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Islands of the Feral Pigs
In Hawai‘i, people, pigs, and ecosystems only have so much room to coexist, and the pigs exist a little too much.
An honorary member of The Nature Conservancy’s field team, Nicolai Barca’s dog Tako gets ready for the helicopter flight to the Drinking Glass Unit, a fenced exclosure in the highlands of Kaua‘i, where feral pigs have been removed to allow native plants to thrive. Along Kaua‘i’s northern coast, the Kīlauea Point National Wildlife Refuge recently completed an even more elaborate fence that can also keep out cats and rats to protect seabird nesting sites, including threatened Newell’s shearwaters and endangered Hawaiian petrels. “I even have a friend who thinks they’re gonna fence from the mountains down to the ocean.” The truth, Barca says, is that across Hawai‘i, three-quarters of forests will remain wide open to pigs under statewide watershed protection targets.
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