Bevy of Boobies, Juggernaut of Junglefowl

We went to Kaua’i for a week with Steve and Elizabeth, to mark Steve’s 40^th birthday in style. We stayed at a palatial private guest house, sharing the digs with a few geckos and a yardful of laughing-thrushes and shamas. Bananas grew indiscriminately just outside the door. A stone Buddha watched from the patio, inspiring serenity, quietude and calm.

Kaua’i boasts the rainiest place on the planet: up the hill, at Wai’ale’ale it rains 430 inches in an average year, which is to say eleven metres. Sometimes the rain came down the hill and hurled itself at us too, but never oppressively. We rented a Nissan Altima and drove to one end of the road then the other in search of adventure.

We climbed above five thousand feet to hike the Pihea Trail, marveling at the gobsmacking grandeur of the island’s northwest corner. We went to Kilauea Point to see legions of red-footed boobies, great frigatebirds, Laysan albatrosses and red-tailed tropicbirds. At Sand Mine bird sanctuary in Kaua’i’s semi-desert southwest corner a Hawaiian quartet awaited: Hawaiian stilt, Hawaiian gallinule, Hawaiian coot, Hawaiian duck. We drove the rough road to Mana Point where the glorious sand beach is said to bark and the mountains vault clear out of the blue-green water. Visions of South Pacific leapt to mind.

We completed a cycle, albeit backwards. Two years ago we visited the site on Hawai’i where in February 1779 Captain Cook was dispatched by the Hawaiians. A little more than a year earlier Cook had found the archipelago he dubbed the Sandwich Islands and made landfall at Waimea on Kaua’i. At Waimea a monument commemorates Cook’s discovery of the Islands—something the Polynesians had actually accomplished about 13 centuries earlier—and a bronze statue honours the great navigator itself. The same bronze stands on the causeway opposite the Empress Hotel in Victoria.

I daydream about the paradise the archipelago must have been a millennium and a half ago before it was forever altered, first by the pioneer Polynesians, then by the Europeans who followed Cook. Between them they managed to eliminate more than 50 species of native birds. Extinctions proceed apace today. Six small Kaua’i endemic forest birds—ones occurring there and nowhere else—cling by their little toenails in the high forests of the Island. A deadly cabal of feral goats, pigs and rats and mosquito-borne avian disease exact a terrible toll. In three attempts we saw three of the endemic birds—the easiest three—but were otherwise foiled. In another decade matters will doubtless be worse still.

Certainly there are birds to see down in the lowlands where the residents live and tourists stay but, like the tourists, they are all from away: red-crested cardinals from Brazil, Japanese white-eyes from—well, you can guess—and chestnut munias from India. One alien that does not live on Kaua’i is the Indian mongoose. Rather like the little old lady who swallowed a fly, the Hawaiians introduced the mongoose eighty years ago to deal with another invader, the roof rat. Alas, the mongoose decided that Hawaiian birds make better eating than rats. Human folly was thus exposed afresh.

The mongoose never made it to Kaua’i and that was very good news for the red junglefowl. The junglefowl is the ancestor of the humble chicken beloved of Colonel Sanders and his finger-lickin’ devotees. Though there isn’t a single mongoose on Kaua’i there are plenty of junglefowl. They walk down the street, loiter in parking lots and hang about the forest edge. Open a bag of crisps and see how they run. They are everywhere. Elizabeth found them entirely charming and needed no additional bird stars.

While I looked for birds Steve went snorkeling with his new underwater Pentax. He snorkeled four times—three of them with his dear old mum—and blasted away with the new camera. I was amazed at the variety and abundance of fish going about their business in the shallows along the Kaua’i coast. Steve bought a serious fish field-guide, and identified 45 of the species he’d seen and photographed. That easily outclassed the paltry 42 species of birds I could see and identify. I didn’t grumble.

The adventure ended too soon. Before we knew it we were aboard a WestJet 737 headed back across the Pacific. A crossing of paths with the little forest endemics proved out of reach but Steve’s fish extravaganza and the birds we did see—the stilts and coots, frigatebirds and tropicbirds, boobies and albatrosses and yes, even the ubiquitous junglefowl—did their best to ensure that Kaua’i lingers in the memory bank a good long while.