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Chickens were not high on the agenda when we went to Kaua’i. We hoped to see some of the endangered native forest birds, and the seabirds that nest on the North Shore. But chickens were inescapable. They greeted us at the airport in Lihue. They wandered around the hotel where we spent the first night. There were chickens on the beaches, chickens along the highway. (But relatively few road-killed chickens—far fewer than the dead armadillos you’d see in a comparable-sized chunk of Texas.)
Kaua’i has two classes of chicken. Most of the urban birds are descendants of fowl who were liberated by Hurricane Iniki in 1992. They’re variable in size, shape, and pattern. Some have the lean, mean look of gamecocks. Cockfighting, although illegal, is a popular pastime in the islands. During our stay a state legislator proposed recognizing it as a cultural institution; the bill didn’t get very far.
The island is so far, knock wood, mongoose-free. Apart from feral cats and possibly the native short-eared owl, feral chickens have no predators to keep their numbers in check. I don’t know if anyone has attempted a chicken census, but there are clearly a hell of a lot of them.
Then there are the elite—the ali’i of chickens. They’re supposed to be direct descendants of the red junglefowl, native to South and East Asia, that were transported through the South Pacific by the Polynesians and their precursors, the Lapita people. Chickens, along with dogs, pigs, taro, sugar cane, and paper mulberry, were part of these great navigators’ basic traveling package. They probably reached Hawai’i with voyagers from the Marquesas about 1800 years ago. The word for chicken in most Polynesian languages is moa, a name they applied to the giant, flightless, and presumably tasty birds they encountered in New Zealand. PreColumbian chicken remains of South Pacific origin have even been found in South America.
To see these ur-chickens, you have to drive the Waimea Canyon Road up to Kokee State Park. The junglefowl hang out around the restaurant—sometimes in the restaurant—and natural history museum at Kokee. You can buy bags of chickenfeed (“Feed the Wild Moa,” says the sign.) When we stopped there, a rooster tried to get into our rental PT Cruiser. He seemed to be low in the pecking order and may have been seeking asylum.
We stayed at a YWCA facility called Camp Sloggett, down a rutted dirt road from park headquarters—highly recommended, by the way. Sloggett has its own colony of chickens: we counted four roosters and three hens. They weren’t furtive, but you couldn’t get too close to them. The roosters all looked pretty much like the red junglefowl in our South Pacific field guide, with golden-red hackles, black bellies and tails, and white rumps. The hens were small, brown, and speckled.
Anyone interested in conducting a field study of the social behavior of the free-range chicken—and yes, I remember that Gary Larson cartoon—could do worse than spend time on Kaua’i. We watched which roosters deferred to which others, which hens spent time with which roosters. Wild junglefowl, according to one source, are sometimes monogamous, although we didn’t see any indication of that at Sloggett.
Kaua’i roosters, both the high-country elite and the urban masses, don’t just crow at dawn. They get started sometime in the predawn darkness and keep at it off and on all day. The same source that talks about junglefowl monogamy describes the call as “very reminiscent of the cock-a-doodle-do of [the] farmyard or village chicken, though usually more shrill and with strangulated finale.” Ron thought she was hearing that, and I will defer to her generally superior ear.
I’d like to point out that at no time did either of us personally strangulate a rooster, despite the temptation.
The locals seem to have made their peace with the noisy birds, though. They’ve become a kind of mascot. We saw T-shirts proclaiming the chicken the real state bird of Hawai’i (officially it’s the Hawaiian goose, or nene). The gift shop at the Kaua’i Museum in Lihue offers counter-rooster earplugs; we were told they’re selling briskly.