Wahiawa is considered free of noisy coqui frogs after an intensive three-year eradication campaign coordinated by the Oahu Invasive Species Committee.

As a key to success, committee manager Rachel Neville credited the fact that the project got sufficient funding to attack the coqui population before it grew too large, according to a news release yesterday.

“;We feel comfortable that we have eradicated them,”; said Chelsea Arnott, a supervisor of the committee affiliated with the University of Hawaii Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit.

Army personnel cleared brush and state Department of Agriculture and Division of Forestry and Wildlife crews joined in the systematic effort of spraying citric acid solution in the forest habitat on federal, state and private land.

Area residents, who reported coqui sightings and tolerated the noise of nighttime spraying operations, were also parties to the effort, said Becky Azama, a section chief of the Agriculture Department plant pest control branch.

Arnott said no one in Wahiawa has reported hearing the high-decibel mating call of male coqui since November 2006. Residents of the area adjacent to the Schofield Barracks East Range first reported the noise in 2001. At the height of the Wahiawa infestation in 2004, more than 130 male frogs inhabited the 10-acre area, according to the report.

The eradication announcement was made now, two years after silence descended in Wahiawa Heights but after coqui were heard recently in Kailua, to let Oahu residents know “;We have done it before and we can do it again,”; Arnott said.

The Wahiawa infestation was considered the only “;naturalized”; coqui population - established in a habitat for several generations - on Oahu.

Coqui, native to Puerto Rico, apparently traveled to the islands with potted plant material and are constantly being reintroduced to Oahu from the Big Island. Individual frogs have been removed from Waimanalo, Kaneohe, Hawaii Kai, Manoa, Mililani, Pacific Palisades and Ewa Beach.