TBT: The Tragic Tale of the Chick and the Mongoose

I'm going to be completely honest here.  While living in Hawaii was an incredible experience, it was also one of the hardest times of my life.  There were some parts of our life there that were amazing and some that were difficult.  Because of the struggles I was having I didn't really write down much about our time there.  I'd like to add in some Hawaii stories to my Throwback Thursday posts so that I have a record of those.  I won't get into anything too deep, but rather just tell some fun or entertaining (or, in today's case, rather sad) anecdotes.  Today, I bring you the Tragic Tale of the Chick and the Mongoose.

I was at work the day that the groundskeeper came up to Blake with a baby chick he'd found abandoned, knowing of our love for cute little animals.  There are tons of wild chickens on Oahu, and lots of them hang out at the park outside the gates for Hanauma Bay.  We kept him in a big cardboard box throughout the day, but tried to let him out as much as possible because he was very upset about being in the box.

Another animal that lives at Hanauma Bay in large numbers is the mongoose.  Tourists love the mongoose.  They would always ask 'What are those squirrel things?' or 'Was that a ferret?' and we would tell them the story about how mongoose came to be in the Hawaiian islands.  Clear back in the 1800s, this island was covered with sugar cane fields.  The fields were often infested with rats.  Someone decided it would be a good idea to import mongoose to eat the rats, but they obviously didn't think it through too well.  Mongoose are diurnal and rats and nocturnal, meaning they were never awake at the same time.  Many years later, we have a huge population of mongoose that eat the eggs and young of many native bird species.  Oops.  Mongoose are sneaky, smart, and clever.  One of the rangers told me a funny story once.  A tourist had just bought an (overpriced) hot dog from the concession stand.  He was sitting on the rock wall and put his hot dog down next to him.  He was talking to someone else and was completely distracted when a mongoose climbed up the back of the rock wall and slid the hot dog right out of the bun and bolting.  The man then lifted up his hot dog to eat it and saw that his hot dog was gone! 

So, here I am with a baby chick that I am guarding very closely because I know the mongoose dart out of the bushes near our workstation all the time.  The little innocent baby wanders closer to the bushes, and so I reach down to pick him up.  Just before my hand reaches him, I see a flash of brown fur and the chick is gone.  I hear the terrifying screeches of a few mongoose fighting over a meal.  I spend a few seconds in shock and then begin to cry.  I feel guilty for not protecting the chick well enough and so sad that he had to die that way.  I cry longer than your average person would cry about nature taking its course in the animal kingdom.  What can I say, I am just a big softie when it comes to animals, especially baby chicks. 

It wasn't too long after that revenge was taken on accident.  While driving one of the jeeps out of Hanauma Bay, Blake saw a mongoose running across the road.  This really isn't that rare, and they always scurry out of the way.  For whatever reason, this one made a dumb decision and ran the wrong way, right under one of Blake's tires.  He saw it in his rear-view mirror and pulled over to see if the mongoose was okay.  Spoiler: it wasn't.  He took a nasty picture of the dying mongoose with a pool of blood around his head which I will not put up on this blog for all of your sakes.  We always joked about killing the mongoose because they were a pest around the park, but Blake felt bad for actually running one over.  We considered it karma for the life of that little chick and the balance of the universe was restored once again.