Qualla: Makauwahi Cave https://qualla.com/makauwahi-cave en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:09 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Makauwahi Cave https://qualla.com/makauwahi-cave Makauwahi Cave: Introduction https://qualla.com/makauwahi-cave/ You enter through a sinkhole. The opening drops you into a collapsed limestone chamber on Kauai's south coast, near Mahaulepu Beach, and suddenly you are standing in the richest fossil site in the Hawaiian Islands, perhaps in the entire Pacific Island region. Makauwahi Cave is not the kind of cave that inspires awe with stalactites and underground rivers. Its power is subtler: packed into its sediments are nearly ten thousand years of ecological history, a record of everything Hawaii was before humans arrived and everything it lost afterward.

Read more: Makauwahi Cave on Qualla

]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/8/7/y/s/makauwahi-cave-wp/87ys-makauwahi-cave-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Makauwahi Cave: A Lake in a Cave in a Dune https://qualla.com/makauwahi-cave/ The site is geologically unique in the Hawaiian Islands. The cave formed in eolianite limestone, hardened sand dunes from an era when sea levels were different, and inside it sits a paleolake, a body of water that has been slowly accumulating sediment for millennia. That sediment...

Read more: Makauwahi Cave on Qualla

]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/8/7/y/s/makauwahi-cave-wp/87ys-makauwahi-cave-a-lake-in-a-cave-in-a-dune.mp3 0:06 2 full Makauwahi Cave: A Catalog of the Lost https://qualla.com/makauwahi-cave/ The bones tell the most dramatic story. Remains of some forty species of birds have been found in the cave, and half of those species are now extinct. Among the discoveries are giant flightless ducks and geese that had no analog elsewhere in the world: the turtle-jawed moa-nalo, ...

Read more: Makauwahi Cave on Qualla

]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/8/7/y/s/makauwahi-cave-wp/87ys-makauwahi-cave-a-catalog-of-the-lost.mp3 0:06 3 full Makauwahi Cave: What Humans Brought https://qualla.com/makauwahi-cave/ The sedimentary record does not merely catalog loss; it documents the mechanism. The first Polynesians arrived in the Hawaiian Islands roughly a thousand years ago, and the cave's layers show the ecological consequences in fine detail. Feral pigs, feral dogs, and rats accompanied...

Read more: Makauwahi Cave on Qualla

]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/8/7/y/s/makauwahi-cave-wp/87ys-makauwahi-cave-what-humans-brought.mp3 0:06 4 full Makauwahi Cave: An Uncertain Future https://qualla.com/makauwahi-cave/ For twenty years, the Makauwahi Cave Reserve operated as a public site where visitors could walk through the sinkhole entrance and learn about the fossils embedded in its walls. Sulcata tortoises, seventeen of them, were brought in to serve a practical purpose: their grazing kept...

Read more: Makauwahi Cave on Qualla

]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/8/7/y/s/makauwahi-cave-wp/87ys-makauwahi-cave-an-uncertain-future.mp3 0:06 5 full