Five-mile cat fence in Hawaii intended to protect petrels

Should you be lucky enough to find yourself on Hawaii’s Big Island, you are welcome to visit Mauna Loa, the largest volcano in the world.

Cats, however, are not — a point now being enforced by a new 5-mile-long fence constructed for the sole purpose of keeping felines away.

Mauna Loa’s lava-covered slopes make for some seriously forbidding landscape, but cats have adapted just fine since arriving on explorers’ ships. So fine, in fact, that the invasive little 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 pairs are on the Big Island.

To protect the petrels, the National Park Service and other organizations spent three years flying in people and materials to build the cat-proof barrier, a 6-foot-tall fence topped with a curved section that even the wiliest kitty should not be able to scale. It’s the longest anti-cat fence in the United States, and it encloses 600 acres of 8,000- to 10,000-foot-high terrain that petrels, also called ‘u’au, view as choice breeding territory.

Hawaiian petrels are seafaring birds that arrive at Mauna Loa, part of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, to build nests in deep lava crevices in April. In June, females lay just one egg. The egg hatches in August, and the chick does not fly until November.

That leaves seven months for feral cats to scale the slopes and feast on adult or baby petrels, which they have been caught on video doing.

The barrier is the latest example of a “conservation fence,” meant to protect wildlife from attackers. The leaders in this method are Australia and New Zealand, where cats and other invasive predators helped wipe out so many species that the governments have declared all-out war on them. One such fence in Australia, for example, is 26 miles long.