THE BIRDS AND THE BEES

The past month we've done a lot of things and a couple days I joined our company, the Hampson family on their tours of the island.  The photo above is is not a flower but rather the fruit and bright red bud case of a yellow flower very much like a buttercup that grows on bushes.  We found these bushes in the 2 mile nature trail at Manuka State Wayside near South Point.  Later I found one in a Hilo park but I still don't know it's name.  Anyone?
Thank you, BJ, for finding that this bush is Ochna Serrulata, commonly know as "The Micky Mouse plant", and that it is native to Africa.

This year I netted my broccoli to protect them from birds.  4 or 5 varieties like to eat the flower heads as soon as they start to emerge and they are so persistent at it that last year we rarely got any.  The kind that does the most damage are tiny grey birds with burgundy/brown heads on the males.  They travel in family groups of about 6 except in nesting season.  Wednesday I saw a male flying from the lower edge of our property, through the banana plants, up into our 60' tall mango tree, around an extended branch and up into the thickest part of the top, all while carrying a 10 or 11 inch blade of grass that must have been a load for such a small bird.  Then, much to my surprise, that bird was right back out in 4 or 5 seconds flying right back to where he had come from.  As I had just sat down on the steps for a rest I watched as that bird found another piece of dry grass where I had done some scything, cut it to length, and took off for the nest building site.  Again he emerged from the mango in a few seconds and headed straight back to the dry grass.  As I watched he completed 15 trips in about 12 minutes, for his size about the equivalent of us running up the stairs of a 100 story building carrying a chair I imagine.  I've often found the spherical baskets that these birds weave so here is a picture of one that blew down.  The female must have been in the tree weaving the nest as the male delivered the material.  They are so small and move so continuously that I couldn't get a picture of the birds.  These baskets are much bigger than a nest would need to be but after the fledglings are mature they continue to travel with their parents all day and for maybe a month and they all return to the nest at night.   Again, what's its name? 

Another small and continuously moving critter here is the Hawaiian bumble bee, also known as the carpenter bee.  Being large, black and noisy, they are good at scaring people with bee phobias.  Although they lack hair on their abdomens, the thorax is hairy and they do have pollen baskets on the hind legs like other bees.  Each female nests separately by boring a 1/2" hole into soft dry wood and her mate may hang around to "guard" it but as he has no stinger he can only bluff.  Four holes are visible in the log in this photo with one flying bee. Here in Hawaii, as everywhere else in the last few years, honey bees are in decline due to a confluence of pests and human spread poison.  As about 1/3 of the crops we eat depend on insect pollination it is important to encourage our insect helpers.  

When I saw that a gate I had built with a frame of African Tulip wood had become occupied by carpenter bees I didn't mind them buzzing around me every time I went through it because the females are too busy feeding and boring to bother chasing and the males can't sting at all.  I did realize, however, that the gate would not last for long.  To provide the bees with a good spot to bore into next I cut a 5" diameter dead African Tulip log eight feet long (it is very soft wood so it is preferred by the bees), and hung it by galvanized wires from the eves of my back porch.  This would put them close to the bored-in gate and close to the lilikoi (passion fruit) vines whose flowers are a favorite of the bees.  They also like the flowers of our lima bean that covers the porch of our guest house as seen in the photo below (actually six plants cover about 240 sq. ft. of vertical space).   I hung the log in November and as soon as  we had some warm dry weather in January I noticed "bee dust" floating down from the log.  I am so happy to have more pollinators in our neighborhood especially as the honey bees are almost non-existent now.  Today I googled 'Hawaiian carpenter bees' and was discouraged that nearly all the cites were "how to exterminate" types.  It is tempting to conclude that most people who post on line are idiots, but then we are exceptions, aren't we?  If my method of giving them someplace better to bore into other than the house fails in the future I will be sure to let you know.

We also have a much smaller pollinator that I have cultivated a bit. I am now talking about the leaf cutter bees that I mentioned a year ago when we spotted them carrying leaves into our small bamboo wind chime.  This year I found one stuffing the top tube of a polyethylene lawn edging scrap.  We will never get any honey from either these or the bumble bees but they are well worth encouraging as pollinators and please stop the poison!  


