Rooster Peace

by Kim Steutermann Rogers

I’ve made peace with the chickens. Not that there’s peace, mind you. They still crow at 3:00 a.m., because my neighbor on the hill constantly forgets to turn off their outdoor lights which beam spotlights into our bedroom window. I crow about that to my husband. How is it those beacons in the night, I ask, don’t shine in their bedroom window, too? But this isn’t about my neighbors; it’s about the chickens.

Chickens roam free on Kauai. The moa, as named in Hawaiian, arrived with the first Polynesians and, so, are some of our island’s first residents and protected, at that. I’m told the fine for harming one on state land is $500. Centuries later, when the Filipinos arrived, they brought their cultural practice of cockfighting (although illegal here) across the sea to Hawaii—a decided insurance policy to the island’s chicken population. (Those pup-tent-looking structures you see lined up in various communities around the island house roosters bred for fighting.)

On Rice Street in downtown Lihue—not to mention every other road around the island, paved or not, one lane or two—it’s not unusual to see traffic stopped waiting for a hen and her line of chicks to cross the road. Not all make it, of course, especially on the highway. We have very little animal life on Kauai—no squirrels, no rabbits, no mongoose—and so on those occasions when the chicken does not reach the other side of the road, they become not just road kill but the road itself. You see, while the county sends out its animal control paddy wagon to pick up the occasional cat or dog that meets the same fate, I’ve yet to see a dead chicken scraped off the road. They’re left until they’re so flattened that they're imbedded in the pavement; you'd need a backhoe to pry them up.

At our previous home—the rental overlooking Aliomanu Bay—we sat perched 60 feet above the water. For some reason, the chickens rarely ventured up our steep drive. But the first night we moved into our new, half-built house, however, one chicken roamed right up to our bedroom window—the same one in which our neighbor’s lights shine—and crowed. It was 3:00 a.m. Since then, I’ve learned not all roosters crow alike, and I think it’s related to age. That, or just different personalities, like you and I have different laughs, say. But before I came to this knowledge, before I made my peace with chickens, before the first cockle stopped bolting me upright at 3:00 a.m., I wasn’t so unruffled about the chickens. And neither was Eric. He would rise, sneak outside—picking up a few rocks leftover from the foundation’s base—and lob them at the rooster. (Well, I don’t know if lob is the right word, but I don’t think he ever mortally wounded one.)

They say Kauai has more chickens than any other island, because of one incident at Nawiliwili Harbor maybe a hundred years ago when a crate of mongoose were sent to all the islands. A dockhand, so the story goes, tossed Kauai's crate of the critters into the water after one of the rodents bit him. And now we are the only Hawaiian island without a mongoose population problem.

In the new house, it wasn’t long before my alarm of roosters shifted to ticks. It seems we’d moved to the center of tickdom. The actual breeding grounds of the bloodsuckers. The Mecca of all ticks. My little Penny became infested. They’d latch on the poor girl, suck her dry and when the "fattie" was so bloated with Penny’s blood that it couldn’t hold on anymore, it would fall off and roll into the cranny where the hardwood floors stopped and the sheet-rocked walls started--a veritable protected, womb for hundreds of tick eggs to hatch. And it usually happened at night. Because our bed was then on the floor—no hand-carved teak bed from Indonesia yet—the hatched babies also crawled up our mattress, under our covers and latched onto me, too. I'd wake several times a night and pick the creepy crawlies off my body. It seems about this time I stopped noticing the crowing and bumped up "installing baseboard" to the top of the to-do list.

With virtually no predators—except rats which, for some reason, don’t eat all the eggs—chickens reproduce faster than rabbits, and so they’re everywhere. Pecking along the fringes of the beaches, cleaning up at the outdoor eatery down the street called Ono Charburger, even at the top of the mountain in Kokee State Park. Another story shares that Hurricane Iniki freed the fighting roosters in 1992 and spread them to all corners of the island, leading to an island-wide spread of chickens and roosters in the most unusual places. Tourists love them—so much so I’ll bet more pictures of chickens depart the island than those of endangered Humpback whales in winter.

Months later—after lifting the bed onto a frame and picking hundreds of ticks off Penny at a time—we got the tick problem under control while chickens paraded across our yard with chicks in tow. I learned how territorial roosters are. How they are not monogamous; they have a harem, in fact. How they crow all day long, at any hour, not just dawn.

But I still hadn’t made my peace with them. Not quite. It wasn’t until a friend told me about her laying hens. How she let them out of the coop to roam in her yard during the day. How they ate the bugs in her yard. The mosquitoes, the beetles, the roaches, the centipedes. And, in a moment of insight, I blurted, “The ticks. The chickens eat the ticks.”

And that’s when I made peace with the chickens. They rose another rung on my ladder of respect when watering my soon-to-be magnificent hedge of native white hibiscus I discovered holes in its leaves. Almost every other leaf had been nibbled through like ornate, Italian lace. I plucked a leaf off one of my sweet-smelling prizes and took it to Marit at Growing Greens Nursery. “Night beetle,” she said and suggested I place solar lights around the plants to drive off the beetles which only feed at night. With the light, she said, they’d mosey on—to another unsuspecting plant, no doubt—and leave my beauties beetle-free. Of course, I was also counting on my newly-discovered secret weapon to gobble up those beetles in their tracks.

After a year of hearing roosters crow in the night, I’ve grown used to them. Still, every now and then, one plants himself below our bedroom window, blasts a cockle-doodle-do, and I wake up, but I don’t mind so much anymore. Not as long as they eat a few ticks and night beetles at the same time.

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