Rooster Racket on the Chicken Isle

Oddly, it’s one of the first things you notice about Kauai. They’re everywhere, it seems: all over the airport souvenirs, on the grassy shoulder to your right when you’re driving your rental car out of the airport, scratching along the path that goes down to the beach ... Chickens. Feral chickens.

Attaching the word “feral” makes them sound scary, but mostly they’re a nuisance. The roosters are causing great aggravation because of the racket they make. From the Wall Street Journal:

Other Hawaiian islands have feral chickens, too, but Kauai’s problem is worse because it is the only island in the chain that lacks mongooses, the natural enemy of wild chickens. Mongooses were imported to the Hawaiian islands in the late 1800s to kill rats in the sugar-cane fields. Local legend has it that a mongoose bit the hand of a Kauai dockworker, who knocked the entire crate of the critters into the bay, and no more were imported. That’s good news for rare bird species if nobody else.

Blame 1992’s Hurricane Iniki for the free range roosters. According to the WSJ article, the plantation workers kept fighting cocks—until the hurricane wiped out their enclosures and set them free. A side note: cockfighting is illegal in Hawaii, though it’s still taking place on Kaua’i; there was a raid in March that landed 100 roosters in police custody.

For visitors to Kaua’i, the biggest problem with the roosters is the crowing, of course. From the LA Times guide to Kaua’i (though lots of other guide sources give the same warning):

Generally, having a few chickens scratching around in the dirt is quaint and downright picturesque. However, the “dark side” of the chicken population explosion is the increase in the number of roosters. In fact, a new industry has cropped up: Rooster Eradicators. Resorts hire these eradicators to remove the roosters from the well-manicured grounds because the large number of these male birds has led to, well, a sort of crowing contest. Generally roosters will crow as the sun comes up. But on Kauai, with the population increase, the roosters crow all day long and throughout the night in some places. Just be warned that part of the “charm” of Kauai is the rooster population, and you might want to consider bringing earplugs.

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