The common dwarf mongoose.
As you drive the Road to Hana, there is an excellent chance you will see a small, brown, ferret-like creature come running out of a thicket of sugar cane. It’s a mongoose, a little creature first brought to Maui by British settlers looking for a way to control the island’s rat population. Unfortunately, these settlers didn’t take one thing into account – rats are nocturnal, and mongooses aren’t – so the experiment was a failure. Along the way, these transplants to Maui have managed to severely decimate the native nene goose population by stealing eggs from their ground-level nests. Today, Hawaiians are looking to exterminate the same mongooses who traveled so far to get to Maui in the first place.
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