Blog # 17
Matthew’s Killer Chickens
In 1971 a wild chicken showed up in our yard on the slopes
of Maui. It would search for insects and seeds each day and return to the woods
behind our place to roost each night. The hen looked exactly like the pictures
I had seen of Red Jungle Fowl, the chickens brought to Hawaii with the first
settlers. All domestic breeds of chickens are descended from these and the Grey
Jungle Fowl found in the forests of Asia.
I obtained a rooster from the stocks at the Honolulu Zoo
where Jack Throp had bred them and used the chickens on the grounds where they
were not only interesting to zoo visitors, but ate all the dropped food left by
visitors. A sort of Gallinacious serendipity.
That’s how “Super Moa” ended up on Maui. The hen was known
to my kids as “Henny Penny” and she took to the rooster in a hurry and began
laying eggs. My older two, Tim and Joan, were raising 4H beef steers but Matt
was too small at age 8 to handle a steer, so he took over the jungle fowl. We
ate some of the eggs, but the hen was pretty good at hiding them and soon there
were little yellow chicks peeping away in the yard.
I discovered how tough these birds were when a mongoose
showed up one day. The rooster was elsewhere, but the hen made some kind of
noise and the chicks scattered into long grass and stayed perfectly still while
the hen pulled her wings back behind her, squatted as low as she could and
charged the mongoose. For those of you not familiar with the mongoose it’s like
a big weasel. It’s the Rikki Tikki Tavi of Kipling’s Jungle Book; the
one who fights the cobra. The chicken looked like a big feathered arrow as it
screeched and charged. The mongoose took one look and high-tailed it.
Literally.
The roosters were also aggressive. A stray dog was eying the
chickens one day, and the rooster came from behind the house scooted silently
up behind the dog and then screamed his battle cry as he erected all those
green, gold and red-brown feathers and flew onto the back of the dog’s neck and
went after its eyes. The dog escaped by running off a 10 foot steep embankment
and tumbling to the road below where he ran off. There was a lot of strutting
to follow, kind of like an NFL touchdown dance but a lot more colorful.
Matt separated the cockerels from the hens and raised them
in a covered pen. He planned on fattening them up and selling them as fryers.
But one morning we found the pen looking like a slaughter house. Seven of the
nine or ten week old cockerels were dead and the last two exhausted looking
birds, covered in blood, were facing each other to see who would be champion.
We separated them and cleaned them up. Word got around the neighborhood, and
there was a lot of interest among Haka
Moa practitioners. Cock fighting was popular among ancient Hawaiians and
the practice was still common on Maui and Molokai in 1971. Matt sold the
remaining birds and didn’t ask where they were bound.
Thanks for reading my blog. There is a recent New York Times
article about these birds at
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