Chockers with chookies

If you are one of those grouches who can’t abide the rooster’s jubilant dawn hurrah, Kauaii is your hell. This glorious Hawaiian island is literally run by chooks and the dawn chorus rings out way before dawn and, well, it goes on all day really.

It is one of the most exquisite phenomena I’ve encountered.

Well, I’m a chook lover - and this is chook island.

They are here in vast numbers just doing their own thing.

The chickens of Kauai are spread with neat territorial imperative all over the island.

And they are very beautiful chooks.

They’re known as Red Jungle Fowl and they are a very ancient breed of chookie.

They’re smaller than a Sussex or a Rhode Island Red but bigger than bantams. The girls can be a bit plain but the boys are showy with particularly perky tail feathers. The roosters have good red combs but the girls seem to have stunted combs and they all look like point-of-lay pullets.

They live in the carparks, on the road verges, in the hills, in hotel grounds, domestic gardens, even on the beach. Look down and a chook is quietly pecking its way past the sun lounge.

They are the welcoming committee under the plumeria trees at the post office.

Kauai has lots of golf courses, too, with grass so fine that it feels like carpet. Feral chooks are all over the golf courses….strutting proud roosters with little hens and packs of chicks. Golf links are prime chook real estate and the golfers just have to put up with it and try not to hit them. I suppose it happens sometimes and the golfers claim a real “birdie”.

They are not in any way domesticated. They are not owned. They coexist with people. They are pleased with scraps received but they are not hanging around for them.

They are not like seagulls, even if they are all around the beach.

Actually, there are no seagulls on Kauaii.

There are remarkably few birds.

One has to remember that this island just popped up as an isolated volcanic land mass far, far from other islands with ecosystems.

Most of the life forms made it here as the result of storms. The were literal blow-ins, whether they liked it or not. Little spiders flew in among the clouds and dropped down on their parachute silks. Plant seeds blew in. The Nene geese probably arrived by navigational error or weather trauma error in a migratory event.

Not the little zebra doves however, These hapless Asian immigrants arrived as caged birds and were cruelly liberated by their owners to fend for themselves. Fend they did. Tiny, sweet little creatures with absurdly short legs, they have become dominant birdlife.

The chooks were brought by humans and bred for the usual purposes - eggs, meat, feathers, fertiliser… But one day, along came the ferocious Hurricane Iwa and it blew away not only all the hen enclosures but all the hens.

Free hens.

There was no getting them back. They have been free range ever since.

They keep the gardens tidy. They are terrific pest control. They aerate the soil.

They’re happy scratchers, thriving on forage.

Don’t try to get too close. They will artfully dodge away.

No one seems to kill them. They seem to love them.

They have become an emblem of the island.