A much smaller insect here has been costing me gasoline.  I think it is a VERY small beetle or weevil that is attracted to boring in my plastic fuel 'cans'.  After both my mixed gas and straight gas cans started leaking careful examination revealed several partial and one clear through hole in each.  The holes were about 1/32nd inch diameter.  A friend suggested that cutting through to the gas must have killed the bore so I gave the whole container a careful examination and on one I found a tiny dead beetle that I needed a magnifying glass to see.  A trip to the University Of Hawaii at Hilo Agriculture extension service identified the beetles on the gas can as Granulate Ambrosia Beetles, a type of tiny weevil. They are about the length of Eisenhower's ear on a dime but only half as wide.  You can view one at: http://extension.entm.purdue.edu/caps/pestInfo/pics/big/Gran_ambrosia3.jpg   However, the entomologist does not believe that they would eat plastic.  I keep telling everyone only they they "bore" into plastic, not that they eat it and their size fits the holes perfectly.
 Not only are fuel 'cans'  and fuel expensive here, real metal gas cans are nearly impossible to find.  Only one local dealer that I found carries a metal can and that is for a special Federal standard to qualify for carrying gas inside a vehicle.  It sells for well over $100 so I guess I'll be buying another plastic one and coating it with insect repellent.  I later did find a more normal metal gas can for $50.
Aloha!

ELECTRIC CAR - OUR FIRST THREE WEEKS!

Our Think City car finally arrived on June 15th.  I got a ride to the dock and had no trouble getting it from Matson and with only a little trouble getting the sequence right, I got it started.  because the car had not been charged in a month I was a little concerned that the battery may have self discharged but it still had 80%.  Driving home was uneventful and I still had over 50% when I got home.  Like most electrics this car has only one speed but the "shift lever" does have, in addition to drive, an econ position which limits the amperage draw and the top speed in order to get the best range.  I, of course, choose econ and found it completely satisfactory on our hilly 55 mph limit highway.

As you can see, the Think is noticeably narrower
than our Subaru and a lot shorter.  It is a two seater
with a large space in back with rear hatch and the 22kw
li-ion battery is under both the seats and most of the rear
space.


The Think brand has had a difficult life of high 
hopes followed by bankruptcies.  At one time 
Ford owned it, in 2011 it was back under 
Scandinavian ownership with an American
division assembling cars in Elkhart, Indiana.
Such a small car at a premium price was a 
hard sell here so they bankrupted the American
division and sold the European division.  We
learned the 100 or so cars remaining were being 
sold at steep discounts.  Since here on Hawaii, 
where no dealers sell electric cars, we would 
need to service our own car anyway we were 
more willing than most to risk an "orphan" car
brand.  
    

Myrna started using the Think for her commute the next day and after the battery was cycled a couple times it did even better.  She now uses about 30% of the charge for each round trip, about 10% down to Hilo and 20% back up to Hakalau.  Saturday we made a trip to a potluck at about 2,000' up a slow bumpy road and I was pleasantly surprised that the climb only took about 2% of charge.  A 110 volt charger came with the car and that takes about 7 hours for Myrna's usual drive discharge.  For $800 we could get a 240 volt charger that would take half the time but as it doesn't matter under the current use we will put that off.

This car feels rock solid and since the dealer agreed to JPEG the whole shop manual my only fear is failure of a computer module.  The bumper sticker says "I GET MY ELECTRICITY FROM THE SUN".  The house got most of its electricity from the sun before we got the car but now we will need the rest of the roof covered to supply both.  Since cheap geothermal power looks to be stalled, more solar will be next year's goal right after we sell our former house and get our federal  tax rebate of $7,500 for the car.  The Hawaiian tax rebate fund was consumed by May and won't apply anyway to cars bought out of state.  For tech details, the Think website is: http://thinkev.leftbankcompanies.com/owners/

