LIHU‘E — Helicopter landings in remote areas of Kaua‘i have long been criticized by environmentalists as damaging to Kaua‘i’s fragile ecosystem. A self-taught botanist, however, is proving just the opposite. “There are species now which are primarily found only in
LIHU‘E — Helicopter landings in remote areas of Kaua‘i have long been criticized by environmentalists as damaging to Kaua‘i’s fragile ecosystem.
A self-taught botanist, however, is proving just the opposite.
“There are species now which are primarily found only in my reserve and nowhere else in the world,” said Keith Robinson, adding that the preservation work he does is funded by a helicopter tour that pays fees for landings on Robinson family property as part of an ecotour.
The Kaua‘i Planning Commission approved on Oct. 12 a request from Robinson for a two-year extension of his permits to continue operating a helicopter landing facility and botanical tours in Nonopahu Ridge, mauka of Makaweli on Kaua‘i’s Westside.
The original permits go back to Aug. 8, 2006, and Robinson is required to provide an annual report of his work as a condition to renew the permits.
The Robinson family owns the island of Ni‘ihau and large portions of Kaua‘i’s Westside.
Nonopahu Ridge reserve
Robinson said that 20 years ago he had the idea to create and maintain three botanical reserves. He envisioned one in the dry forests of Ni‘ihau, one in Wainiha, and one in West Kaua‘i.
The Nonopahu Ridge reserve is roughly 10 acres, and the helicopter landing area is two acres.
Robinson said he has already erected about 2,000 feet of electric fencing in the Nonopahu Ridge botanical reserve, to keep animals out. He needs to put up another 2,000 feet of fencing to finish the project, he said.
The area that Robinson has fenced so far has excluded about 80 percent of livestock, he said. The helicopter landing area is completely fenced in.
“I’m not going to say conditions are perfect up there. We’ve just been through a really nasty drought,” said Robinson, adding that prior to the establishment of the reserve, the area was part of Makaweli Ranch, which raised livestock. “The top of that ridge was basically as bare as the top of my head.”
When Robinson first started the Nonopahu reserve he tried to grow grass at the helicopter landing, but the area was so overgrazed by livestock that he had to use an exorbitant amount of fertilizer, he said.
He said Mainland farmers consider 10 to 20 pounds of fertilizer per acre as heavy usage.
“I did not get a response from that grass in that two-acre place until I had put in 550 pounds of fertilizer,” he said.
The grass slowly recovered, but Robinson said the results are “still not very enthusiastic.”
Erosion
Robinson said as plants grow they take nutrients off the soil. Grazing animals feed off the plants, and are sent off to slaughter.
“Basically we are eating the harvesting machine that takes the nutrients out of the soil,” Robinson said. “As the years go by, there’s less and less nutrients in the soil, the plants grow more and more slowly, and finally the soil is exhausted, no more fertility.”
Without plants, the erosion problem increases, Robinson said.
When Robinson first received the permit for the helicopter landings in 2006, Lex Riggle, district conservationist at the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, estimated that the conservation efforts would result in at least a 10-ton-per-acre-per-year reduction in soil erosion.
The project site is in the head of a 100-acre watershed. Storm run-off eventually reaches Makaweli River, and will arrive in the ocean, according to a report written by Riggle.
In June, 2010 Riggle calculated the erosion in the area as ranging from 180 to 280 tons per acre per year. Robinson called these numbers “horrifyingly high.”
Riggle, however, still commended Robinson for his efforts to intercept sediment generated on the steep slopes above the project area.
Riggle said in the 2006 report that the greatest threat to Robinson’s project was the population of wild pigs and goats. He also said the replacement of invasive species with native ground cover, shrub and trees would significantly reduce soil erosion.
“The continued rooting by pigs leaves the soil disturbed and vulnerable to erosion and the re-colonization of invasive plants,” Riggle said.
The island of Kaho‘olawe had been used as a target for bombing exercises for many years by the U.S. Navy. Today Kaho‘olawe is a nearly barren island. Robinson said, however, it was mostly livestock that caused that. “The livestock did far more damage than the bombing did.”
Robinson said Native Hawaiian species are “biologically incompetent,” and are being replaced by Java plum and guava trees, which “may not be very attractive, but they are a lot tougher.”
‘Buying little time’
When Commissioner Hartwell Blake asked Robinson how long would it take until he could call his project a success, the answer was quick.
