HILO — It was a cool morning in January when longtime Kukuau Street resident Tim Wright first noticed something in the corner of his eye — a hen, wobbling through his sleepy Hilo neighborhood with a trail of chicks close behind.
HILO — It was a cool morning in January when longtime Kukuau Street resident Tim Wright first noticed something in the corner of his eye — a hen, wobbling through his sleepy Hilo neighborhood with a trail of chicks close behind.
“It came out of nowhere,” Wright recalls. “I actually thought it was a black cat, but there were all these babies following her. I thought they were cute.”
Wright’s tune changed a few weeks later, however, when the wild chickens began multiplying. Soon, there were dozens running amok in the streets. They began defecating in his carport, Wright said, and running through his yard. And they would awaken residents as early as 4 a.m. with crowing.
For Wright, the turning point came in February when he awoke one day to discover his newly planted Kumato tomatoes had been dug up by chickens.
“That’s when I said, ‘OK, this is war,’” he said. “That’s when their cuteness kind of wore off.”
These days, Wright said the problem has slowly been mitigated thanks to two neighborhood youth he’s dubbed the “Chicken Boys of Kukuau.”
The boys are 10-year-old Trystan Sotoreis and 14-year-old Jon Rieeira. Last summer, they noticed Wright trapping chickens and paying the Hawaii Island Humane Society to pick them up.
“They were like, ‘Uncle, what are you doing with the chickens?’” Wright said. “I told them (what I was doing), and they were like, ‘We’ll come pick them up. And we can catch chickens.”
The boys have been catching chickens ever since.
To-date, they’ve caught more than a dozen. Some, they lure using a tame rooster. Others, they catch using traps deployed in the yards of consenting neighbors.
Once caught, Trystan and Jon keep the chickens and raise them at homes of friends and family.
“It’s fun,” Jon said last week, showing the Tribune-Herald a rooster and a handful of chicks captured in recent weeks. “It’s kind of like a sport — you get to chase after something and then grab it.”
Wild chickens are an ongoing problem in East Hawaii, but the HIHS said the problem has gotten worse in recent years. Its Keaau shelter has taken in 632 wild chickens so far in 2016 — a 33 percent increase over the same period in 2015, HIHS Executive Director Donna Whitaker said in an email.
Its Kona shelter has taken in 282 so far in 2016, she said, down from 341 in 2015. Its Waimea facility has taken in 11 in 2016, down from 27 in 2015.
Whitaker said residents can help solve the problem by putting their egg-laying chickens in a coop to collect eggs.
“If the community sees a hen sitting on eggs, they can collect the eggs (and dispose of them if you don’t know they were laid that day),” Whitaker said.
Kukuau residents aren’t sure where the first neighborhood chickens came from. Wright has lived on the street nearly three decades and said he’s never noticed chickens before. But he said the problem appears to be getting better thanks to Jon and Trystan’s efforts. The boys believe there are about 30 chickens still roaming. They said they plan to continue catching until all are caught.
“It will feel very good (to catch them all),” Trystan said.
“Yeah,” Jon added. “That will mean that it’s no more chickens.”
Email Kirsten Johnson at kjohnson@hawaiitribune-herald.com