So You Want to Live in Hawaii: Wildlife on Kauai

Life and Death in a Hawaiian Lagoon

Greg Patent — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 18:00:30 GMT

Night Heron on a tree branch surveying the water below for a potential meal of fish. When he finds a likely spot, he’ll fly to the water’s edge.

Black-crowned Night Herons, or just Night Herons, are the most widely dispersed herons in the world. Here in Kaua’i, we see these stately birds hunting for fish at the water’s edge of a lagoon. When I say “hunting” I mean the birds are as still as statues staring into the water with their piercingly red eyes seeking a fish for a meal.

The heron remains perfetly still as he focuses his gaze.

The adult birds have a striking appearance and their sharp pointed bills are perfect instruments for a life devoted to capturing and feeding on fish.

On our almost daily walks around the lagoon we’ve seen many birds in their feeding pose, but never have we witnessed any heron attempting to or actually catching a fish.

Several months ago we did happen upon a heron who had just captured a fish. We watched him manipulating his catch with his tongue and swallowing his prey head first. The whole action lasted about 3 seconds. Wow!

A few days ago, on a late afternoon walk, we stopped in our tracks and gasped at the following sight.

The heron must have just caught the fish because we could see it opening and closing its mouth as the heron tightened his grip.

To us it seemed that this fish was too large for the heron. How was he going to swallow that?

We had to find out. So for about 15 minutes we stood quietly, barely moving, as we watched this life and death drama unfold.

Because of the fish’s size, the heron had to kill it before swallowing it. And he did that by clamping his powerful jaws down hard around the animal’s throat to suffocate it. Over the next few minutes we could see him repeatedly squeezing the fish right behind its head.

A better view of the fish showing its size relative to the heron.

When it looked to us as though the fish was dead, the heron dipped its tail in the water. I’m guessing this action would have told the heron that the fish was, in fact dead. If the tail twitched, it would signal the heron that his job wasn’t done yet.

After the first tail dip, the heron applied more pressure on the fish, followed a few minutes later by another tail dip.

By then the fish was dead. Its body was completely still. The heron began manipulating the position of the fish between his jaws, trying to position it for a clean swallow. He kept shifting the fish’s position over and over and never seemed satisfied.

You can see that this fish is pretty long! Its head is now in the heron’s mouth.

Finally, several minutes later, with the head of the fish firmly secured in the heron’s mouth and the fish’s body dangling from it, the heron did something we had not expected. It flew up and across the water and landed in a tree!

Now what, we wondered? Did the heron have a nest there?

A few seconds later a second heron flew to the tree and landed right next to our heron. We are guessing that this intruder had been watching the whole time and figured he could steal the fish right out of our heron’s mouth.

But this is what happened. The arrival of the intruder so startled our heron that he flew off instantly, and the fish he had killed left his grip and dropped into the lagoon with a tiny splash, as if to say end of story.

We felt so sad for our heron. We lost sight of him after the fish fell. The intruder heron stayed in the tree and just kept looking at the spot where the dead fish had re-entered its domain. As a corpse.

This is not how we wanted our story to end. In our version our heron would’ve remained on the shore. Throwing his head backward, he’d widen his throat to a size even he never knew was possible, and down would slide his precious fish. After swallowing, he’d flick his tongue in and out within his bill and rest for a few minutes before flying off to roost for the night.

Nature doesn’t work the way we want it to. Being a predator is hard work. Often there’s no payoff. But the heron survived and would fish successfully another day. The fish’s body would become fodder for aquatic beings. And life would go on.

Living with Lizards

Greg Patent — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 18:01:02 GMT

Aloha and welcome to my newsletter, a guest post by my adorable wife, Dorothy. She’s had a lifelong love of nature with lizards occupying a special place. In Kaua’i, lizards are everywhere, outdoors and in. Read on. You may be captivated by them, too.

Some lizards like brown anoles do, indeed, love living among the greenery, but geckos are a different story.

Kaua’i is lizard heaven--warm but not blistering hot nor colder than 60˚F, and nicely (for lizards) humid. You’d think they would be happy with living outdoors where there’s greenery and lots of small insects to chow down on. But not necessarily so.

There are basically two types of geckos here—green ones that are active in the daytime, generallly outside, and a few species of basically brown ones that venture out after sunset.

Here’s a green gecko, about 4 inches long, licking a small piece of fresh pineapple. They love fruit! Dorothy checks our narrow balcony often to make sure fruit is available to a gecko that wanders by

Once we moved into our apartment, we quickly learned that condos and geckos are natural companions. Just find a place to hide, come out after the lights are out, help keep down the indoor ant and cockroach populations and be safe from predators—lizard researchers even refer to their subjects as “nature’s lunchbox.”

