by Glen Chilton
Michelle pointed out another interesting biological control method. Some birds are nectar robbers. Birds had discovered the nectar reserves located at the base of the banana poka’s flowers, and by gaining access to the nectar by poking a hole in the flower, and therefore not fertilizing it, were keeping the plant from producing seeds. “The birds are nailing it,” she said.
Banana poka eradication efforts in Koke’e State Park have been so effective that when park personnel need to collect vines for the Banana Poka Round-up, volunteers have to search backroads in four-wheel drive trucks. Luckily, Michelle spotted one of the vines draped over a tree in a nearby meadow.
However, other forces are continuing to spread the plant. When ripe fruit drops to the ground, pigs eat them, dispersing the seeds. Pigs didn’t swim to Hawaii, of course; they were brought by Polynesian settlers. These were followed by black-tailed deer and goats, which quickly proliferated and spread. All three mammals are hunted legally in Koke’e State Park. Michelle explained that pigs can be hunted throughout the year with dogs and knives. I thought I had misheard, and asked for clarification. She claimed that an Airedale–pit bull–Labrador retriever cross is trained to grab and hold the pig while the hunter runs up and kills it with a knife. Was she teasing me?
According to the Kauai telephone directory, she wasn’t. Wild pigs can be hunted with dogs and knives in, for instance, Hunting Unit C, year-round on Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays, and state holidays, at a rate of one pig per hunter per day. Hunting Unit C must really hate wild pigs, where they can also be dispatched with rifle, muzzleloader, handgun, bow and arrow, or sustained teasing.
I suppose I can see why locals are so eager to kill pigs, aside from the opportunity to eat their yummy, yummy bits. Pigs in Hawaii now number more than 100,000 individuals. They root in the soil for grubs and worms, leaving depressions that fill with rainwater and become breeding opportunities for mosquitoes. They eat the fruit of introduced plants like the banana poka and Brazilian strawberry guava, spreading their seeds.
Banana poka were not the only exotic plant species we spied growing around the museum’s buildings. Michelle pointed out Chinese fir, introduced around 1804. Hoop pines were brought from Australia around 1880. We saw loblolly pines, California redwoods, Monterey cypress, Italian cypress, Mexican cypress, and two species of eucalyptus.
After thanking Michelle for her time, there was nothing for it but a hike, and in all of Kauai, this was the place for it. Michelle suggested that to see native birds the best spot was the Alaka’i swamp, the highest-elevation swamp in the world. We continued up to the end of the road and found the Pu’u o Kila Lookout. At more than 1,200 metres, looking out over the Kalalau Valley, it seemed that we had come to the end of the world. The swamp is the result of past volcanic indigestion and 350 days of rain a year. Even though we were fortunate to be visiting on one of the other fifteen days, the red mud trail was slick, preventing the vast majority of visitors to Pu’u o Kila from leaving the car park. A missed step put Lisa on her backside and covered our Birds of Kauai book, purchased thirty minutes earlier at the museum’s gift shop, in red slime.
Our perseverance was rewarded. We had left the mosquitoes below us and entered a fern-filled world of shade trees and mist. Verdant greenness was punctuated by the spiky red flowers of the ‘ohi’a lehua tree, whose nectar attracted wonderful feathered creatures. First came the ‘Apapane, a crimson-red honeycreeper whose black bill and red wings seemed a suitable costume for a superhero. Then we spied the ‘Anianiau, which seemed less like a bird and more like a flying lemon plugged into a car battery. The smallest of Hawaii’s honeycreepers, it is found only on Kauai, and generally only above 1,000 metres. A little deeper into the swamp, we spied the Kauai ‘Elepaio. I had read about the behaviour of this bird in scholarly papers and expected something a little showier from a native Hawaiian bird. They are grey and slightly darker grey, with bits of tan and two narrow grey bars on the wings, but they earn bonus points for being relatively common and carefree.
