The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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You might think the Hawaiian Islands would be like Galapagos, isolated as they are thousands of miles from any shore, another Darwinian study in evolutionary flora and fauna. But no, humans brought in their tropical fruit trees and favorite plants, altering the landscape by design but mostly by accident.
Feral goats roam the lava beds and wild donkeys menace the highways. Rats came in with the sailing ships and with no predators flourished nicely. Slugs with a disease transmitted by those same rats can infect humans with a brain-eating virus or bacteria or some damn thing that can lead to death. Our friends here in Hilo won’t eat anything that hits the ground ripe or not. Paradise comes with a caveat.

I spotted a wild turkey yesterday and a small flock of escaped parakeets today. Feral cats roam the ground here looking for tourist handouts. Most unexpected of all was the mongoose that humped across the lawn and into the rough next to the golf course, a species introduced to control the rat population. Course, mongoose are daytime hunters while rats rule the night. Now they got both. We humans don’t make very efficient gods when it comes to landscaping the Garden of Eden, big surprise. Can’t wait to see what ‘solutions’ we dream up for climate change, probably a global catastrophe of our own making worse than leaving the problem alone.

Nevertheless, I have to admit the mongoose is a surprise species to a tourist like myself. And so far as I can tell, the cobra population is zero. Mark one up for us humans.

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