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Early morning in the Kikori River Delta of Papua New Guinea, and a man paddles to work in his canoe. I was heading out in a speedboat (we slowed down to not swamp the man in the canoe), to run palm transects in a tract of flooded forest (see Ten Years Ago in Papua New Guinea). [NOTE: Image was scanned from a slide and the quality is not as good as I would have liked. Sorry].
Original Post: Palms of Kikori, PNG Date: September 4, 2008 at 1:01 PM
[NOTE: It has become clear to me after the first week of this retrospective (see Retrospective) that I have significantly more than five favorite posts from each category. Just so you know].
About ten years ago, Hank Cauley and I collaborated on an ecoforestry project in the Kikori River delta of Papua New Guinea. Hank, a dedicated non-botanist who was working at the World Wildlife Fund at the time, would later go on to become the U.S. director of the Forest Stewardship Council and a Senior Officer of the Pew Environment Group. The Kikori project was focused on developing protocols for the sustainable management of local forests, which typically are: 1) tidally flooded, 2) owned collectively by large kinship groups, 3) too muddy for mechanized logging, and, as a result, 4) not eligible for government forestry programs nor attractive to logging contractors. In brief, we spent three years working with local communities helping them to manage their forests. We also set up a small local sawmill. Both with mixed results...
During this time, my colleague Andrew Henderson (see Hukaung Valley Rattan Survey), was finishing up a field guide to the palms of South Asia and he was looking for places to field test the taxonomic keys. There are a lot of interesting palms around Kikori that we needed to identify so we invited him to come visit and do some plant identification. I took my video camera when we went to the field. It was all great fun and I learned a lot of palms. So did Hank.
[NOTE: The large log landing and loading dock was filmed upriver outside of tidal forest. The log with the beautiful red wood being sawn at the end of the video is Xylocarpus granatum.]
Sign at the entrance of the Kikori sawmill in Papua New Guinea (see Palms of Kikori, PNG and Living on a Log Raft). The information presented is correct and the sign is really quite nice. Just a little problem with the spelling of the word "sustainably". [NOTE: I was in the U.S. when they put up the sign. When I finally saw it, I remember I grimaced - and then complimented them on their initiative and told them how great it looked].
Beautiful wooden statue with feathers and shells that I got in Papua New Guinea several years ago (see Palms of Kikori, PNGandTen Years ago in Papua New Guinea). Sums up pretty well my current frenzy with tickets, and visas, and travel advances as I prepare for my upcoming trip to Vietnam.
A somewhat choppy, wandering video clip from a palm survey that I did in the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea in 1999. The study was part of the Kikori community forestry project (see Palms of Kikori, PNG and Living on a Log Raft); the video was shot and narrated by Kevin O'Regan, the Kikori mill manager (thx, Kevin).
This is the log landing at a village sawmill in the Kikori River delta of Papua New Guinea (see Living on a Log Raft and Palms of Kikori, PNG). The logs with the reddish heartwood are mangrove cedar (Xylocarpus granatum). The portable Lucas Mill is set up in the palm thatch buildings to the left. That's me in the baseball cap in front of the mill with a video camera. [NOTE: No idea who took this picture; it was scanned from a print].
Woman in Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea carving out the pith from the trunk of a sago palm to extract the starch. The starch is mixed with water to form a paste or baked into biscuits. [NOTE: Neither form has much flavor, at least to my taste buds].
During the forest inventory work at Kikori (see Living on a Log Raft and Chain of Custody), the tide would occasionally catch us in the middle of a transect and we had to count and measure trees in water up to our waist. The villager on the left is estimating tree height with a clinometer, while his colleague on the right has measured back 20 meters from the sample tree with a fiberglas tape. Kind of fun, actually, although I always worried about snakes. [NOTE: The main problem was keeping my camera out of the water. Most of the time, it and the clipboard with the tally sheets were balanced on top of my head].
The flight from Port Moresby to Kikori (see Palms of Kikori, PNG) usually makes two stops: Baimuru and Kerema. On one trip flying back from Kikori, the plane made an unscheduled stop in a small village in the middle of the forest. As we were circling to land, a small crowd formed at the edge of the landing strip. I took this photo from inside the plane. [NOTE: My colleague, Andrew Henderson, was fascinated by the whole encounter because several of the people appeared to be dressed as palms].
About ten years ago, Hank Cauley and I collaborated on an ecoforestry project in the Kikori River delta of Papua New Guinea. Hank, a dedicated non-botanist who was working at the World Wildlife Fund at the time, would later go on to become the U.S. director of the Forest Stewardship Council and a Senior Officer of the Pew Environment Group. The Kikori project was focused on developing protocols for the sustainable management of local forests, which typically are: 1) tidally flooded, 2) owned collectively by large kinship groups, 3) too muddy for mechanized logging, and, as a result, 4) not eligible for government forestry programs nor attractive to logging contractors. In brief, we spent three years working with local communities helping them to manage their forests. We also set up a small local sawmill. Both with mixed results...
During this time, my colleague Andrew Henderson (see Hukaung Valley Rattan Survey), was finishing up a field guide to the palms of South Asia and he was looking for places to field test the taxonomic keys. There are a lot of interesting palms around Kikori that we needed to identify so we invited him to come visit and do some plant identification. I took my video camera when we went to the field. It was all great fun and I learned a lot of palms. So did Hank.
[NOTE: The large log landing and loading dock was filmed upriver outside of tidal forest. The log with the beautiful red wood being sawn at the end of the video is Xylocarpus granatum.]
Wednesday, July 3, 2013 at 7:55AM 
