Grove Koger

By which I mean, technically, red junglefowl. More specifically, moa, or Gallus gallus. Or maybe not … or at least not quite.

On our visit to the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i, Maggie and I admired everything from the island’s palms and other tropical and subtropical trees (including, in some spots, cacao trees) to the tasty coffee grown and marketed by Kauai Coffee. There were animals ranging from plump land snails to wild boars (three of which we saw briefly at the edge of our back yard before they saw us). Gentle geckos lived behind the refrigerator in our kitchen, and anoles darted about in the undergrowth. We even swam with sea turtles off Poipu Beach.

But we never quite got used to the island’s junglefowl, which we encountered just about everywhere. I grew up on a small farm where chickens were a common sight, and I feared the rooster that seemed to have taken a particular dislike of me. But the junglefowl on Kaua’i were not only common—make that very common—but noisy. Very noisy. Although the hens minded their own business, scratching and pecking in the dirt, the roosters lording it over them crowed constantly, from dawn to dusk. Constantly.

Plus, we never quite knew what to call them. According to our copy of the Hawaii Audubon Society’s handy guide Hawaii’s Birds, they were brought to the islands by Polynesian colonists. Truly wild populations apparently live only on Kaua’i in Koke’e State Park and Alaka’i Swamp. Feral fowl can be found on Kaua’i as well as O’ahu, Moloka’i, Maui, and Hawai’i. The site Birds of Hawaii notes that the bird “is considered as the main ancestor of the domestic chicken,” and adds that “the birds observed are descendants interbred with domestic chickens to varying degrees.”  

So what we encountered so often on Kaua’i were, essentially, chickens, whose hens and roosters differed little (to my unsophisticated eye) in appearance from the ones I knew as a child. In any case, we ended up calling them chickens, which consisted of fewer syllables. But that crowing …

♫ ♫ ♫

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