With the busy Winter season just around the corner, Lahaina is about to be flooded with tourists enjoying the beautiful parks and sandy beaches. However, the cleaning crews at the dozens of area parks will look a little different this year. Visitors will notice dozens of squirrels around these popular locations carrying cigarette butts and refuse, but the Parks Dept. doesn’t want you to worry. The squirrels aren’t another invasion of non-native species, and they’re not in any danger. They’re working.
Three dozen trained squirrels in all will be employed to keep Lahaina’s most beautiful areas trash-free, according to Mayor Albert Cravalho. “Our intention is to not just keep our parks clean, but to show that nature is one of the best teachers. If these small animals can be taught to clean up, we can certainly teach our children to be responsible stewards of the land, and maybe learn ourselves. Plus, the squirrels literally work for peanuts. So far, they’re just as good at cleaning up as their human counterparts, and it’s been a hit with the tourists.”
The brainchild of former DLNR officer Brandon Kama, the squirrels come from his animal sanctuary and rehab non-profit “Creature Comfort.” With the help of the public, and donated veil travel from Veilcorp, Kama says he has been able to save over a thousand animals in the past three years. While Creature Comfort focuses on returning animals to the wild whenever possible, often the animals Brandon takes in are too hurt, or lack the ability to fend for themselves. Most of these animals are used for therapy purposes, but Kama says he noticed something about the squirrels living at the facility. “Whenever we took the squirrels out, they’d grab anything they could off the ground, and that gave me an idea.”
“Not many people know this, but squirrels are amazingly easy to train. You can even teach them to use a litter box if you keep them inside. People have trained animals to do all sorts of things over the years. They’ve taught monkeys to search for landmines, and Chinese fishermen have used cormorants instead of nets for centuries. I didn’t see why you couldn’t teach a squirrel to pick up a cigarette butt. I started off with the ones most food driven, and let their natural instincts be part of the training.”
Working in teams of twelve, Kama’s bushy-tailed cleaning crews have been trained with the help of an automated food bin. The squirrels receive a food pellet or treat each time they deposit a small piece of trash, or discarded cigarette end. Kama says it takes one of the squirrel teams about an hour to clean up a five acre area. “Sometimes you run into something that’s too big for the squirrels, and you have to toss it in the bin yourself, but for the most part you don’t have to do anything but wait. You don’t even need to pack up the squirrels if your next location is nearby. They’re so focused on the bin that they will follow it wherever it’s wheeled.”
However, many have complained in the past few months that Kama’s squirrels don’t always stay where they are supposed to, and that some have developed a taste for the nicotine in the discarded cigarettes they collect. In an open letter to the Lahaina Advertiser, one frequent park visitor said in part,
“…..I tend to avoid the parks in the morning now since I find the squirrels to be overly aggressive until they’ve found a few butts to chew on. I’ve seen them steal unattended packs off of picnic tables, and follow around smokers, chittering angrily until they can get a square of their own….I’m just thankful that they weren’t trained to seek out old beer cans, and liquor bottles, or by the end of the day, the park would be filled with belligerent drunk squirrels falling out of trees.”
There have been a handful of cases involving squirrels that have wandered out of the parks as well. In addition to worries about escaped squirrels starting a breeding population on Maui, the rodents can cause serious damage to buildings, and the island’s electrical infrastructure. Hula Noodle owner “Uncle” Ralph Umeke has had his own run-in with Kama’s cleaning crew, and thinks the program should be cancelled.
“I get that tourists get a kick out of seeing a tree rat pick up garbage, but Hawaii has had enough trouble with invasive species. This Kama guy does a terrible job at keeping these things under control, and it’s already cost me plenty. For weeks we could hear the damn little things crawling on the roof during lunch. I called to complain, and they came out , apologized and promised to not let it happen anymore, but a few days later we heard them running around again. About that time, I’d occasionally catch a whiff of cigarettes in the restaurant, usually in the morning. I assumed it was one of the kids I hired to bus tables sneaking a smoke. They denied it, but it was the only thing that made sense to me. Then one day a big storm came through, and I found out where the smell was coming from. I noticed part of the ceiling began to drip brownish water, and before I could get a bucket out in the dining room, a section of the ceiling caved in. Over a hundred pounds of wet cigarette butts poured out. The squirrels had chewed a hole in the building, and had been storing cigarettes in the roof space. Cigarette butts haven’t been, and never will be, one of the many delicious condiments you can get for your noodles here. This squirrel thing is the pits, and needs to be shut down.”
