“Its protected from goats and sheep so we can really get a population established that everyday people can drive right up and see these plants and get to know them.”

“DOFAW, the Division of Forestry and Wildlife, has a grant from the federal government to propagate keiki silversword at a nursery lower down on Mauna Kea. And then they plant them every spring. And they had plants and needed to put some more in the ground, and the Office of Mauna Kea Management has a volunteer program… [DOFAW] contacted us and asked if we were interested in planting silverswords in here in this enclosure. This enclosure… is actually Department of Land and Natural Resource land, its part of the Mauna Kea Forest Reserve, fenced off for silverswords.”

“Having a day like today provides us the opportunity to give back. So often we consume, we take… even the vistas we have here. But these plants wont be here unless we help them.
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“Our main target species out here is fireweed, mullen, and some of the invasive grasses that really do a lot to suck up the water. Water is the biggest issue out here for native plant regeneration.

One of the questions people always have is what is the purpose of going out and hand-pulling a weed on a mountain that is so big? And what we find is that for the rare native plants the weeds in the immediate area really hurt them. They suck up all the water, they keep them from growing, and they keep them from having babies.

We really appreciate having the volunteers come out. They do make a difference. They cut back on the seed bank. And what we see is over time, less and less of these weed plants regenerating in these areas.

Its just inspiring and it gives everyone a lot of hope.”

“On a landscape scale, were not going to stop fireweed or mullen from moving up the mountain. What we want to make sure is that we… aren’t spreading invasive species.

… also, by removing the invasive plants, we remove a food source for invasive insects. The summit of Mauna Kea is really an insect dominated ecosystem.”

“We are just so excited because the silversword have been so rare they have been kind of kapu for the longest time. Most people in Hawaii have never seen a silversword, at least not a Mauna Kea silversword, and they certainly have never held one in their hands. So this is a really unique and – I think – first time event.”

“The Mauna Kea silversword is so unique because its only found on Mauna Kea, it s only at high elevation. It cant survive down low. It became very rare when the mountain became over-run with sheep, goats, and feral cattle. So now that we have fewer animals on the mountain and we have areas like this that are fenced off, we can bring up their numbers and hopefully they can start to spread out into the wild.”

“These silverswords werent around even twenty years ago. They had to find them in some of the gulches along here. Because they were protected and the goats couldnt get to ’em, they provided us with the seeds.”

“We’ll be watering in these silverswords twice a week for the next month or so. And then after that we will continue to water once a week for another five months, or until we get some real rain or fog up here. The Big Island – and much of the rest of the state – has been in a pretty severe drought for the past few years. You can see that with all the brown vegetation up here right now.”

“Just seeing these kids get their hands on these plants and they learned about them in school from outreach programs and now they get to really come up and see it and help out. That means a lot to me.”