Remember when “the birds and the bees” used to be a parents’ or health teachers’ lecture topic that elicited snickers and raised eyebrows from budding pre-teens, plus quickened heart rates? And no wonder, since such a talk dealt with Things
Remember when “the birds and the bees” used to be a parents’ or health teachers’ lecture topic that elicited snickers and raised eyebrows from budding pre-teens, plus quickened heart rates? And no wonder, since such a talk dealt with Things our hormones and changing bodies were pointing us toward, even if they hadn’t rocketed us there already. Curiosity reigned, even if a tidbit of knowledge was already in place, absorbed from peers, pets or matter-of-fact parents.
“The birds and the bees” is no longer a laughing matter. Instead, a modern lecture might lead us into a maze of environmental concerns.
Some while ago I mentioned the apapane birds — those beautiful, scarlet honeycreepers possessed of jet black wings and white tail coverts — who have been dropping dead in Kokee. A news writer from The Garden Island followed up on this. An article mentioned necropsy reports naming avian pox or malaria as the cause. Deductive reasoning takes us from malaria to mosquitoes to cause. Since mosquito larvae don’t hatch in cold climates, and since Kauai’s Kokee forests have warmed, the signs point to global warming.
Many people remain unaware, unconcerned, or may wish to believe that global warming is a false idea. Others have seen or experienced the writing on the wall — the calving, melting glaciers, migrations of polar bears, deeper diving of beluga whales for their cod, dwindling water supplies, escalating weather catastrophes and widening searches of seabirds for their catch. Others are worried, trying to behave and think “out of the box” to put brakes on what they believe will negatively impact all life on our planet.
Some of us in this community tend to ask, “Are apapanes our canary in the coalmine?” This species of our already endangered native birds — along with their distant cousins —have no other place to which they can remove themselves to nest and multiply, since their Kauai habitat is close to being the top of the island.
Scientists already believe we have lost our Kauai O‘o-A‘a. Gone, no more to return. A wake-up call. It seems so easy for “my” Road Scholar participants who travel here for a field study to Waimea Canyon and Kokee State Park to understand why, on a small island, environmental concerns are pointed up much more quickly than on a large “mainland” continent. They are already fascinated with Hawaii as they bypass the tourist mystique and learn more of Hawaiian history and culture as it became intertwined with the history of world powers — England, Russia, and then the United States. Sometimes people “get” the parallel between of endangered birds and people of Hawaiian ancestry, who have been forced to become a “new breed” to survive.
This past Friday, a new group of Road Scholar travelers arrived by ship in the harbor. You can be sure they heard our best stories, past and present, and our concerns. In Waimea, we made a quick transition from Capt. Cook’s 1778 arrival (and the death toll that followed due to the introduction of unfamiliar germs), to the current concerns about GMO crops and applications of agricultural chemicals (“Blowing in the Wind”). Before we ever got to the subject of birds, we jumped to bees, the fact that their numbers are dwindling.
For some interesting watch-dogging, you may check out the name Dr. Jonathan Lundgren on the web or in the news, the reason being that this USDA Agricultural Research Service entomologist is being stopped in his publishing tracks because of an article he wrote about what effects pesticides are having on bees. Also, Derrick Broze has an article with AntiMedia.org that gives permission to republish, if wished, under a Creative Commons license. The question being raised concerns “policy neutrality toward scientific inquiry.”
Traveling on to Kokee, I mentioned the Kauai Forest Bird Recovery Project, how the staff has been releasing raised and sheltered birds of endangered species in the hopes of revitalizing their populations. On Saturday, members of Ka Imi Institute once again performed a traditional Hawaiian ceremony blessing the current release, as they did for the reintroduction of the puaiohi (Kauai thrush), and the akikiki and akekeke in past years. Along with that blessing, a concerted follow-through on the reduction of greenhouse gases by a coalition of committed nations is needed.
Although few of the Road Scholars were proclaimed “birders,” familiar with Hawaii birds, after the o‘o-a‘a talk, they browsed through bird and plant books available at the Kokee Museum shop, lingered at bird display cases and admired local photographers’ and artists’ bird prints and art. The group also had a taste of our mesic forest trees in the loop walk behind the museum, the basic habitat of our jewels, our native birds.
What are you going to do? was a question that cropped up later.
What are we all going to do? was my rejoinder, pointing us back to our shared environmental concerns. Citizens from the USA Mainland from Maine to California, from Florida to Washington and all states in between are starting to pay attention, if they’re not already concerned and taking action. In large areas of seaboard, farmlands and forests, mountains and prairies, worries are building — from the increased severity of storms, the “weird” weather patterns that aren’t like a blip in the Farmers Almanac, the increasing health concerns about fouled water supplies and fields that upset the delicate balance of nature. And threats to the health and well-being of creatures: birds, bees, and more, including us, we vulnerable humans. Like the GMO controversy we now face. In court.
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Dawn Fraser Kawahara, poet, author and instructor, lives with her husband, Delano Kawahara, “with books and birds” in the Wailua District.
