Our Adventures on Oahu; or, In Pursuit of the Elusive Wild Mongoose
First of all, a few words of advice for anyone contemplating a trip to Oahu:
1. Stay at Sharon Price’s B&B in Kailua. Sharon is fabulous, her prices are good, and she has friendly pets. Moreover, the B&B is less than a mile from the nicest beach—and one of the least populated—we saw on all of Oahu. Kailua is an easy 30-minute bus ride from downtown Honolulu, but it feels worlds away from all the Waikiki craziness—which was a good thing, as far as we were concerned.
2. Never, EVER, buy spray-on sunblock. It does not work, even when applied diligently every hour. If you want proof, I can show you bits of formerly sunburned skin that are flaking off my shoulders as I write.
3. Make sure you go to the Waimea Valley Audubon Center, the Polynesian Cultural Center, and Pearl Harbor. More on each of those later.
4. Order coconut sorbet at Buzz’s Restaurant in Kailua. Buzz’s coconut sorbet is the new love of my life. Porpoise also decided that Buzz’s Lava Flow is the best drink he’s ever had.
5. If you’re trying to photograph birds with a digital camera, make sure you turn off its cheery little ding-a-ling noise, because, if you don’t, all you will get are photographs of birdie bottoms as they fly away. Again, I can offer ample proof.
6. Do not consent to leave until you have seen at least one mongoose.
Did you know that there are mongooses in Hawaii? I sure didn’t, until the retired Navyman sitting next to us on our flight into Honolulu told us about them. Naturally, at that moment, I became obsessed with finding a mongoose.
It’s not too hard, they say. Mongooses have become quite prevalent on the Hawaiian islands since their introduction in the 1880s. You see, Hawaii has no native land mammals except the hoary bat (didn’t see one of those, and that’s fine with me, after my bat-astrophes last summer).So when Europeans brought rat stowaways with them on their ships, there weren’t many predators (other than a few birds of prey) to manage the new rat population. Hence, lots of rats.
So leave it to the Europeans, brilliant ecological strategists that they were, to introduce another problem. Sugar planters imported Indian mongooses to control the rats that were destroying their crops. Well, it turns out that rats are nocturnal and mongooses, though they may be either nocturnal or diurnal, are primarily diurnal in Hawaii. They didn’t eat many rats, but they did eat lots of eggs of the nene, the goose (now endangered) that is Hawaii’s state bird. Of course, there were no larger predators to eat mongooses, and they’re now fairly widespread on the islands. Our B&B host claimed that you can even see them on golf courses now.
Anyway, the mongooses really shouldn’t be there, and they do some harm, but it isn’t the mongooses’ fault. They’re just doing what nature equipped them to do. And, besides, they are cute, and I was obsessed with Rikki-Tikki-Tavi when I was little, and I might never again have the opportunity to see a mongoose out in the wild (even if it wasn’t that wild), so I was really excited.
Porpoise indulged me. Everyone else laughed at me. The other couple staying at our B&B even saw a mongoose when they went out to Hanuama Bay to snorkel. They told us about it over breakfast, and then the male half of the couple unintentionally uttered the most devastating words he could have spoken to me at that moment: “It almost looked like a little otter.” Oh, the cruelty. Waaaah! It looked like a little otter, and I might not get to see one!
Our last day on Oahu, we drove to the Waimea Valley Audubon Center on the island’s north shore. It’s a lovely nature preserve/arboretum, but, most importantly, it was there, in a clearing, that I saw a flash of brown fur and a little weaselly body. I immediately let out the shriek heard round the world, at which point any hopes of photographing said mongoose vanished. Oh well. I was too busy performing the “I saw a mongoose” dance of joy to hold the camera still anyway.
One day I may develop the observational skills (including, say, quietness) of a naturalist. Right now, though, I can’t contain my excitement at seeing a new animal. Even if it is a pest. I, as a human, am a worse ecological pest, so at least we have something in common.
Add comment May 28th, 2006