<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\tI notice a bright-white bone shard the size of a butter knife half buried in the sand. It looks like it may be a femur, but from what animal or how old? I have no idea. The only animals I\u2019ve seen are a lone cockroach and a few seabirds flying overhead. Some of Mo\u2018omomi\u2019s most notable species are now only memories. A giant flightless duck and a long-legged owl lived here hundreds to thousands of years ago. Now, they\u2019re extinct.<\/p>\n
Near the bone, shells poke out from the sandstone cliffs\u2014thousands upon thousands of white spirals glinting in the sun. My first thought is that these are marine snail shells from a time when ocean levels were higher. I barely stop to take a photo. I assumed the snail-sleuthing portion of my trip was over. Earlier in the week, I scoured the mountaintop bog forests of Moloka\u2018i in search of Hawai\u2018i\u2019s renowned endemic land snails. Sand dunes are not where I expected to find more examples of moisture-loving land snails.<\/p>\n
I was wrong. Later, after speaking to experts, I will find out that the shells in the dunes are indeed from land snails, but different than those I found in the mountains. The remains at Mo\u2018omomi are considerably older. And the species are extinct. Archaeological evidence and oral history show that Hawaiians fished and gathered along this coastline since at least the 12th century; the bleached snail shells tell an even older story. Preliminary dating by scientists suggests the shells are between 3,000 and 42,000 years old. The snails lived during a much wetter climatic period that predated humans in Hawai\u2018i. They weren\u2019t adapted to dry sand dunes at all.<\/p>\n
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\u201cWe can trace the pace of climate change through these shells,\u201d says Brenden Holland, an evolutionary ecologist at Hawai\u2018i Pacific University. \u201cThere\u2019s been massive drying over the past 10,000 years. Areas like Mo\u2018omomi were probably forested down to the coast.\u201d The snails were likely jungle dwellers that may have died as the trees gave way to sand, he adds.<\/p>\n
By dating additional shells from the Hawaiian Islands, Holland and his team hope to piece together how the landscape evolved as the climate changed before the arrival of humans.<\/p>\n
In much more recent times, another more acute agent of change came disguised as a gift. In 1867, officials visiting from Hong Kong presented the king of Hawai\u2018i, Kamehameha V, eight Indian axis deer, or chital, which were set free on Moloka\u2018i. With no natural predators, the deer flourished and caused considerable damage to native plants.<\/p>\n
Today, the Nature Conservancy maintains high fences around sections of the Mo\u2018omomi Preserve to keep deer, as well as cattle, out and allow vegetation to recover. Outside the fenced area, deer droppings and footprints show the deer will roam and munch wherever they can. Without the fences, Mo\u2018omomi\u2019s native vegetation would be hard-pressed to recover.<\/p>\n
<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\tThe Nature Conservancy\u2019s efforts to keep out deer and cattle and remove invasive vegetation like kiawe over the years have borne unexpected surprises. In 1999, caretakers found a single nest belonging to a wedge-tailed shearwater (\u2018ua\u2018u kani<\/em>), a seabird that digs burrows in dunes to lay eggs and raise its chicks. Once common in the region, its nests had disappeared from Moloka\u2018i centuries ago.<\/p>\n Finding the nest spurred conservationists with the organization to begin dedicated trapping efforts for feral cats, mongooses, and rats\u2014introduced predators that eat their way through populations of ground-nesting seabirds with ease. Almost 2,000 shearwater burrows now dot the Mo\u2018omomi landscape, making it one of the largest colonies in the whole state.<\/p>\n While the shearwaters are not globally threatened, the Nature Conservancy hopes that other rarer ground-nesting shorebirds extirpated from Moloka\u2018i, like the Laysan albatross (m\u014dl\u012b<\/em>), might also eventually nest at Mo\u2018omomi.<\/p>\n<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>