Like I said in my other thread about Hawaiian centipedes, the subject of chickens in Kaua’i deserves its own thread.
The beautiful island of Kaua’i is simply stiff with feral chickens. Everywhere you go - the open highway, golf courses, suburbs, parking lots, even the carefully landscaped grounds of resort hotels - is acluck with chickens. Big roosters, little roosters, skinny young pullet hens, mama hens with adorable chicks, and adolescent poussins are everywhere.
I asked locals about it and also checked with Google, and several different stories are floating around:
- They were always here. Ancient Polynesians brought them in their canoes.
- Some guys from Texas brought over some fighting cocks to breed, and threw the unwanted culls into the jungle.
- Hurricane Iniki knocked over everyone’s chicken coops, and all the chickens ran into the jungle and started breeding indiscriminately.
Two things are for certain: Kaua’i is the only one of the islands which doesn’t have the imported mongoose, so the chickens have virtually no predator to keep them in check. Come to think of it, I did see one or two wild chickens on Oahu a year ago, but they were shy and wily. But Oahu has lots of mongooses (mongeese?), so I see the reason for their scarcity and wariness.
The next certainty is that starting at 3:00 a.m., the whole island lf Kaua’i reverberates with the sound of crowing roosters. The first night wasn’t too warm, so we left our sliding glass door open. We were ten floors up in a hotel, but the roosters were loud enough to promptly wake us up. I can’t imagine staying in a ground-floor cottage or condo, what with the roosters screaming ten feet away in the yard, not to mention wondering about centipedes in the bedclothes.
I also asked the locals if the chickens didn’t provide free food for everyone, and got varying answers to that, as well. Such as:
- The fighting cocks were full of hormones, so no one wants to eat their offspring.
- They’re wild, and you don’t know where they’ve been, so no one eats them.
- They are eaten, but they’re so tough that they’re just used for soup stock.
When we spoke with the friend who had lived there for two years, he said that wild chickens were always pecking away in the breezeway or crawlway under his house outside of Kilauea. He once watched to see what they were finding, and it was young centipedes! Although the roosters drove him crazy, he let them alone because he said he’d rather deal with them than with a centipede infestation.
Does anyone else have any more reliable information about the chicken population on Kaua’i?
