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We know the ritual. The clock winds down to zero. The players head to the locker room, some jubilant, others beaten. The clean-up crew goes to work. And then, after everyone files out of the stadium, the lights are shut down.

Only this time, that may happen on a Friday night on Kauai for the last time, or at least for the foreseeable future.

And it’s all being done for the birds.

Games once heralded as Friday night pau hana community gatherings will now be held Saturday afternoons, and the community outcry highlights that Kauai’s ballfields are merely the latest battleground in a struggle between the rituals of modern life and the desire to protect the environment, the plants and animals that make Hawaii special.

Friday night lights, an American tradition right alongside apple pie and celebrity gossip, is butting up against a tradition of revering nature exemplified by the 160-year-old Hawaii motto that dates back to kingdom days: “The Life of the Land is Perpetuated in Righteousness.”

State Rep. James Tokioka, who represents the Kauai county seat of Lihue and sat on the Kauai County Council before he headed to the Legislature, says it’s frustrating and disappointing for him and others in the community to see Friday night football come to an end, even temporarily.

“Culturally, it’s a place where everyone from every district on this island can go and have a good time, release whatever stresses they have during the week, cheer for their children, family members or their friends and socialize with the rest of the island,” Tokioka said. “That’s what high school football has been about on Kauai.”

Tokioka also points to the health and safety of student-athletes — many of whom are “big boys” — who are forced to play in the daytime heat instead of the cool night air. It’s feared that stadium food booths, a major part of fundraising for team travel, will see far less business during day games. And Kauai’s football champ will be at a “competitive disadvantage” when it travels to Oahu to compete in the state tournament at season’s end, Tokioka complains.

He’s not alone in this sentiment. Dozens after The Garden Island newspaper first reported the schedule change. Tokioka said he’s heard from angry constituents that they might be less inclined to go out of their way to help the birds in light of the forced change to the football schedule.

Mayor Bernard Carvalho — himself a former NFL lineman — said in a that he understood the frustration and felt for island families, though he made clear the legal and moral obligation he has to do what he can for the birds.

The changes to this season’s football schedule were announced by the Kauai Interscholastic Federation last month. Tonight’s preseason matchup between Kapaa High School and Lethbridge Collegiate Institute from Alberta, Canada, at 7:30 p.m. will be the first, last and only Friday night football game on the island this season.

The Kauai Interscholastic Federation football schedule for 2010.

The KIF executive board, comprised of the principals of the island’s only three public high schools, unanimously decided to back down in the face of potentially bankrupting fines if the stadium lights continued to have a negative impact on a trio of protected seabird species, Executive Secretary Diane Nitta told Civil Beat.

While fear of potential penalties largely drove the decision, the threat of enforcement is hardly an empty one. The decision came just months after the island’s electric company was indicted criminally by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly violating the repeatedly over years. The rare indictment came on the heels of a civil lawsuit that charged the company with failing to take steps to protect birds.

Protecting the Birds

The species that the Kauai Interscholastic Federation and the County of Kauai are seeking to protect — the Newell’s Shearwater, Hawaiian Petrel and Band-Rumped Storm-Petrel — are not only native and indigenous to Hawaii but endemic, found nowhere else in the world.

“The situation is particularly acute for the Newell’s Shearwater because the number is so high that are susceptible to fallout and because the population decline is so steep,” said Scott Fretz, wildlife program manager for the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources Division of Forestry and Wildlife. The at-sea population of 80,000 and Kauai-based breeding population of 20,000 in 1995 is projected by experts to have dropped by 75 percent in the years since, he said.

Shearwaters are technically “threatened,” but could be listed as “endangered” soon. Either way, they are protected by both the Federal Endangered Species Act and the . A complicated system of criminal and civil penalties from both the federal and state governments means fines could reach into the tens of thousands of dollars — for each bird.

Risk to birds, and thus the financial exposure for the schools and the county facilities that host the games, is most pronounced during the fledgling season that lasts from Sept. 15 to Dec. 15 each year. Starting Sept. 18, varsity games will kick off at 3:30 p.m.

The change was the latest in a long line of moves that the schools have made in an ongoing effort to limit the impact on birds, Nitta said. In years past, the schedule was manipulated so that Waimea High School on the island’s comparatively bird-less Westside would host games at Hanapepe Stadium on the nights closest to new moon, when the sky is darkest and the lights are most distracting for fledglings.

Lights are generally only dangerous for those young birds, fluffy down still protruding from their adult feathers, who use the light from the moon and the stars to navigate down from the dark, wet Kauai mountains on their inaugural flight to the sea. Instead of reaching the expanse of ocean like countless generations before them, the birds — hardwired by eons of evolution to use light as a guide — are distracted by floodlamps. They circle and circle the lamps in large loops until they fall, exhausted, to earth.

