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More efficiently than an alarm clock, a crowing, feral rooster can awaken a neighborhood, even those neighbors who had no intention of getting up early. The frustration in the complaints can be extreme — such as the one person who asked whether it was legal to pick off the roosters and hens with a pellet gun.
In Honolulu, the calls for action were heard by Trevor Ozawa, then the East Oahu representative on the City Council, who headed the Budget Committee two years ago.
A particularly infested area was the Hawaii Kai Park and Ride, run by the city Department of Transportation Services, Ozawa said. But there was no single city agency in control, and the Hawaiian Humane Society did not have a contract for that, either.
“That’s why I put money in the budget to get a contractor, so we wouldn’t have people passing the buck,” Ozawa said in a phone interview recently.
Since then, there’s been some movement, but it’s still in the pilot phase, said Randy Leong, the city Department of Customer Services’ deputy director. Starting in 2015, there’s been more than $154,000 spent, in four separate contracts, but the targets have been pretty elusive. The Hawaiian Humane Society has not been involved in these efforts.
“We’ve done the catching with a trap, visiting these spots, catching during the daytime,” Leong said. “It wasn’t that effective, almost to the point of being futile.”
The chickens, it turns out, are pretty hard to trap during the day. But last year the city issued the first of two contracts to hunter Mitchell Tynanes, who is pursuing the birds as they roost at night. So far a little more than $3,000 has been spent, and the city will evaluate his methodology before something more than experimentation is done.
Of course, feral chickens are not just Oahu’s headache. Kauai notoriously has contended with a rooster and chicken population explosion. Nobody knows for sure how that happened, but the general consensus is that it dated to Hurricane Iniki in 1992, when domestic chickens were set loose in the storm.
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