What’s An Island Beach Without Sand?

(Photo:Star Advertiser)

A few months ago, I wrote about the big $2.5 million project to replenish 1,730 feet of beach at Waikiki with sand pumped from the sea bed offshore. (What’s a Beach Worth Without Sand?)

After three months of work, the project is still being finished up. Initially, workers loaded sand sucked from offshore into an air-conveyance machine designed to blow it down the beach through an underground pipeline. Due to mechanical problems the pipeline method failed to work so they’re doing it the old fashion way: truck the sand on the beach to spots in need of widening.

That’s tourist-centric Waikiki Beach.

Yesterday, the US Geological Survey reported that about 70 percent of the beaches on Oahu, Kauai and Maui are being lost to long-term erosion. The 10-year study found 85 percent of beaches are eroding on Maui, 71 percent are eroding on Kauai and 60 percent of Oahu's beaches are eroding, according to a news report in the Star Advertiser, Erosion taking a big bite out of isle beaches

The study attributed accelerated loss due to human activity. Of the 9 percent of beaches lost on Oahu, Maui and Kauai totaling 13.3 miles in the past century, nearly all of them have been lost due to the building of sea walls.    The shoreline changes will be further accelerated by sea level rise, estimated by be close to 3 feet by the end of the century.

The study's lead author said that, with the new information about coastal erosion, government agencies have the ability to develop new policies to establish building "setbacks" based on erosion rates of a specific property.

Hard to imagine the government doing that in development-frenzied Hawaii. But what’s an island to do with beaches without sand?

--Mike Sato

Travel Notes: Tropic Living Below Nature’s Chirping

There are seven, some say eight, types of geckos living in Hawaii. Since being introduced in the 1940s, the Common House Gecko ( Hemidactylus frenatus ) has pretty much taken over.

Two fat ones are living in the fluorescent light fixture over my mother’s dining room table. When the lights are on, we can see them through the opaque glass, their fat pink bellies and slender tails and lizard feet— along with their poop and remains of insects they’ve fed on.

My mother understandably wants them out and the fixture cleaned out.

“Most homes in Hawaii welcome geckos,” writes Linda Pascatore in The Gecko, "because they eat insects like ants, mosquitos and roaches. Geckos are very vocal creatures. They make a clicking sound that sounds almost like a person saying, “Tsk, tsk, tsk”, which can be heard at night. They also make repeated chirping sounds at times. Another sound heard is the tapping as the gecko holds its prey in its mouth and hits it against the wall, window, or ceiling to kill it. Here in Hawaii, the occasional gecko poop, eggs found stuck inside printers, and strange night sounds are all well worth the service the gecko performs by eating household insects. Geckos also eat fruit, nectar, and pollen. They will lick up juice with their long tongues.”

My mother wants them out of her house. It is unnerving to hear the “tsk, tsk, tsk” called out overhead during dinner.

According to Explore Biodiversity, “Geckos are one of the few reptiles or amphibians that are notorious for colonizing islands. Part of the reason for this is that some geckos have the amazing ability of parthenogenesis. In essence, this means that one gecko, who successfully made it do an island can produce unfertilized eggs that later become a whole clan of female clones!”

These Common House Geckos aren’t, however, parthenogenetic. There are males and females and the males are territorial; they will also eat juvenile geckos of their own species and other species.
The difficulty with getting them out of the house is that there are two of them and they will no doubt leap out of the fixture in opposite directions when I remove the glass . If we’re lucky, maybe they would scurry up a wall, using those special toepads with thousands of tiny spatula-tipped setae which allow them to climb walls and hang from the ceiling.

 On a wall or on the window, there would be half the chance to capture them.


If we’re unlucky (which would most likely be the case), they’d scurry under the furniture or into the kitchen under the refrigerator or into the bedrooms.

My mother wants them out of the house. It’s tough living with Nature chirping overhead.

--Mike Sato

San Juan County Council Says “Yes!” To BLM Lands Protection

Watmough Bight (Susan Muckle)

The San Juan County Council voted unanimously this morning to send a letter to the Interior Department supporting permanent protection of Bureau of Land Management lands in the islands.
NEWS RELEASE:

Islanders Thank San Juan County Council For Unanimously Supporting Permanent Protection of Local BLM Lands

San Juan County islanders thanked its county council today for unanimously supporting permanent protection of local Bureau of Land Management federal properties in the islands. The county council voted to send a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the Washington congressional delegation expressing their support of either congressional action or presidential proclamation to achieve federal protection.

“We thank the council for its leadership and thank the many, many people who have expressed their support,” said Asha Lela, chair of the group Islanders for a San Juan Islands National Conservation Area. “We will continue to make sure that there is permanent protection for the BLM lands and that islanders are involved in the management of these lands.”

Asha Lela and other concerned citizens have been working for several years on federal legislation seeking permanent protection for the BLM lands in the San Juan Islands with a strong community voice in their management.

Congressional legislation to permanently protect the BLM lands as a National Conservation Area was introduced by Rep. Rick Larsen and Sen. Maria Cantwell but has been stalled in Congress.

Most recently, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and BLM officials have discussed permanent protection of the federal lands through presidential proclamation based on the congressional legislation and working with local elected officials and citizens.

For more information, contact Islanders For A San Juan Islands National Conservation Area, www.SanJuanIslandsNCA.org 

This Great Ark of Islands

I’m sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific under the branches of a massive monkey pod tree watching a gecko drink the water condensing on my plastic cup.

It’s staggering if I think too hard about how all the flora and fauna on this island either came from somewhere else or evolved from what came from somewhere else.

My friend and classmate says that there weren’t geckos like these when we were growing up here. True, there weren’t chameleons either. Neither were there the green sea turtles that now feed and haul out in the shallows of Alii Beach Park. And, if some bad actors stop harassing and killing endangered monk seals, those will have a chance to live here as well.

When I was growing up in Honolulu, I’d take for granted the mynah birds, the grey doves, the Chinese ringed-neck doves, house finches and mejiro. Over the years returning to Oahu, I’ve seen cockatiels, parrots and parakeets in the trees in Manoa Valley and the black and white-capped, pink-beaked Java rice birds in the lawns and playgrounds.

My mother’s house needs to be treated for termites that can eat through the foundation and joists. She keeps a clean house so the cockroaches and ants stay outside. A few years ago, there was an infestation of white flies that killed a number of the ubiquitous plumeria trees.

The classic cases of unanticipated consequences is the introduction of the mongoose to control the rat populations in the sugar cane fields. The mongoose ate birds and bird eggs and reproduced like — well, mongoose. Only the islands of Lanai and Kauai have been spared the invasion of the mongoose.

The African snails that invaded Oahu in the ‘50s weren’t as big as the monster snails being found these days in Florida but big enough to clear cut through local succulents. They were controlled by introducing the rosy wolfsnail which, unfortunately, devoured all kinds of snails.

These are islands and efforts are made to keep infestations isolated. The latest battle involves the coqui frog whose booming population infests the Big Island of Hawaii and Maui and now is being found on Oahu and Kauai. Besides having a voracious appetite for insects and spiders, the din of the frogs at night soon passes from a quaint appreciation to a maddening nuisance. (Listen here)

I think about how all the flora and fauna on this island either came from somewhere else or evolved from what came from somewhere else. I’m staggered.

--Mike Sato