Last day of fieldwork...not really

I am on Huahine right now, just for the day to collect a bit more from a protected species of Glochidion before my permit expires (middle of next year, before I will have a chance to come back here). When I previously came to Huahine, in January, by a sheet stroke of bad luck all the fruit I collected reared out a parasitic seed-eating totricid moth, not the Epicephala moths I was looking for, so here I am again. Glochidion huahineense is a tree that only grows at sea level on the northern part of Huahine, in fairly swampy areas. As a general rule, whenever I have to do fieldwork at sea level, it rains. This is fine, because at sea level I don't have to worry about slipping off a mountain and dying. True to form, it rained all day today, and I fell waist-deep into a rather icky ditch when I tried to jump across it.

Collecting along roads at sea level (minus the ditch part) was just fine with me, because this one day on Huahine comes at the end of a two-week trip to the islands of Taha'a and Ra'iatea, which came one week after my brother Daniel visited Mo'orea, which came right after an amazing week on Niau in the Tuamotus (which I never got around to blogging about), which came right on the heels of an exhausting week on Mangareva (see previous posting), which came two weeks after a trip to the Cook Islands, which followed four weeks on Rapa, after I had been here for eight months...Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? I love fieldwork, but like anybody who has ever had to do a lot of business travel, it is possible to get sick of fun things. I got a lot of good material on Ra'iatea and Taha'a, but I should have gone there six months ago, when I was less burned out (and didn't have mild food poisoning before I even got on the plane). And I will have to go back to both islands again next time I return to French Polynesia.

There were two really rewarding things that happened on this last trip. The first was three days I spent camping on the Temehani Rahi Plateau on Ra'iatea. I had camped here back in 2006 with my colleague Okamoto-san from Kyoto University, and from what little I knew at the time, I could tell it was a special place, a sort of montane, wet scrubland of native plants, including multiple species of Glochidion. I know the flora much better now, and it was amazing to hike back through the scrub and recognize all the plants, but remark how different they were morphologically from their relatives on Mo'orea and Tahiti (many are separate species; many are dwarfed). It was like being Darwin or Wallace and realizing the subtle differences between species on different islands. This time also, I hiked all the way up to the top of the plateau, where I could look all the way to the south end of Ra'iatea, until the rain arrived. There was also a dwarf species of Glochidion up there (G. emarginatum) 30 cm high, with creeping branches and tiny leaves that looks like it should be a blueberry or something, until you notice the characteristic cheese-shaped fruits.

The second thing is that as a consequence of going to Rapa back in March, I have gotten to know most of a Rapa family, most of whom now live on Tahiti. (Like the names of alien races in Star Trek, the people and the languages of the Austral Islands have the same names as those of the islands.) I spent the weekend before my departure for Ra'iatea with part of this Rapa family, and casually mentioned that I was going to Ra'iatea. It turned out that one of the brothers lived on Ra'iatea, and he basically fed me and invited me to the Heiva festivities with his family during the duration of my stay on the island. In return, of course, I am going to facilitate their acquisition of cheaper, better consumer items from the US--which I will either carry down with me on my next trip, or keep at my apartment until one of them next visits California.

Fieldwork is not over though. I have a bit left to do on Mo'orea, and either Monday or Tuesday I will be going to Tahiti with four colleagues from Gump for a week. I will be flying home via LAX on August 18, stopping for a few days to see Dan Grin before returning to the better part of California on August 21. Now that the one-month marker has passed, I am a bit sentimental, but I know I'll be coming back for fieldwork, and I mostly just have an insatiable desire to get back to Berkeley and see everyone, and start figuring out how these trees and their moths are related to one another...I am going to have to change the title of this blog though. Darn.