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Chicks Gone Wild - Grand Cayman
May. 21st, 2023 02:42 pmGrand Cayman Travelog #19
Out for dinner - Thu, 18 May 2023, 8pm
Something I've noticed on a number of tropical islands is wild chickens. On some islands it's just a few, on others it's overwhelming. For example, chickens are seemingly everywhere on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Grand Cayman has... sort of a medium?... number of wild chickens running around. We can hear at least one rooster from our room. Occasionally we see a few in the grass near the parking lot. Chickens are more prevalent elsewhere around the island. For example, when we visited Hell today we saw a cluster outside the post office:
Link: view video on YouTube
Yesterday one of our tour guides explained to us that the wild chickens problem on Grand Cayman traces back to Hurricane Ivan, in 2004. While people reinforced their houses as best they could for the storm, things like chicken coops were not protected. The hurricane blew them all over. The freed chickens quickly went wild. Nobody claimed them, and now they're just pests.
The guide says the government considered a bounty on wild chickens. It wasn't without precedent; they did have a bounty on green iguanas, which were preying on the island's native blue iguanas. But the iguana bounty wound up being costly as locals quickly turned in way more iguanas than the government figured.
I'm thinking about the wild chicken problem again tonight because we have one dining with us. We're sitting outside a restaurant, and one's here waddling around our table, waiting like a dog for us to drop some food. She's even cooing softly to ingratiate herself to us. Shooing her away with our feet does nothing more than elicit a few squawks of protest before she's back to begging for scraps from us.
Oh, the guide also said that locals can be fined for feeding wild chickens. Tourists are exempt, she said. But we're not going to feed this damn pest. I hope she hangs out here at the restaurant until someone orders chicken nuggets. 🐓🪓🍗
Out for dinner - Thu, 18 May 2023, 8pm
Something I've noticed on a number of tropical islands is wild chickens. On some islands it's just a few, on others it's overwhelming. For example, chickens are seemingly everywhere on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Grand Cayman has... sort of a medium?... number of wild chickens running around. We can hear at least one rooster from our room. Occasionally we see a few in the grass near the parking lot. Chickens are more prevalent elsewhere around the island. For example, when we visited Hell today we saw a cluster outside the post office:
Link: view video on YouTube
Yesterday one of our tour guides explained to us that the wild chickens problem on Grand Cayman traces back to Hurricane Ivan, in 2004. While people reinforced their houses as best they could for the storm, things like chicken coops were not protected. The hurricane blew them all over. The freed chickens quickly went wild. Nobody claimed them, and now they're just pests.
The guide says the government considered a bounty on wild chickens. It wasn't without precedent; they did have a bounty on green iguanas, which were preying on the island's native blue iguanas. But the iguana bounty wound up being costly as locals quickly turned in way more iguanas than the government figured.
I'm thinking about the wild chicken problem again tonight because we have one dining with us. We're sitting outside a restaurant, and one's here waddling around our table, waiting like a dog for us to drop some food. She's even cooing softly to ingratiate herself to us. Shooing her away with our feet does nothing more than elicit a few squawks of protest before she's back to begging for scraps from us.
Oh, the guide also said that locals can be fined for feeding wild chickens. Tourists are exempt, she said. But we're not going to feed this damn pest. I hope she hangs out here at the restaurant until someone orders chicken nuggets. 🐓🪓🍗
