I dont’ like to focus on negatives, but I was reminded this morning of how bad our wild rooster and chicken problem could get.  I will never forget this place my friends and I dubbed “Rooster Island”.  I went with a group of about 20 friends to Indonessia for 30 days in 2001.  Our home base was Kuta Beach on the island of Bali where we carried out various community outreach programs , surfed, and had a great time for roughly the first week and a half of our trip.  After that, half of our group headed to the docks at Sanaur to catch the hour long Ferry to a place called Nusa Lembongan.  We waited and waited for our Ferry and finally it came.  So we all piled on this so called “Ferry” which looked more like a makeshift power fishing boat and crossed the channel.  Our destination at Nusa Lembongan was absolutely beautiful, truly a ultra tropical destination with perfect waves and the whole nine yards.  Kind of like Kauai right?  Ya, actually Kauai is reminding me more and more of that place everyday.  The wild rooster problem on Nusa Lembongan was mind boggeling.  We kept asking ourselves, how do people lieve here?  Our group was in disbelief at this totally off the rocker rooster infestation.  We stayed in these beach house huts a few thousand feet from the water and all you caould hear was rooster 24 hours a day.   walk down stairs to the ground floor and you’ve got mamma chicken with 10 chickies to your left, mother hen with 20 chickies on your right, and like literally 20 or 30 bad ass roosters all around them trying to be the baddest.  It was like a nut house, their numbers were incredible.  There must have been 10x more roosters than even the resteraunt up a Kokee on Kauai has during tourist feeding frenzies!  So what’s my point you might ask?  Simple, Kauai could eventually get this bad.  Nothing is controling Kauai’s wild chicken problem and it would be a shame for that to continue.  Write your counsel memeber an email and let them know you think this issue is important.

Once you have purchased a trap from www.RoosterTraps.com, the process of catching the critters is pretty easy!  As much as you want to put your new trap out the second you arrive at your house, holding out for a day or two will prove best.  Find a place where you will most likely be leaving your trap when you set it.  Leave the trap there and bait the surrounding areas for the first day or so.  Let the Roosters and chickens get used to the new object in the area.  These guys are smarter than you think, so you need all the tricks you can think of.  When you have decided to set your trap for your big catch, make sure you use the same food (cat food, corn or nuts works great) as you did to bait the day before.  When baiting your trap, you don’t want to over bait the surrounding areas.  Drop a few pieces of food here and there creating a trail straight to the door of the trap leading to the platform in the rear of the trap.  You will most lilkely be using your trap throughout the year as newbies stroll through the areas looking for someone to bother.  To make placing the bait under the platform easy, take a stick about 3 feet long and tie or tape a spoon to the end of it.  Swing the door open to the top of the trap and set the trigger that will hold the door up while also lifting up on the platform.  Fill the spoon with your bait and poor it over the center of the platform.  The bait should trickle though the wire mesh and set on the ground.  You now have a trap ready to catch a rooster!  Please contact your humane society for relocation and handling advice.