Stilts may lose Kona habitat
By Timothy Hurley
Advertiser Staff Writer
Cyanotech Corp.'s award-winning habitat for endangered Hawaiian stilts will likely be shut down in a compromise over public safety.
Advertiser library photo • July 2, 2002
On the recommendation of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Kona company has drained its 1.7-acre artificial lake and is installing a net over the dry bed to discourage an estimated 250 stilts from returning in March to breed as they have since the habitat was created in 1997.
About 250 stilts had been expected to return to the Kona habitat in March.
The lake was carved out of the lava landscape at the urging of the wildlife service as a way of keeping the federally protected stilts — known in Hawaiian as ae'o — from drowning in Cyanotech's algae production facility, within the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawai'i at Keahole.
But the state Department of Transportation stepped forward to object, saying the congregation of the black-and-white wetland birds represented a hazard to air traffic at Kona International Airport a half-mile away.
The agencies butted heads on the subject for years, with a compromise finally acknowledged in the company's revised habitat conservation plan and incidental take permit approved by the wildlife service before last year's breeding season. According to the three-year plan, if the number of stilts that fledged (maturing from egg to flier) in the first breeding season exceeded the number of stilts expected to die there over the length of the plan, then the habitat would be discontinued.
That's what happened when five drowned from March to August, while 48 chicks fledged.
A public hearing will be held at 6 p.m. tomorrow in the Kealakehe Intermediate School cafeteria to discuss the plan and incidental take permit. State legislation was approved only last year that allows the state to sanction the plan and permit under its endangered-species laws.
Along with covering the lake with a net, the company will focus on a strategy of scaring the birds off through the use of flashy mylar tape and through more human activity around the production ponds, said Scott Waddington, Cyanotech's field biologist supervisor. Hopefully, the birds will take up residence in other wetland areas in Kona or perhaps on different islands, he said.
Waddington said company officials aren't exactly looking forward to turning the stilts away. Cyanotech is proud of its work with the water birds, which earned it the Hawai'i Audubon Society's Corporate Conservation Award in 2001. "We're caught in the middle," he said of the debate between the two government agencies.
The stilts started showing up in 1997 after Cyanotech, which manufactures natural health food products, expanded from 10 acres to 90 acres, laying out about 60 acres of aquaculture ponds for increased microalgae production. The company turned to the Fish & Wildlife Service, which suggested working with the conservation organization Ducks Unlimited Inc. to write a conservation plan. As a result, the company created the habitat and assigned scientists to manage water levels and add waste algae to enhance breeding conditions.
According to the wildlife service, the Kona Coast stilt population swelled from about 105 in 1998 to more than 220 in 2001, thanks largely to Cyanotech's efforts. Now, the Kona Coast population represents more than 10 percent of the Hawaiian stilts found statewide.
But the success only exacerbated complaints from the state Airports Division, mindful that wildlife collisions with aircraft cost more than $300 million annually in the United States.
A 2002 wildlife hazard study strongly recommended that the stilt habitat be eliminated.
"It doesn't belong there," said Mike Pitzler, state director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services, the agency that conducted the study for the DOT.
But the story may not be over for the Cyanotech habitat. The state's Endangered Species Recovery Committee is recommending that the lake bed be maintained just in case it's needed. The panel, which advises the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, believes the lake may actually reduce the air-strike hazard at the airport by drawing birds away from the airport.
That may be true in the short run, Waddington said, but to break the cycle of breeding within close range of the airport, the habitat must be eliminated.
