Honolulu Star-Advertiser © Susan Scott
April 26, 2010
While fetching my mail recently, I found the Hawaii Audubon Society’s April newsletter, ‘Elepaio, and almost didn’t make it back to the house. The headline of the lead story contained the words “bodyboards” and “coot,” and that stopped me. What possible relationship, I wondered, could an endangered water bird have with wave-riding toys?
The story of that connection was endearing enough, but the pictures on the next page stole my heart. Soon I was walking to Kailua’s Hamakua Marsh Wildlife Sanctuary in search of coots. And when I found several of the little black-and-white cuties paddling around, I saw them in a whole new light.
Because Hawaiian coots are easy to find, they might not seem like an endangered species. They are. It’s just that these water birds will settle for far less than their natural habitat. Nearly any spot with open water attracts our endemic coots: golf course ponds, concrete-lined sewage treatments ponds, water reservoirs, brackish fishponds, flooded taro fields and saltwater estuaries. And if the water levels in their chosen sites get low, the coots just fly somewhere else.
About 80 percent of Hawaii’s 2,000 to 8,000 coots live on Kauai, Oahu and Maui. The rest are scattered throughout the islands, some even flying to Niihau when standing water is available.
Coots prefer floating nests, building them on logs, rafts of vegetation, narrow dikes and mud bars. It was normal behavior, then, when the birds tried to construct nests on floating pump hoses in Molokai’s Wastewater Reclamation Facility on the western side of Kaunakakai.
Guy Joao, the facility’s operator since 1989, watched the coots’ failed attempts at nest-making in the two settling ponds, each about 2 acres in size. Time and again, the birds’ nest material blew off the hoses, and their breeding attempts failed.
You can see where this is going. Yes, Joao gave the coots a boogie board. He tied a rope to the board, made a rebar anchor, secured grass roots on the board’s surface and placed it in the pond. A pair of prospective parents claimed it immediately, and the facility was soon hosting coot chicks.
Pleased with this success, staff workers went to garage sales and bought more boards for their coots. But being coot landlords, the workers learned, wasn’t all that easy.
In this area of strong tradewinds, the boards had to be anchored on both ends to prevent the wind from flipping them. Also, the anchor lines had to be long enough to accommodate fluctuation in water levels, but not so long as to let the boards run into each other. When nests get too close, coot parents squabble, the boards tip and eggs are lost.
Another problem is that coots build nests up to 3 feet deep, and the vegetation pile eventually sinks the boat. Each board lasts about two years and then falls to the bottom. Every four to six years, workers scrape the sludge and the boards from the ponds’ floors and take them to a landfill.
Today the facility’s nature-loving staff holds local bodyboard drives for the coots and encourages school groups to visit. Students learn about water conservation, recycling and, of course, the remarkable coots.
You can read the article and see pictures of how these thoughtful county employees are making a difference, at www.hawaiiaudubon.com/newsletter.html.
Besides seeing coots in a new light, this story also changed my view of discarded bodyboards. Now they’re coot rafts.