Kunigami Reunion

Today was a real treat for me: I was able to meet up with one of my fellow graduate students, Kentaro Inoue.  We were contemporaries at Arkansas State starting in 2005.  We took some wildlife management classes together, weathered a particularly bad ice storm together when my house lost heat, and just ran around (and around) in the same circles as would be expected of most graduate students in a small university town in a dry county in rural northeast Arkansas. When Kentaro went away to Ohio for his PhD, I figured we'd run into each other again somewhere in the United States.  I never imagined that we'd meet up in his home country!

Kentaro is from a town near Tokyo, and this was his first trip to Okinawa prefecture.  His sister lives and works in the Kunigami area of Okinawa, or the northern third of the island near Okuma.  I told Kentaro that he was visiting the best part of Okinawa, and he said he'd been enjoying his trip so far.  We had lunch, then went to Hiji Falls, and then off to the Kunigami Forest Park to look for anything we could find.

At Hiji Falls, we saw the Ryukyu Robin, an island endemic and a lifer for me! Kentaro is more into freshwater invertebrates than birds, but I think both of us enjoyed catching up and getting out and about. In the beauty of the falls, we caught up, talked publishing, and life since we last saw each other at Andy's wedding.  Perhaps the most fun of the day was being surrounded by newts: they were EVERYWHERE in the Kunigami park!  Who knows where they were going or where they were crawling from, but we took great care continuing on the path not stepping on them.  All in all, a great day and a great reunion.