Here’s Cracker Jack, a gecko that showed up one night while we were watching TV. Safely out of harm’s way on a supporting beam, we watched him slowly investigate his territory for a potential meal. When we looked again a few minutes later, he had vanished.

As we were moving in, we’d stashed our empty suitcases under a countertop in the kitchen. When I moved one piece, the tiniest possible brown gecko appeared on the floor—oh, it’s so cute I exclaimed. But when I reached down to catch it— poof! It zipped into a crack and was gone. But I was entranced.

The next encounter was quite different. Our refrigerator has a separate freezer compartment atop the cold space. One day I swung open the freezer door and was horrified to see a mangled-looking brown gecko twitching on the edge between the two sections.

I yelled to Greg, saying I’d killed a gecko by mistake! I was very distraught. It looked like I’d partly cut off its head but it was still twitching. Yuck! Greg touched it to turn it over and then I could see that it wasn’t a wounded neck at all, it was the tail that was gooey and detached and the gecko’s legs were flailing. Greg picked it up carefully and I realized I’d been fooled by an ancient lizard trick—sacrifice your tail to distract an enemy and you can live on to grow a new tail.

Doubting it could survive since he might have other injuries, we opened the sliding door and laid it gently on the narrow balcony, hoping it could somehow make it. In the morning, he wasn’t there. A good sign. Maybe.

Learning to live with in-home wildlife can be interesting. When I find an indoor gecko I name it. “The Count” hid under the toaster on the kitchen counter. Once when I scared him he scrambled out where the edge of the counter meets the wall. There he lay still, except he waved and wriggled the end of his tail. Aha! I realized he was doing the “bite my tail, it’s really my head” routine to lure a predator away from his body. I left quietly to get my camera to catch the action but when I got back in just a minute or two he was gone.

“Wally” would appear seemingly out of nowhere and climb around on the wall behind the TV. One morning as I fetched fruit from a bowl I felt a funny squiggly feeling on my hand and pulled away, only to find Wally climbing up my arm. I shook him off and he scurried away along the floor and disappeared. I then knew to look for him before grabbing fruit.

Here’s Wally, hiding under some ginger.

A gecko Dorothy named Dori on our front door next to a hinge. She’s tiny, only about 2 inches long

Now and then a baby shows up out of nowhere on the screen window. I’m in awe of how the beautiful pattern of browns appears in tiny replicas on their bodies. We wish them well as they begin their perilous lives.

Baby Gecko.

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Survival may be difficult in the lizard world, but it can happen. We’d released the injured brown gecko outside onto our narrow balcony, which is actually the realm of the green day geckos. We’d forgotten about him as we imagined he really didn’t have much of a chance to survive. Then one day after two days of almost constant rain, as I admired the sunlight shining on the balcony, a beautiful brown indoor-nighttime lizard emerged from the crack under the sliding door and began to lick up ants on a bit of pineapple we’d left out for the green geckos. And here he is.

What’s a nighttime gecko doing here in the bright sunlight, I wondered. Then I looked more closely and saw that this fellow had a new piece of tail, and he appeared right in the area where we’d placed the injured gecko weeks before. I immediately dubbed him Lazarus, since he appeared to have arisen from near death. The sunshine brought out his colors as he fed on the balcony, and I admired him for his beauty and determination to survive.

Greg had his own special encounter with a gecko. He named him Hitch. Returning to the car after a root canal procedure, Greg opened the car door, slid onto the driver’s seat, and just as he reached for the door handle, this is what he saw:

The gecko Hitch. Hope you’re all right wherever you are.

A small gecko that looked like he’d discovered a new home. While waiting for the gecko to make up its mind and leave, Greg took photos and made a video of the gecko. After a few minutes, Hitch crawled away and disappeared. But where did he go?

Some people don’t like sharing their homes with geckos, but we enjoy their company, as do many other folks. One fellow we are told has taught a gecko to sip wine from his glass! That’s going a bit far, but it’s good to know that ‘our’ geckos aren’t the only welcomed ones.

Postscript: During the past five years, Dorothy has worked with many lizard scientists in the field to research her new book on lizard evolution in the Caribbean, “The Lizard Scientists” (Clarion Books, 2022). Here’s a review:

The Horn Book (Jan/Feb 2023):

Patent interviews the scientists in a variety of research settings and explains, in easily understandable and scientifically robust detail, their research questions and methods and the contributions they make to our understandings of evolution and natural selection...... High-quality photographs of anoles and their habitats, taken by lizard scientists turned documentary filmmakers, are well aligned with the text and provide details that readers can scrutinize.

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