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Ocean Watch

This year, my family and I celebrated the Fourth of July in Kailua with a picnic on a rocky perch to watch the fireworks.

When my sister showed up with the family dog, Lucy, none of us thought much of it, but strangers stared as if we had lost our minds. Dogs and fireworks are not usually a good mix.

This dog, however, does not mind fireworks. She slept peacefully through the arrival of the new millennium and totally ignored last year's Independence Day blasts. If there was any dog that could behave at a Fourth of July picnic, we figured it was Lucy.

But like kids, animals can surprise you in the most unforeseen ways.

The fireworks started going off, the crowd oohed and aahed and Lucy contentedly sniffed the ground. Then suddenly, the dog went nuts. She yelped and jumped and lunged against her leash. Lucy whined so loudly and pulled with such fervor, it became embarrassing.

We looked around to see what had the dog going, and spotted a dark shape swoop near the rocks where we sat.

"Is that a bat?" a friend said.

It wasn't. When the soaring creature came around again, I recognized its colors and flight pattern. Our little mutt was going bonkers over a wedge-tailed shearwater.

The shearwater was at Kailua Beach that night because offshore lies tiny Flat Island, or Popo'ia, a bird sanctuary containing about 1,000 shearwater nests and about 60 Bulwer's petrel nests.These aren't typical nests made of sticks; they're actually holes in the ground.

Shearwaters, also referred to as wedgies, have webbed feet with sharp claws and dig burrows much like dogs would. On Midway, I have been surprised several times to suddenly see dirt flying like mad from a well-tended lawn. A closer look revealed an industrious wedgie excavating a new home.

Flat Island has been a state bird sanctuary since 1951, but it wasn't until the early '90s that the no-trespassing laws there began to be enforced.

Today, you can land on the sand beach, but it's illegal to walk around on the island. As a result, the place now teems with native birds, including migratory shorebirds in the winter.

Right now, shearwater parents are sitting on eggs inside their burrows. The eggs will start hatching soon, and then comes the hard work of feeding the chicks. Both parents leave before dawn, spend the day at sea hunting for fish and squid, and then return at dusk to feed their one offspring.

Seabird parenting can be tedious work. In a remote wildlife refuge, I once saw a wedgie parent land near its burrow only to find a monk seal lying over the hole. The peeved parent stumbled around and around the seal, which remained sound asleep. Soon the other parent arrived and did the same.

Eventually, both birds settled close to the trespasser's belly and waited.

Finally, hours later, the big mammal grunted, rolled over, and the waiting birds scurried onto their hole.

Here in the main islands, wedgies have far more trouble than seals snoozing on their doorsteps. Thoughtless people walk on and collapse burrows, and city lights cause fledglings to fly into buildings and utility wires.

Dogs, however, are probably these ground-nesters biggest threat. A few years ago at Kaena Point, one pet dog killed dozens of shearwater chicks by digging them out of their burrows.

We can help Hawaii's wedgies by not walking on their nests and keeping our dogs leashed when near a colony.

As I learned on the Fourth of July, even the most oblivious dogs can find these birds irresistible.