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Chickens in Trees

I was lucky enough to vacation in Kauai last year, one of the oldest Hawaiian islands. If you ever visit, the first thing that you’ll notice — the very first thing — is the chickens.

The afternoon I arrived, I took a Zoom call sitting on some grass, casting nervous glances at a rooster slowly approaching me like a Weeping Angel. Looking over the motel balcony, I could hear occasional clucks, and I couldn’t localize the sources until I saw a chicken flutter up onto the branch of a short tree, joining its troupe. As I learned from a fantastic paper[1] by T. Desta, a professor in Ethiopia, the proportion of chickens roosting in trees actually varies a lot, possibly due to environmental pressures like predators or hot ground temperature: e.g., only 1% do this in Myanmar, 8% in one part of Nigeria and 65% in another.

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