The
National Park Service has built a five-mile-long fence around Mauna Loa
on the Big Island in Hawaii. The purpose of the fence is to keep cats
out, making it the longest cat-proof fence in the country. Isn't that
nice, they're trying to save the poor kitties from death by volcano.
Except, while it might keep cats away from flowing lava, that's
not the purpose of the fence.
It's to protect nesting birds from the cats.
Mauna
Loa’s lava-covered slopes make for some seriously forbidding landscape,
but that hasn’t deterred cats, which have adapted to the Hawaiian
islands just fine since arriving on explorers’ ships. So fine, in fact,
that the little invasive predators are now a mortal threat to the
endangered Hawaiian petrel, a seabird that breeds on Mauna Loa. Several
thousand of the birds live in Hawaii, but only about 75 breeding pairs
are on the Big Island.
The fence, which took three
years to erect, is six feet tall and has a special curved design at the
top that is supposed to be cat-proof. I find it hard to believe that
cats couldn't scale it if they had to, but I can well believe that it
might be more difficult than a cat would consider worth the effort.
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