Kauai, the Hawaiian Island home to thousands of feral chicken

3 min read

3 years ago Ivan

The island of Kauai, in the Hawaiian archipelago, is home to thousands of feral chicken that have developed a real relationship with the island’s human inhabitants.
From the pristine beaches of Lumbahai, to airports, gas stations, even urban parking lots, they are everywhere on the Island.
They roam freely, and have adapted to lead a a variety of lifestyles in their Hawaiian paradise, from eating garbage and cat food, to depending on tourists for food, or foraging on native arthropods.
It’s because of this lifestyle variety that the chickens relationship with humans is a quite complex: On one hand, everyone agrees that they have brought down the populations of pesky Hawaiian centipedes, however, they also crow 24 hours a day and they tear up foliage and grass, even destroying whole gardens.

But how and when did the Garden Island become a paradise for feral chicken?
Well, the answer to that question is just as complicated as the creatures’ relationship with the human population.
Ask the locals, and they will tell you about hurricanes Iwa (1982) and Iniki (1992), which destroyed hundreds of chicken coops, letting the animals loose in the wild to breed. Data shows that the number of feral chickens definitely increased after these hurricanes, but they are only part of the answer.
The truth is that Kauai has been home to wild chickens (moa) for over a thousand years.
They were brought to the island by Polynesian navigators, have been living alongside the native fauna ever since. So when the domestic chickens that escaped their coops wound up in the wild, they didn’t only breed among themselves, they bred with the wild chickens as well.
Either way, like all the birds of Hawaii, the moa is protected as an important part of nature, and since not a lot of people can tell the difference between the native moa and the domestic chicken and their hybrids, people usually avoid harming the chickens. That’s one of the reasons why the birds feel at home everywhere on Kauai Island, they don’t have any natural predators, and people respect them.

With so many chickens running around, you would think people would go out of their way to catch (at least secretly) and cook them, but that’s not the case, as the meat of the feral chickens of Kauai is notoriously hard, so much so that it inspired a funny local saying:
“If you like eat da chicken get two pots of water to a boil. In one pot put da pohaku (lava rock) and in the other put da moa (wild chicken). Once the lava rock is done da moa is ready to eat.”
The feral chickens have become an integral part of the Kauai experience. Sure, having infrastructure covered in chicken poop all the time, accidentally hitting a rooster while driving, and being woken up every day before dawn, isn’t very pleasant, but having a growing population of wild chicken has its advantages: tourists, for istance, are crazy about them, and this has inspired a business around the birds.
As a result souvenir shops are full of items like magnets, t-shirts or coffee mugs featuring the chickens, and other businesses benefit from indirectly, because some people choose this Hawaiian island mainly for the chickens. So while there are plenty of reasons to hate these so called rodents with wings, the people of Kauai have learned to live alongside them in an almost pacific way.
Feral chicken live also on the other islands of Hawaii, but humans aren’t that fond of them, and mongooses, which feed on their eggs, keep them from breeding at the same pace as those on Kauai….