THIS LEFT US with a glorious February day to play tourist. Rising very early, we took the Jeep to the region of Poipu, and bounced along rutted dirt cane-field roads to the last of the beaches, Mahaulepu. It was supposed to be one of the best places on the island to see endangered monk seals. We didn’t see any. Scrambling up and over rocks of solidified sand, we spotted a pod of thirty dolphins. Then we spied a group of whales bearing down on a school of large fish, driving them up in the air in a mad attempt to avoid being breakfast. And then we spotted something almost as good as a monk seal—a green sea turtle, endangered in anyone’s book, lazily swimming by. Liberally slathered in sunblock, I dozed on the beach while Lisa watched the antics of humpbacks for nearly three hours. She also spotted a Wandering Tattler, known locally as the ‘?lili.
By the end of our brief stay in Hawaii, we had seen nine native bird species. Regrettably, we had chalked up a massive sixteen species of bird that been brought to Hawaii by humans. Most of the plants and insects and all of the reptiles we had seen were also introduced. It all got me thinking about the nature of Paradise. I had to wonder if Hawaii can be Paradise if it hosts so strong a military presence. Can an island be Paradise if its crime statistics look good only in comparison to other islands? Is it Paradise if the only major road is notoriously congested all day every day? Is this Paradise if the shark attack statistics are downplayed by claiming that most fatalities are those paddling surfboards? Hawaii certainly looked like Paradise when we were greeted home by a blizzard.
CHAPTER SEVEN
If God Were a Frog
REASON NUMBER SEVEN FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: BECAUSE POOR PEOPLE WILL EAT ANYTHING, RIGHT?
IF GOD WERE A FROG, I suppose He might be a Paradise toad. The sort of creature that only a mother could love, this amphibian has warty red skin with patches of sickly green. Discovered by Harold Braack, whose surname sounds oddly like the call of a toad, it breeds in small spring-fed pools in arid rocky regions of western South Africa. There seems to be something particularly holy about both Mary’s frog, known only from Mount Balabag on the island of Palawan in western Philippines, and the Virgin Island coqui, found on the islands of Tortola and Virgin Gorda. Alternatively, the Almighty might be represented in amphibian form by the southern ghost frog. Found in forest streams of the Cape Mountains of South Africa, it has skin the colour of light brown sugar with splotches of slightly darker brown sugar. The bleeding toad sounds somehow biblical; its status of “critically endangered” wasn’t helped by the eruption of its favourite home, Mount Galunggung, in 1987. My favourite contender for an all-powerful frog is a globular little yellow mass with red and black spots known as the Holy Cross toad.
In contrast, there can be only one contender for Satan in the form of a frog. So foul and evil a creature that it appears on the World Conservation Union’s list of 100 worst invasive alien species, the American bullfrog is a truly despicable creature when it is found in the wrong place.
The right place for an American bullfrog is eastern North America from Nova Scotia south to central Florida and northern Mexico. The wrong place is anywhere else, including China, Cuba, England, France, Israel, Japan, Russia, and nine countries in South America. Once established at a site, bullfrogs seem willing to expand their range rapidly along streams, canals, and irrigation ditches.
Some frogs are attractive. Bullfrogs aren’t. They are green or brown and always blotchy. A really big one would have a twenty-centimetre body, with another twenty centimetres tacked on as legs. A bullfrog that big would weigh in at something approaching 750 grams. The sides of their heads are marked by huge eardrums and big, bulgy eyes. They have come to me in my nastier dreams.
American bullfrogs have been imported as pets and as accidental tag-alongs with goldfish. However, the introduction of bullfrogs has been mainly an issue of food. You might try to win your next Scrabble game with the word “ranarium,” a commercial operation where bullfrogs are raised for human consumption
. These facilities do not require a lot of space and need only a modest initial investment, and have been tried with varying degrees of success around the world for over a century.
Curiously, it seems that every attempt to raise bullfrogs for food had an export market in mind. Locals generally seem to prefer steaks and burgers to frogs’ legs. Is it possible that no one really wants to eat them? Many countries have found that the market was overestimated, and bullfrog farms sit abandoned. Frogs then sneak away into the night and cause trouble.
