Pouhala Marsh Cleanup

This is the Pouhala Marsh. It is a key player in Oahu's natural water filtration system, but sadly it has been pretty abused over the last 75 years or so. The Hawaii Nature Center has been rehabilitating it and it is recovering fantastically. 

(these picture belong to NATHAN YUEN. He has a nice little article on the place too)

It is now a wildlife/bird reserve, and one of the endangered species that are regular residents are the Hawaiian stilts. Approximately 10% of the entire world's population live at this marsh!

Check out those feet!

We got to help with one of the clean up days, removing invasive plants and rubbish (it was being used as an illegal dump for quite some time so even with constant cleaning there is always rubbish to be removed!)

We were on the rubbish removal in the stream section. It was too muddy for us to bring our camera's but some of the event staff were taking pics and I found quite a few of Richard

(that's me standing next to Richard, you cant tell from the pic but I am holding the biggest yet cutest toad I ever saw that one of the Navy guys caught for me)

The stream appeared to be about a foot deep at most but we were warned the mud was pretty deep under that. I figured I might sink up to my knees or so. With my first step I was up to my hip in thick, oozy, foul smelling filth! Trying to fee that leg I managed to get waist deep in the mire! It was insane! The harder you fought it the deeper you sank... We soon figured out a system where I would carefully wade in a few feet, pass back the rubbish, and then Richard would pull me straight up and out by my arms. Luckly the mud wasn't sticky so though we smelled funny we at least weren't covered in the stuff once we got out. We had some fun Navy guys working on our team with us and one of them had a method where he would just lay down flat and pull himself along the surface. He called it the alligator we all laughed so hard our sides hurt. We pulled so much trash out of that marsh it was truly mind blowing, and we didn't even get close to all of it. 

Here is a pic of us returning, you can just see the top of my head.

Here is a shot from opening they were all clapping at Richard and I, because apparently we were the only non affiliated guys there. (Most of the volunteers were employee's of Target and Starbucks). 

It was a really fun day and we are hoping to do it again soon and bring Ben along with us.

One of these tiny butterfly's landed on my shoe they are soooo tiny, sadly I have no idea what kind it is or if it is a good bug or an invasive one... either way it was beautiful:

(this photo also belongs to NATHAN YUEN)