Being a small island in the middle of the Pacific ocean, Kauai gets its fair share of high winds and big rolling seas. Nothing spectacular about that, from a local point of view. It may change schedules for beach visits or whale watching boat trips, but for most practical purposes, life goes on as normal.

   
 However, in 1999, a major storm hit the island. The seas washed half a mile inland. Much of the near shoreline housing was destroyed, forests were ripped up and beaches reshaped. That was a long time ago and nothing of the destruction remains obvious to the visitor. Except the hens! Yes indeed, the hens remain. The storm when it came, scattered the domestic fowl and sent them from their runs and sheds, unfettered and unfenced, cockadoodling to liberty. A mere hen generation later, the now wild hens set about making a pleasant life for themselves, in their own little piece of Hawaiian heaven. By now, their numbers are significant, and they wander happily around gardens, fields and roads having a gay old time. 

  
But they did lose their sense of time. Their early-morning cock-a-doodle-do timing is seriously screwed up. From the middle of the dark night, from the perch directly outside my bedroom window, from the expanded lungs of the champion-loudest-cockeral-in-the-world, comes the regular 4am booming call that would shatter the gold teeth from pirates dead for four centuries. Michael sprays them with the garden hose. He says it chases them away. Secretly, I think they enjoy it.