Introduced American bullfrogs have been reported willing to stuff down just about anything they can fit in their mouths, including native insects, other frogs, newts, fish, and crayfish. Among the more unlikely items found in their diet are grass snakes, young mink, small turtles, and ducklings. Bullfrog tadpoles are thought to compete for food with the larval forms of native frogs, and adults have the potential to transmit diseases to which local amphibians have no natural resistance. Experts in Venezuela feel that the endangered La Carbonera stub-toed toad could be wiped out in months if American bullfrogs were to invade their habitat. Competition with American bullfrogs is most likely to have a negative impact on frog species that are most closely related to them, particularly other members of the same genus. For close relatives, hybridization is also possible. At a time when amphibians are under threat globally, introduced bullfrogs seem to be an additional problem that no one needs.
IT WAS ROUGHLY AT THIS POINT that Lisa and I joined the global transplantation of living organisms by moving from Canada to Australia. Lisa had completed a series of post-doctoral fellowships in the field of biomedical physiology and was poised to become a professor in her own right. It had become apparent that the chances of finding professorial positions in our respective fields in the city of Calgary were remote, and so we began to look at alternatives. Among those was the possibility that I would allow myself to be a kept husband and rely on my spouse for my next meal. When Lisa interviewed for and was subsequently offered an outstanding post at James Cook University in north Queensland, the correct route seemed obvious. At least it seemed obvious to us. When my colleagues found out that I was chucking in a position that was virtually guaranteed for life to move to a hemisphere that I hadn’t even visited, their responses were of two sorts. I must be very brave or I must be very stupid.
Australia is covered with introduced species, but it doesn’t have American bullfrogs. Of all the places that I might have chosen to spy on bullfrogs, I chose Uruguay for three reasons. First, no one I knew had ever been there. Second, I had recently completed a twelve-session night course in elementary Spanish, and although I had always felt like the most dim-witted student in the class, I wanted to try out some of my new-found knowledge.
Finally, research had just been completed on the invader in Uruguay, and the country’s principle amphibian researcher had promised to show me around.
Unless you are a member of the Uruguayan military, you will find it nearly impossible to fly to Uruguay without flying to Argentina first. For me, this meant a flight from Sydney to Buenos Aires, the closest transportation hub to Uruguay’s capital city, Montevideo. The Pacific Ocean is really, really big, and our plane seemed in no hurry to get to Buenos Aires. I passed the time by constructing naughty expressions in Spanish using my phrasebook. Nothing I came up with would be naughty enough to get my face slapped. However, I made a mental note not to use the word coger. In Spain the verb means “to take” or “to catch.” In South America it is a much cruder version of the expression “to have carnal knowledge of.” Asking a local where I might be able to engage in coitus with a bus could conceivably get me into a bit of trouble.
Before departing for Montevideo, I enjoyed a couple of free days wandering the streets of Buenos Aires. I found my way to the Cementerio de la Recoleta, populated by the earthly remains of presidents, physicians, Nobel Prize winners, writers, diplomats, and other mucky-mucks. I discovered that coffee culture in Argentina means café con leche (coffee with a large quantity of steamed milk), a glass of water, a glass of orange juice, and tasty chocolate wafers. Florida Avenue was alive and electrified late into the evening. Street vendors hawked beaded work, quick portraits, more beaded work, cigarette lighters, and additional beaded work.
Indeed, there was only one great challenge for me in Buenos Aires. In a country full of ravenous carnivores, a good vegetarian restaurant is a rare and precious thing. And so for an evening meal I set off for La Esquina de las Flores (The Corner of the Flowers). When I arrived at the address on Córdoba, I found that my dining opportunity had been replaced by a gaping construction site. Luckily, I had a plan B. The restaurant Rubia y Negra (Blond and Black) on Libertad was said to brew eight varieties of beer. In its place I found a hairdressing salon. For an instant, I toyed with plan C. Ligure on Juncal was said to serve the best ranas a la provenzal, bullfrog legs in garlic, in all of Argentina. Bullfrogs? What an opportunity. Not that I wanted to eat bullfrog legs; most vegetarians don’t. But perhaps I could find a fellow patron who had ordered them and could then ask how they tasted. Fat chance.