Nuclear Waste

I've always believed that we as a race are not equipped to plan for events that exceed our civilization's existence many times over in duration.    Yet the quest for massive amounts of centralized (read billable) electrical production, encouraged by government demand for access for enough bomb building plutonium to destroy all life on earth many times over, drove us to build many nuclear power plants that are now operating beyond their design life.  Even more foolishly, the incredibly deadly waste they turn out by the ton "every four to six years", in the form of "spent" fuel rods that must be kept in deep pools of cooling water for years before they can be moved to a long term waste depository, has been allowed to build up in those pools with no long term storage in sight.  There, at the generator sites, they are more accessible to terrorists and to natural disasters such as befell the Fukashima Daiichi reactors which are still leaking cooling water into the Pacific Ocean and will never be fully "cleaned up" in our lifetime.
For years our nation had a plan to store waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada and we spent probably a billion dollars preparing the site.  When it was almost ready in Obama's first year, he keep a promise to Senator Harry Reid  and stopped the whole project.  Did this stop the nuclear power industry from continuing to produce waste?  Do we have a new waste depository plan?  No and no!  In 2010 they got a Nuclear Regulatory Commission extension of 60 years for the time they could store waste on site ( http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2012/2012-06-11-092.html).   Now I ask you what for profit corporation, that undoubtedly has a holding company insulated it from possible losses by separately incorporating each nuclear power plant, could be trusted to care for money loosing waste storage and processing for 60 years AFTER that plant is decommissioned as these aging plants soon will be?  The linked E.N.S.  article discusses the federal appeals case of that NRC ruling but not the long tern implications.  Clearly the industry plans to stick the tax payers with ALL the waste costs as soon as they stop making a generating profit just as they have always done for most of the insurance costs and most of the cost of preparing Yucca Mountain Repository.

So just one more reminder and I promise no more till next year, we don't need to build more Nukes!  The means to survive on all clean renewables is here if we just put all our resources that we are currently spending on fossil fuel subsidies, defense of our access to other countries fossil fuels, world domination, farm subsidies to millionaires and the clean up of future obsolete  waste.
Next I hope to be writing about our life with our electric car that should be arriving soon.

SPRINGTIME 2012

Springtime is almost over and although I've not done anything real important it has been busy and interesting.  In many small ways we have become more comfortable and more integrated into our community here in Hakalau and East Hawaii in general.  I continue to work most Friday mornings with the all volunteer community park maintenance crew.  We continue to enjoy swimming at several different places and a couple weeks ago I added (at 67 years old) jumping 21' off the old county road bridge into the Hakalau river.   Here is a video of others doing the jump from the top of the rail (23.5') where I will jump next time. http://hxcmusic.me/video/EqeFAAga1Vw/Hakalau%20bridge%20jump

I attended the Hawaii County Democratic Convention last month.  Until he arrived himself at about 11:00 I was distributing fliers for my choice for congress from our district, Bob Marx.  He is a Hilo attorney of 30 years who has represented a lot of public interest matters.  The "grandson  of plantation workers" on Oahu, he graduated from Law School in Portland then served tree terms in the Oregon State Legislature before returning to Hawaii to set up practice in Hilo.

I worked pre-convention on the resolutions committee and spoke on two resolutions.  One that I wrote was poorly received and I'm afraid it illustrates how little people understand or are willing to take ownership for environmental destruction.  It was to give polluting bio-mass burners no state or county support and to encourage geothermal and other clean renewables instead.  People are desperate for jobs that the average person can aspire to and that will reduce our dependence on oil imports that they are willing to overlook the pollution of bio-mass burning.  About 1/3 of the attendees oppose geothermal because either they believe Pele will be offended, and we are not talking about natives in particular, or because the only currently operating geothermal facility has had a few leaks and not enough buffer zone around it.  I think very few people have any understanding of how much energy they waste and they are not willing to give up commuting in their monster trucks that undoubtedly produce in aggregate 1,000's of times the pollution that a few geothermal leaks let out.  Regarding surplus geothermal power going to free cars of gasoline, they've never seen it so they don't believe it.  They have seen successful use of solar here and don't see why we can't just put a solar panel on the car's roof because they refuse to learn about the amount of energy required to move their monster truck or SUV.