Unlucky birds end up on the wrong end of a car tire or as a snack or playtoy for a cat or dog. Those lucky enough to fall right where the lights are shining — Earthjustice attorney David Henkin said shearwaters once “rained down on the field” at football games before the species’ population plummeted in recent years — have a good chance of being delivered to the Save Our Shearwaters staff, rehabilitated and released.

“It’s pretty awesome to see a bird take off from the shoreline and return to sea, where it’s supposed to be,” said Angie Merritt, Save Our Shearwaters program coordinator for the Kauai Humane Society since 2009. The program encourages citizens who find downed birds to carefully take them to county Fire Department stations. She said the program has picked up and released over 30,000 seabirds in its 30 years of existence.

But even the lucky ones aren’t necessarily in the clear. Merritt and Henkin said that of the thousands of birds that have been tagged with identifying metal bands, very few have ever been seen again. That doesn’t mean they all die, because adults are far less prone to light distraction than youngsters. And the pelagic shearwaters travel great distances — Fretz said they can reach the equatorial countercurrents in the South Pacific before they return to Hawaii to breed each Spring. So thousands of tagged shearwaters may be out there somewhere, though Fretz isn’t confident.

“That’s why this is so important, that’s why this is getting so much attention, because this bird is on trajectory toward extinction,” he said.

But it doesn’t have to be a simple either-or choice between birds and football.

Finding a Path Forward

“There isn’t necessarily an unavoidable conflict between night-time football games on Kauai and compliance with the law,” Henkin said. “There are ways to comply with the Endangered Species Act and continue having night-time football games. But they require some investment and some effort.”

Both the federal and state laws include provisions that allow an entity to apply for an incidental take license that allows otherwise lawful activities to continue to operate even if they hurt endangered species.

Before an incidental take license can be issued, the applicant needs a habitat conservation plan that demonstrates “how they will minimize and avoid take to the maximum extent practicable (and) how they will mitigate for that take in such a way that their actions will result in a net recovery benefit for the species,” Fretz said.

This means that if there’s an unavoidable impact to endangered species from lights at football stadiums or other facilities, the county could spend money to monitor colony health or control non-native predators like cats, rats and barn owls at the birds’ mountain burrows, or take other steps to help.

Rather than start their own plan, the county could be in the fortunate position of being able to buy into an that’s already in the works under the guidance of the state’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife. Fretz said that plan should be done in a year and a half, meaning the county would have no coverage and could be liable for any bird takes for all of this football season and the entire 2011 season as well.

Kauai county spokeswoman Mary Daubert said the county is indeed applying to be part of the state’s islandwide habitat conservation plan. Daubert said the county has been in discussions with the U.S. Department of Justice about endangered birds for the last three years, and that discussions are ongoing.

Henkin said the county should start taking steps now to reduce its impact on birds, and said it’s unlikely that the state or federal government would use their enforcement capabilities against an entity that is doing everything it can. He applauded the decision to move football games to Saturday afternoon, and said turning off lights at other facilities at 8 p.m. during fledgling season is another positive step.

The Hawaii Legislature approved money in recent years for retrofitting lights to limit reflection that could distract birds, but the work was never completed by the County of Kauai, Tokioka, the state lawmaker, said. But if the county didn’t receive assurances from those in charge of federal enforcement, spending millions on retrofits might be for naught.

Asked what steps the county has taken to reduce the takes of birds or protect their habitats, Daubert pointed to the change in the football schedule and the 8 p.m. automatic timers at outdoor parks during fledgling season.

“We are also developing best management practices to fix situations where lights are turned on due to break-ins or vandalism, and all lights at county facilities not needed for security or safety reasons are either being shielded or shut off during the fledgling season,” Daubert wrote in a Thursday evening e-mail.

The Kauai Interscholastic Federation and the county government may have their eye on potential fines, and others may be worried about the timing of a football game, but, at least for now, the birds and their fate are taking precedence.

“Hawaii is blessed with an incredible diversity of species that are found in the islands and nowhere else. While sometimes changes can be difficult, it’s not impossible,” Henkin of Earthjustice said. Humans, on Kauai and elsewhere, need to “face these challenges and not destroy these plants and animals that long preceded the arrival of the first humans … if we want to hand (that) down to our children and our children’s children.”

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DISCUSSION Do you agree with the decision to move high school football games to Saturday afternoons to save protected birds? Join the conversation and learn more about endangered species.