covers are now thriving . Planted by Tennessean , including some of the same folks who help oneself us sieve the fossils from the cave sediments , and the eager help of hundreds of schoolchildren from all over Kauai , the new wood has flourished beyond all expectation .
1000 of acres of give up farmland throughout the Hawaiian Islands could grow native works just as well as this !
Unfortunately , many of the animals that melt from Kauai were unequaled to the island . But even if we ca n’t have elephantine , flightless waterfowl , we can make the area more attractive to the surviving specie of birds , animals , and insects that are indigenous to the island . In this way and others , we ’d like to believe we can be a small like old Keahikuni the Diviner in narrate the hereafter . Here at Makauwahi , which has given us such a powerful signified of the yesteryear , we can find a better future for an island world that was nearly lost .
David A. Burney and Lida Pigott Burney live on Kauai . David is Director of Conservation at the National Tropical Botanical Garden , and Lida deal the Makauwahi Cave Reserve .