“Never,” said Robinson, taking a deep breath to continue. “Not during my lifetime.”
Saying he didn’t want to create a “sense of doom,” Robinson said no one, especially in the Robinson family, will continue his work.
“When I’m dead, this whole thing is probably going to collapse. I’m sorry, we’re just buying little time for the species,” he said.
“Anytime somebody stops the work and drops the ball, you loose something and it’s gone forever. That’s just the way it is. We’re going to have to accept that situation. We are fighting a retrograde fight to try to save some of those species,” Robinson said.
Years ago, when Robinson started the endangered-species reserve, the environmental community was “frantic,” he said. “Species were dying off right and left.”
Robinson said he specified he would do the restoration and preservation work if the environmental activists would respect his family’s property rights.
“If they attacked us in any way I would refuse to do the work,” he said.
Despite promising otherwise, the environmentalists eventually attacked Robinson’s work, and he retaliated by walking off the job in his main reserve, on the Westside.
“It turned out that the eco-nazis weren’t quite smart as they thought,” said Robinson, explaining that the environmentalists took over his work, but weren’t able to duplicate it.
“As soon as I walked off the job those plants began to go extinct. In many cases they were individually fenced against pigs,” said Robinson, adding that some of the trees were 20 feet tall. “Almost all of them were dead because they were no longer being watered.
“When you’re working with endangered Hawaiian species you just have got to keep grinding along,” he said.
Na Pali Coast
In the much wetter ridges of Wainiha and Na Pali Coast, Robinson’s original plan was to create another helicopter landing. He said he wanted to pull as much as possible the “dying plants and trees” from Na Pali Coast and place them into protective cultivation in a habitat like Wainiha.
Robinson said one of Hawai‘i’s most well-known botanists, the late Dr. Charles Lamoureux, once asked him to do just that, to pull everything he could from Na Pali Coast and put it in Wainiha, because “it just wasn’t going to make it in the Na Pali. And he was right.
“There are something like 800 of those species out there, and they’re going extinct in an average of one every nine months,” Robinson said.
Robinson told commissioners that keeping plants alive involves a lot of hard work.
“If you’re crazy you go jousting with windmills, and if you’ve completely lost it then you try to save Hawaiian endangered species,” he said.
LIHU‘E — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service added in Marchanother 45 native Hawaiian plants to the federal list of endangeredspecies, according to a National Tropical Botanical Garden pressrelease.
The announcement increased the number of listed endangered andthreatened species on Kaua‘i to 142. The list includes two birdsand one insect, which play important roles as pollinators, helpingthe species to survive, the release said.
The NTBG says that roughly 90 percent of native species in theislands occur nowhere else in the world. Hawai‘i is home to nearlyone quarter of all federally listed endangered and threatened plantand animal species in the country.
NTBG Director of Communications Janet Leopold said the nonprofitorganization grows 99 of those 142 plants listed. The other 43plants are located in high elevations, she said.
NTBG has five locations, including three on Kaua‘i, one on Maui andone in Florida. On Kaua‘i NTBG operates McBryde and Allertongardens on the South Shore and Limahuli Garden in Wainiha on theNorth Shore.
Behind Limahuli Garden, NTBG has a preserve which expands to almost1,000 acres. Leopold said many species grow naturally in thatpreserve, and the area is now fenced off to help keep out pigs andgoats, threats to native plant species.
Leopold said there are many other conservation works throughoutHawai‘i. NTBG works in partnership with the Plant ExtinctionPrevention program, which focuses on species that have 50 or lessplants remaining in the wild.
“Unfortunately throughout Hawai‘i there’s a number of those(plants),” Leopold said.
NTBG has been able to stop at least one of those plants from goingextinct. The Brighamia insignis has only one known plant left inthe wild. But at McBryde and Limahuli gardens botanists have beenable to pollinate the plant and propagate it, Leopold said.
The NTBG website says that early Hawaiians used to eat parts ofBrighamia insignis to treat consumption and other disorders.
Kaua‘i’s Ha‘upu Ridge and Ni‘ihau’s Ka‘ili Cliffs used to housewild populations of Brighamia insignis, but those populations nolonger exist. The last time a population of Brighamia insignis wasreported on Ni‘ihau was in 1947, according to the NTBG website.
