Paradise in peril - Hawaii's native species

Sunset, Feb, 1995 by Lora J. Finnegan

Hawaii's national parks are the front lines in the battle to preserve the Islands' native species

As dusk descends over a black sand beach in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, a volunteer holds a sluggish hatchling turtle in her hand while the monitoring crew logs him in. The warmth of her palm seems to animate the tiny turtle a bit, so she sets him down gently on the sand and watches him flipper his way down to the ocean. With the moon rising in the sky, the crew eventually digs 64 more little Hawaiian hawksbill turtles out of their nest, which had collapsed during a partial hatch the night before.

Those turtles don't know how lucky they are. Three years ago, before the park's new turtle crew began clearing the beach of predators, no hatchlings made it out of the nests alive. Every egg was eaten by mongooses, feral cats, and rats. Like snakes in Eden, these and other alien species are threatening to wipe out Hawaii's precious few remaining native life-forms.

Due to their geographic isolation, the Hawaiian Islands witnessed an evolution of plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth - from birds like the shy crested honeycreeper and the gentle nene (Hawaiian goose) to plants such as the hapu'u fern and the 'ahinahina (silversword). Such species hold fascination for hikers, birders, and visitors to the Islands. And they may bear important secrets for scientists, just as the Northwest forests yielded the cancer-fighting drug taxol from the yew tree.

Their isolation has left them vulnerable, however, to aggressive competitors arriving from less-sheltered shores. Some aliens arrived by accident, such as rats on ships; others were brought in intentionally as livestock or nursery plants. Though only a small percentage have proved harmful to native species, they've wreaked havoc disproportionate to their numbers in a fragile ecosystem.

Many native species are already gone. As many as 150 bird species were once found on the Islands; today only 67 remain, and 31 of those are listed as endangered. Other animals also teeter on the brink of extinction; for example, only about 100 Hawaiian hawksbill turtle adults are estimated to remain in the wild. Plants, too, have suffered: 178 species are listed as endangered, and 28 more will soon be added to the list. In fact, Hawaii has a higher concentration of endangered plant and animal species than any other place in the United States. And at least half of the nation's documented plant and bird extinctions have occurred here.

As native species continue to decline, the battle to preserve them is being waged with a new intensity. Nowhere is the fight more intense than in Hawaii's two big national parks: the Big Island's Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and Maui's Haleakala National Park. The strategies differ, since each park faces a somewhat different gallery of rogues. But at each park, the staff is fired with the dedication of an army defending its homeland: enemy species are targeted, campaigns mapped, forces deployed. This is war.

Hawaii Volcanoes: goose versus mongoose

At 230,000 acres, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park dominates the southeast end of the Big Island, sweeping from lavabound coast to high-montane rain forest. Midway up the mountain, in the dryland forest, protection from predators plays a big role in the effort to bring back the endangered state bird, the nene. The Big Island has one of Hawaii's largest wild nene flocks, but the park's population has leveled off at about 160 birds.

To see the park's latest efforts on behalf of the goose, I drive up Chain of Craters Road. Just off the road, wildlife biologist Howard Hoshide is finishing a sort of Fort Knox for nene. Dressed in fatigues and ankle-high boots, Hoshide looks like a soldier - which, in a sense, he is. The Hawaii native has spent much of his nearly 20 years at the park defending the nene against enemy attacks.

"The nene was considered saved by some recently, since the state put 2,000 captive-reared birds back into the wild," Hoshide explains. "But once in the wild, the population crashed. We found out mongooses and feral cats were just picking off tame adults and flightless goslings."

The 7-foot-high fence he's building looks formidable and has a foot of mesh buried below and a line of barbed wire at the bottom to keep animals from sneaking underneath. Small wire traps have also been placed every 200 yards around the perimeter to deter mongooses.

Brought in from its native India in 1883 to eliminate rats in sugar cane fields (unsuccessfully, as it turned out), the mongoose has become an ecological terrorist, preying on defenseless native species from the nene to the hawksbill turtle. The park's 10-acre, open-topped nesting pen may prove to be the best answer to mongoose predation of nene. "Outside, gosling survival rate is almost nil," says Hoshide. "Inside the pen, it's 90 percent. So we know it'll work. In a way, it puts the bird back a few hundred years, to a time before Hawaii had predators."

Fencing is just part of the solution in the high-montane rain forest. Resource management specialist Larry Katahira knows this forest like his own backyard. A Hawaii native with a wiry build and a ready smile, Katahira has spent his entire 20-plus-year career at this park working on conservation issues.