It’s not just we humans who are trying to find a safe corner to stay in during on-going, bizarre times. A mongoose was captured on Kauai a few weeks back, and for those uninitiated in our audience, the Garden Island is one local garden spot where these vermin have not gotten a foothold.
Introduced to Hawai`i over 120 years ago, mongoose were brought in to help eradicate the growing rat problem in the sugar fields. Well, sugar may be gone from our fields, but mongoose (diurnal creatures) and rats (nocturnal creatures) never hit it off or got together as planned, and both have found their mutually exclusive local niches. For the mongoose, Kauai remains on a list of places to occasionally visit, but not live.
The Department of Land And Natural Resources here estimates that mongooses cause $50 million in damage annually, not to mention the unfathomable loss of musubi and other food items left in golf carts. While mongooses have been found on Kauai, they are not entrenched there, which is good, because that’s one egg/bird-eating guest no one needs.
And just before 2022 rolled in, a wayward (actually leeward, since it was off Kaena Point) wild pig took a bite out of surfer’s surfboard well out in the ocean! Wild bores often appear at Christmas holiday and New Year’s parties, but perhaps due to the fact that everything is once again being (smartly) curtailed, this wild boar was hightailing it (or perhaps low-tailing it, being a feral pig) in the ocean, perhaps to escape hunters and/or dogs. Luckily, the experienced surfer placed her board in between herself and the paddling porker and was not harmed.
Pigs, mongooses, coqui frogs, centipedes, termites, Jackson chameleons, the ubiquitous cockroaches, etc.- we do have our fair share of generally unwelcome animal guests here. Even guests of the human variety that we personally invite here sometimes lose their sense of “welcome” after a while, but that’s another story. We share the land (and water), we accept boundaries, and we understand (hopefully) our place in the grand scheme of things in these islands.
But it still becomes newsworthy (and almost folksy) when we hear about strange animal incidents. Plus, an occasional offbeat story about our fauna friends can help us to put or keep things in perspective, which is still a great relief these days.
Think about it…