I had hoped to visit another introduced species before I left Argentina. Just as it had been introduced to Vancouver in the nineteenth century, the Crested Myna had been found in Argentina since 1982. In the hopes of seeing it, I contacted local bird enthusiast Mark Pear-man. Although we were not able to dovetail our schedules, he gave me all of the details that I needed to find mynas myself at the Plaza Paso in the city of La Plata, fifty kilometres south of Buenos Aires. Mark warned me about a lack of signposts, awkward exit roads, dangerous ghettos, and general violence and security problems in La Plata. Despite the city’s promise of Belle Epoque and Flemish Renaissance architecture, a great natural history museum, and convenient bus service, I decided against a detour to La Plata.
BE ADVISED—on the ferry between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, turista class isn’t nearly as much fun as it sounds. Bring a book. I hadn’t. I tried to keep track of the announcements made in Spanish, and most of them were followed by the same commentary in English so that I could check my translation. The video highlighting the ferry’s safety features made disaster look jolly fun. The lifejackets appeared a lot more substantial than the flimsy thing promised on inflight safety videos. Sliding down a chute from the ferry to a waiting life raft seemed like a thoroughly survivable adventure. I had always felt that if an airliner fell from 11,000 metres with me on it, my last concern was likely to be whether my lifejacket had an operating light and whistle.
In the months leading up to the trip, my correspondence with ecologist Gabriel Laufer had been spotty, so I was both delighted and relieved when he approached me outside the customs hall in Montevideo. In a way that I cannot properly articulate, I immediately felt as though I was making a lifelong friend. He shook my hand firmly, tossed my bags into the back of his truck, and we set off for my hotel.
I got an informal tour of Montevideo en route. Gabriel pointed out the building of the university’s veterinary school as we passed it. It was, with the support of the government, the first institution to promote the idea of bullfrog farms in Uruguay, and did substantial research on cultivation techniques suitable for the country. Like so many people using English as a second tongue, Gabriel downplayed his grasp of the language, although it seemed lucid and coherent. In explaining why a street, Avenida 18 de Julio, was named after a date, he stumbled when trying to translate the word constitución into English. “Constitution,” I said. He corrected my use of the word bambino (“No, that’s Italian,” he said), and sorted out my confusion of the words nombre and numero. We agreed that we would meet early the following morning to travel to a site of bullfrog introduction. We also agreed that Gabriel and his wife, Adriana, would meet me for dinner that evening at nine o’clock.
I was far too excited to sit still, and so after dropping my bags at the hotel, I set off. I wanted to explore, explore, explore. I first selected an al fresco establishment on a side street, and taking the advic
e of a fellow diner ordered melted mozzarella on a thick pizzalike crust. The prices looked steep, until I remembered that the Uruguayan peso was trading at twenty-to-one with a dollar. Compared to prices at home, everything on the menu was dirt cheap. A long string of very young children came to beg at my table, but none were pushy or impolite when I turned them down.
After wandering slowly through the streets of central Montevideo, I came to rest under the shade trees of the Plaza del Entrevero. I spied Rock Doves and very pale House Sparrows, but none of the other introduced birds (European Greenfinches, European Goldfinches, and Common Waxbills) that I had been told to expect in Uruguay. How delightful that some older park users felt free to feed the birds.
A fellow on the next park bench finished off a joint and then quietly picked at his guitar. In an accent that suggested he had spent considerable time smoking joints in the U.S., or watching far too much American television, he said: “So, are you lost in Paradise?”
I replied that I wasn’t sure if it was Paradise, but that I certainly wasn’t lost. “What about you?”
“No, I live here.”
“Does that mean that it can’t be Paradise?”
He pondered my question for a minute, gave up, and changed the topic. He had just been to see the Mausoleo de Artigas, crypt of José Gervasio Artigas, a nineteenth-century resistance fighter, in the Plaza Independencia.
“They dug him up, and put him in a crypt with an armed guard. Do you know about him?” I replied that I did. “Well, he’s too far from the Earth, you know what I mean?” I said that I did, but I didn’t.
“If they scatter me over there,” he said, pointing to a spot about twenty metres away, “and it makes the grass greener, then I figure I’ve done my part.”