There are a few early adopters on this island driving electric cars now, Leafs, Mitshubishi "i cars", and one Tesla, and sometime next week we will receive the Th!nk City that my wife Myrna test drove on a family reunion trip to Chicago.  Yes a long way to ship a car but as none of the electric brands are carried by a dealer here we would have needed to ship from Oahu at least.  This car was a European brand that has had a long history of struggle and ownership changes.  Our's was assembled in Elkhart , Indiana then the company went through another of its bankruptcy/re-organizations resulting in closure of the Elkhart plant.  About 100 cars remain to be sold at discounted prices and they have longer range than the Leaf or the i (100 miles city, 85 miles highway).   They have light weight, large battery, no-rust recycled ABS plastic body panels and will require about twice the electricity as our whole house uses per commute day.  And yes, we do have enough room left on the roof for that many more solar panels --- when we can afford them.  Follow the link to the web site for Th!nk.

http://thinkev.leftbankcompanies.com/why-think-city/exterior-gallery/

ENERGY

ENERGY

What did you think of when  you read the title "ENERGY"?  Since many of you are around my age I suspect some thought of their personal energy level declining lately.  That is not what I am writing about today but there are some parallels.  As the world's fossil fuel reserves decline and their costs go up with the added cost of extraction, we are all needing to work harder just to stay even.  So even if your personal energy levels are not in decline you will still get run down quicker.  Today I am thinking about more strategies to preserve energy. 


When we lived in NE Washington State my main strategy for the house was to use as little electricity as possible by super insulating, using the most efficient lights and appliances heating with dead wood and growing most of our fruit and vegetables so we didn't make as many trips to the grocery.  We also had 2,400 peak watts of solar electric which there amounted to less than 20% of our usage. 

  
Here in East Hawaii at 230' elevation there is no need for insulation or heating and we do have, so far, 1,680 peak watts of solar electric and solar hot water.  Four months of the last year we had negative consumption yet with the $20.40 minimum bill we still average $33.52 per month on 670 kwh's consumption for the year and that is with an electric cook stove and hot water back-up.  In the photo above the west edge of our house shows the back side of our hot water panels, the clothes line (solar clothes dryer) runs from our house to our guest house and beyond the clothes line  you can see the top of the talapia tank that is filled by the rain water from the roof and drained to the vegetable patch. 


 A year ago it was my goal to get more solar when we next had money and then follow that with an electric car.  Lately I've flipped that goal to getting the car first.  I think I can easily explain why.


The grid here is 20% geothermal base load, about another 9% geothermal peaking load, around 1% wind and 1% solar.  The balance is a combination of oil in conventional boilers and naptha burned in jet turbines.  The power bill contains a fuel surcharge line item that increases every two years.  Although we have had geothermal power here for decades the private power company has no incentive to abandon their investment in fossil fuel burners because they can always pass on the costs.  To change this the legislature is working on a bill to separate power generation from power distribution businesses.  Some are saying we could be 100% geothermal in 6 years.


Geothermal done right is closed loop, non-polluting, and should be there for the next 500,000 years till our Island moves off the hot spot.  It also should be very in-expensive which would make electric cars very attractive. If we doubled our geothermal generation (hopefully in separated locations to reduce impact of a lava flow hitting one) over what we need in electricity, some could be exported to other islands and/or used to produce hydrogen or NH3 ammonia for fuel cell cars.   Distributed generation, such as on-site solar, has additional advantages in that it would be less interruptable compared to the event of a lava flow taking out some geothermal.  But if we, personally, were to move (as we have been prone to) after installing enough solar for an electric car we would need to leave behind a lot of investment with little likely return. 


