Response:
Aloha,
Thank you for your interest in volunteering with our Honu Guardian program at Laniakea Beach. I believe you would very much enjoy being a part of our Honu Ohana (Turtle Family). We have a great group of volunteers with diverse backgrounds, yet we all share in the enthusiasm to protect our Hawaiian green sea turtles, enhance the public viewing of these wonderful creatures and provide research monitoring of their daily behavior.
We have three scheduled shifts on weekdays and four scheduled shifts on weekends. The shifts last 3 hours. We require that our volunteers commit to a minimum of 2 scheduled shifts a month and be 18 years of age (or accompanied during volunteer shifts by a responsible adult). All new or interested potential volunteers complete an initial training session (about 1 hour at the beach) followed by 2 "shadowing" shifts of other volunteers.
If you are interested in our upcoming training dates, please email us at:
Contact Us
If you would like to get a head start on the training, you may familiarize yourself with our Laniakea facts in the Information section, "Did You Know Facts". I'm looking forward to hearing from you and seeing you at the beach.
Mahalo
Question: "I live on one of the other islands in Hawaii, do you have Malama na Honu here? I would like to help"?
Response:
Aloha,
Thank you for your email and interest in helping Malama na Honu.
At this time Malama na Honu is a volunteer based non-profit organization on the island of Oahu. The main focus of our attentions is Laniakea Beach on the North Shore of Oahu.
It is at this spot that we have 24 honu that starting in 1999 have been hauling out on to the beach almost daily.
Once word of this got out interests grew. We now see hundreds of visitors, tourists and kama'aina coming to the beach to see the honu every day.
Malama na Honu has volunteers on the beach there 365 days a year, during day light hours. We work to protect the Honu at Laniakea by educating the visitors, setting up perimeters around basking honu as a reminder/request that people respect their space.
As the Honu population has been growing around the islands there is an increased need to educate about these creatures.
If you know of a spot on your island that has honu basking/close to shore and are being interacted with by humans regularly we would appreciate any information you can give us.
I will be keeping all of the information and should the time come that Malama na Honu has the capabilities of branching out to the other islands I hope we can call on you to help get it up and running.
