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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, May 26, 2002

OUR HONOLULU
No more rabbits on Rabbit Island

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

The only person I've met who has lived on Rabbit Island, the little hump-backed crater off Makapu'u Point, is Dr. Bill Brown, the new president of Bishop Museum.

"That's something people would like to hear about," I said.

"Let go out there," he said. "I'll show you my cave."

A visit to Rabbit Island, a bird sanctuary, is not like driving to Waimanalo. You have to get permission. We swam in from a Boston whaler piloted by Dave Smith, wildlife manager for the state Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

Three-quarters of the way from Makai Pier, two wildlife officers in another Boston whaler raced out to check our credentials. City police watch from the highway and report people fooling around the island.

Once ashore, I felt like a castaway on the pristine beach, blue sky overhead, the ocean stretching to infinity. The only other visitor was a monk seal sunning himself on a wave-washed rock shelf. Birds, like hives of bees, swarmed around the crater rim.

Brown was more interested in checking on noddy terns than describing his life as a hermit. There is no water on the island, and no trees except for 10 black stumps of coconut palm trunks inside the crater. Brown said he lived there for three months in 1971 and for six months in 1972.

"I was studying the breeding biology of the sooty tern; measuring their eggs, when they lay, what they eat, how fast they grow," he explained. "I was doing my doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawai'i."

He said he lived in a bird blind on the beach, visiting the "mainland" occasionally in an inflatable raft powered by a three-horsepower Sea-gull outboard. "The waves can get up to 20 feet," he said. "I flipped the raft eight times."

Brown brought back food and water in five-gallon plastic containers. By bathing in the ocean, he got by on three five-gallon containers of fresh water a week. He ate a lot of canned beef stew. A mouse took a drink every time he turned the tap on a container.

The cave is on the west side of the island overlooking a tidal flat where ghost crabs came out at sunset.

"I spent hours watching the waves," he said. "There was a colony of night heron across on Waimanalo Beach. The sun sets right between the twin peaks of Olomana."

There aren't any rabbits on Rabbit Island anymore. Brown said he caught the last one. That may be why there is more vegetation now. Naupaka has taken hold above the beach sand. The slopes of the crater are greener, he said.

"I never saw a monk seal or green sea turtles," he said. "Now there are many turtles." There were lots of tern eggs but no chicks. Brown said he didn't know why.

It's a wild, lonely island, no sounds but the wash of surf, the squalling of terns and the ghostly moans of wedgetailed shearwater in their dark burrows.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.