Makauwahi Cave Reserve

The NTBG volunteers got a special tour of the Makauwahi Cave Reserve [cavereserve.org] last Tuesday, another beautiful sunny day on the south shore. Located just east of Poipu near the shore area known as Mahaulepu. To get there, drive to the Poipu Hyatt and keep going on the dirt road, turn right at the CJM Stables sign, bear right at the fork, and park near the stables (unless you want to brave the tough-looking dirt road to the left into the reserve proper).

Panorama below shows both the north (left) and south (right) cave entrances from the sinkhole, almost 360. Scroll way to the right to see the full image...

Dr. Burney who runs the place with support from the NTBG where he serves as director of conservation showed us around. The site centers around a cave just inland on the south shore that turns out to be an ideal repository of fossils preserving the history of the island. Long ago the center of the cave ceiling collapsed leaving a sinkhole with north and south cave portions opening onto the central open area. In addition to its scientific significance, the site was used for a number of scenes in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

You enter through a low natural portal into the north cave, a large room well lit from the sinkhole it opens onto. Along the west wall is one of the active digging sites, currently filled with water, where Dr. Burney digs down layer by layer through thousands of years of sediment, painstakingly piecing together the biological and geological history of the site.

On the opposite side of the sinkhole opening is the south cave whose main room is of comparable size. However, the south cave has several passages leading deeper into an extensive gallery of more caves for spelunkers to explore, i.e. not practical to casually wander around in by any means. The farther recesses include some burial sites and the deepest darkest parts are home to rare cave-adapted animals, completely white and eyeless.

Dr. Burney has been transforming the surrounding terrain replanting native plants long ago crowded out by invasive human-introduced species, using his diggings to inform what plants and animals originally thrived in this spot hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Beyond the cave area, areas of the adjacent abandoned sugar cane fields have been planted with original native plants in a broader effort to demonstrate that it is possible to restore natural areas to their former composition. Forsaking chemical spraying, weed control is an essential challenge in this effort and they have adopted a unique solution: tortoises. The restored plant areas are fenced into sections expertly weeded on a continual basis by eleven (and counting) tortoises, who work long hours for free weeding and fertilize the plants for no extra charge.

Of course there is plenty of human support needed to keep up a garden of the scale of many acres, and for what the tortoises can't manage they hire workers from the neighboring island of Ni'ihau (where there is 100% unemployment since the island is for residences only and the last place Hawaiian is spoken as a first language).

All in all it's a wonderful success story. Much accurate scientific knowledge has been and continues to be gleaned from diggings and research here, including updating our best estimates of first human settlement of the island (to be more recent than earlier thought) to 800-1000 A.D. Large scale replanting with native species has been demonstrated and the terrain continues to morph into what it was before those troublesome humans showed up. Perhaps soon the last plant extinctions on Kauai will be followed by a resurgence toward larger scale restoration of native species toward building a more diverse and robust environment.