Mauna Kea Oral History Appendix - Office of Mauna Kea Management

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Amazing!
After that it was all different kind of work those days…
...Now, your job up here with the chicken, the poultry like that and the turkey. How big
were the turkeys up here after you fed them. How big were the turkeys About how many
pounds do you think your turkeys were
Turkeys
Yes. About how many pounds up here… What about the turkeys up here at Waiki‘i
The turkeys here didn’t grow too big. Well, about twenty, thirty pounds. Tom turkeys…
About twenty pounds
About twenty, thirty.
Out in the wild or after you fed ‘em How big were they outside on the trees. When you
had to go hunt ‘um on the trees. How big were the turkeys…
They’re fairly thin.
Yes.
So that’s why, the two men outside, they go out there and they see a flock of turkeys.
They count the flock and then they see how many tom turkeys are there. And they leave
one tom turkey to ten females. In other words there’s thirty hen turkeys there, they leave
three. Three lucky tom turkeys.
[laughing]
To take care. The rest of them they’ll get aho string with a long bamboo and make loop
and they throw it over the tom turkeys. And then when you hold ‘em then they pull on the
turkeys off the string, and they tie them up, fold the wing that’s how they bring ‘em down
there to the turkey pen.
Turkey pen, yes.
There was plenty corn so we just let ‘em feed on all the corn they want to eat.
Those trees up there that the turkeys were in was that naio, mämane Those kinds of
trees. What were the trees that the turkeys were perching in
Like that [thinking]…
The pines
Monterey cypress I think they call that, and eucalyptus trees, mämane trees, naio trees.
Yes.
Had fence posts.
Yes [chuckles].
Some places even had rock pile, that’s how they were sleeping.
Yes. You folks used to go up above Pu‘u Anuanu or Pu‘u Lä‘au side Pu‘u Lä‘au section
even, to get turkeys
Yes, all over.
All over.
By the time Thanksgiving come around, they’ve been fed several months of corn there,
they get pretty fat.
Mauna Kea– “Ka Piko Kaulana o ka ‘Äina”
Kumu Pono Associates LLC
A Collection of Oral History Interviews (HiMK67-050606) A:528