By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Today we will tell a story about a rubbish dump at Waipahu called Pouhala Marsh. That is, it was a rubbish dump. Now it's getting a reputation for weaning kids off drugs, saving rare birds and helping high-school students learn about natural science.

You've probably never heard of Pouhala Marsh. Even a lot of people in Waipahu haven't. A century ago, it was old Hawaiian fishponds along the O'ahu Railway. Gradually, the fishponds filled with weeds. People began dumping rubbish there.

The place attracted nothing but trouble. Derelicts slept in shacks made of scraps.

The mangrove thickets provided shelter for drug dealers. Ten percent of Hawai'i's native stilts still nested around the marsh, but rats ate their eggs so fast that the rarely seen bird couldn't increase its numbers.

Nobody can remember who first did what to help transform the rubbish dump. There's Dave Smith, wildlife manager for the state Division of Forestry and Wildlife. His interest was in saving the stilts and other shore birds by bringing back an unpolluted marsh.

Smith wrote grant applications and talked to local companies. Before long, bulldozers were loading bedsprings, toilets, rusty typewriters, tires, horse trailers, car chassis — the debris of decades — onto trucks to be hauled away.

The Weed & Seed federal drug-prevention program got interested. Before long, bulldozers rolled back the wall of mangrove and destroyed the hide-outs of drug dealers and the rats that ate the bird eggs.

Then Waipahu High School students discovered Pouhala Marsh. At a recent Waipahu Community Association recognition program, two students were honored with science awards for projects on water quality at the marsh.

Darrlyn Bunda, executive director of the association, said, "Pouhala Marsh is a wonderful natural resource that few people know about." She said the marsh is included in the long-range town plan for the revitalization of Waipahu.

Hawai'i Nature Center guides take classes to the marsh to study the birds. "I think it's kind of exciting that a place like this exists," said Mary Roney, environmental educator. "It was just an eyesore."

For me, it was exciting to discover the secrets of the marsh. For example, you never see a seagull in Hawai'i, right? Wrong. Seagulls arrive at places like Pouhala Marsh every year but they can't survive. One reason is that Hawai'i doesn't have the kind of shallow-water shellfish they live on in California.

Did you know that about 250 Mainland ducks migrate every year to Hawai'i as regularly as kolea from Alaska? Pouhala Marsh is the place to see the Hawaiian stilt — a classy, black-and-white, long-legged bird that's an endangered species found nowhere else in the world.

The marsh is on Waipahu Depot Road on the makai side of Farrington Highway.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-0873.