Another factor for buying a electric vehicle (EV) first is that there is a state income tax credit in effect for $4,500 on top of the federal $7,500 credit, but it expires March 31, 2012.  Currently the Big Island Nissan dealer won't get certified for Leafs because she doesn't believe she would sell enough to be worth sending a tech to Japan for training and paying to have a level 2 charger installed.  Mitsubushi has a sightly smaller EV that they have had on the road in Japan for 2 years and Austraila one year.  It is now available on Ohau for $6,000 less than the Leaf and even though it has 10 miles less range at 60-90, that would still be plenty for my wife's 30 mile round trip to work in Hilo.  If our former house in Chattaroy sells  soon enough for both credits we've decided to go ahead and get the iMiEV.  Here is a link to see it.
http://www.plugincars.com/sea-change-electric-cars-top-greenest-vehicle-list-112004.html

This row of "our" bananas is actually on the vacant lot next door and supplies about half our annual bananas.

P.S. The house sale did not go through so we don't know when we will get an EV.  Stand -by for a report when we do.

11/11/11 ANOTHER RAINY DAY IN PARADISE

                11/11/11    A RAINY DAY IN PARADISE

As you know, East Hawaii gets a lot of rain and even the in drought of the last couple years Hilo’s per year totals have been in the 80’s.  Historically Hilo has reported an average of 127 inches of rain per year at the airport (34’ elevation) and a lot more on the upland portions of the city.  The photo above is Rainbow Falls on the Wailuku River in Hilo early this month.  The first week of the month has been very wet with over 8 inches here at our house and 6.28 in Hilo.  If it rained at that rate all year we’d have 416 inches annually in Hakalau yet the surprising thing is that it is still easy (at least for a retired guy) to find nice times to be outdoors. Another amazing thing is that there is very little flooding or erosion as there was during the sugar cane plantain days.  Most of the former cane field area is now forest, ornamentals for export, orchards, pastures or row crops of less than five acres.   I am also amazed that even when the Hakalau River does flood red-brown it is nearly clear again within less than two hours of the rain stopping and back to normal the next day.

What potential visitors always ask is which months to visit to avoid the rain.  The answer is if you want to avoid the rain drive to the leeward side (whichever side that is on that day) or just wait an hour.  June, May and January are the driest months on average but the deviation from 10”/month is not great.  March, November and December are the wettest months usually.  Temperature range each day only varies on average from 79-83 f. highs and 63-70 f. lows and for the last few years the annual monthly extremes have moved closer together .

Yesterday, a few days after starting this entry, and 10 days into this rainy month Myrna and I decided to get away from the rain and snorkel south of Kailua.  Hilo had .36” that day, twice that at Hakalau, but only a trace fell on the Konaside beach while the 1,000’ and up got measurable amounts.  Now the total for Hilo this month is 10” and here nearly double that.  When the storms come from the south instead of the usual southeast then Hilo may get more rain than Hakalau.  If we get storms from the west, as some winter storms are, then Kona will get more of the rain.

I expected to see a lot of mushrooms and fungus when we moved here but usually we don’t and I’ve only found one that was large enough to eat and that I was confident enough about.  That was an oyster mushroom.  I’ve not tried to identify the fungus in the attachments but the lizard with one of them is a metallic skink native to Australia.  Sinks are very fast and would normally require a telephoto lens around here.  This day they were unwilling to move from their nearly sunny spots because they needed to warm between showers.  Some lizards are even more sensitive to cold.  Three times I’ve seen dead Jacksons Chameleons on the ground under trees and each time it was on a morning in the 60’s.  Usually Jacksons are not seen because they live in the treetops.

Speaking of invasive lizards, I should mention that the Day Gecko pictured on top of our Subaru (below) had been on at least one trip on the car.  

When I get near him he dashes into a space between the hatch door and the roof to hide.  Once, last year, a different gecko emerged from under the windshield wiper when we were stopped at a traffic light.  It is easy to see how they get spread around and how since we have harnessed the power of fossil fuel the mixing of our planet's species has accelerated.

This gun powder tree stump is showing not the signs of rot but rather a termite colony that had hollowed out the center of a healthy growing tree.

In spite of the bad economy, the wild pig problem seems to be getting worse here again.  Most of the lower elevations are no hunting zones (no shooting within 300 yards of a residence).  All guns must be declared upon entry to the state, must be licensed with annual renewal and must be owned only by people who have passed a firearms safety course and paid a permit fee every year.  It is good that we don’t often hear shooting near our home that we need to worry about but pigs are smart enough to learn about live traps and snares are in-humane because the caught animals maybe suffering a long time.  So the pig problem is likely to always be with us and that includes the destruction of native plants and added erosion.  One neighbor’s front lawn looks like it has been plowed.  I saw three in broad daylight 100’ from the post office Tuesday and three after dark in another place the day before.  Our dog and I visit our perimeter nearly everyday and we’ve not had any in our yard for a year.  After I get some more tree work done I’ll do more fencing.

This week, after having a few days of NO bananas, we found ourselves working on four bunches at once.  Yesterday we bought a second food dryer but until I get a third there will still be times that we need to give some away.  If we had a pig we could feed it a lot of bananas and other fruit and sweet potatoes.  But then if our pig escaped we would be adding to the wild pig problem.  If we caught a wild pig and just fed it awhile before butchering that wouldn’t be an environmental problem and that is precisely what some of my neighbors do.

Aloha!

Movement Towards a Final Destination

                                                MOVEMENT TOWARDS FINAL DESTINATION

This is the finished lychee wood carving that I completed just before I left for Spokane.  For a slide show of the stages it went through see my facebook page.

Since I last wrote here I have made another round trip from Hilo to Spokane.  Sometimes it seems like I am spinning my wheels and getting nowhere.  When we left Eastern Washington to live here on the Island of Hawaii I didn’t expect to ever go back to “the mainland” even though I knew Myrna would continue to do so as long as her mother was still alive.  As it is that lovely piece of the Little Spokane River that was our home has not only proven difficult to sell, it has become a ‘money pit’ as well.

All along the shallow well of surface water at our former home has been a turn off for most prospective buyers.  Finally in August we signed a deal with a lady who grew up in the area with the same type of water system.  She failed to get bank financing but was willing to pay more if we carried a contract.  She had a complicated family situation and I didn’t expect the deal to go through but I flew there to help determine how much to stick out necks out for her and to have a real well drilled for in case she couldn’t close.  When the well driller reached 300 feet and had only hit a trickle at 80 feet, we decided to give up at $8,600.  So now the lady, who couldn’t come up with the down payment, as had become clear by then, was our only hope again.  What we ended up doing was to sign an extension to the purchase agreement till March 1 and to lease it to her in the meantime.  There are real reasons to hope that she (they) will have the down payment then but I won’t hold my breath.  At least the place will be occupied through the winter without us paying the heat bill

So yesterday I again flew home, this time through San Francisco, 2 hour layover, and Los Angeles, 4 hour layover then the ‘new’ Continental route to Hilo.  I read a couple books on our Kindle but still had a lot of time to think.  One conclusion is that even though the flights are boring I’d still rather be moving than sitting in an airport even if I’m not really getting any closer to my final destination.  So, yes, I continue to experience the feeling of  ”the older I get the less I know” .  In other words, I have thought I had reached the physical place where I would spend the rest of my life three times in the past but now I no longer think that way.  Now I still live nearly as if I was preparing my last stand, but I don’t really believe it.  I’m expecting some more surprises down the line.  And, of course, we all have the same “final destination” eventually.

But home coming in Hilo was sweet.  There were a few light showers, warm rich air moving from the Ocean and a wife and dog very happy to see me.  Today at the crack of dawn we walked the dog around Veterans Field and I was delighted that even though we had a shower during the night and the grass was soaked, I was totally comfortable in Crocs, shorts and short sleeves.  In the morning I also discovered that there were three weeks worth of chores to catch up on and I have made a good start on those.  I also had to pick a bunch of bananas, a couple avocados and a whole bucket of papayas and repair Myrna’s car.  Tomorrow I will go down to the Hakalau Community park and see how the volunteer maintenance crew has held up.  Maybe then I will buy a hand held power planer that I think I need for my next wood working project which is to be a curvy lychee wood love seat. 

The temperature range for the next few days is forecast to be 67-83.  I can take that!