Gone are the days of black bears and mountain lions. No more do I need to be afraid of rattle snakes or coyotes. I live in Hawaii now, not Colorado, and the wild animals here are a bit on the milder side...
Take for instance, the wild chicken:
Here, the wild chickens are looked on (by locals, at least) as dirty, diseased road hazards. Some people use bumper stickers to notch off how many they've managed to hit with the grill of their car. Tourists, on the other hand, seem to enjoy these beings of pestilence, taking millions of photos of them to show their friends at home. Personally, I find this behavior yet another example of the strange idiosyncrasies belonging to the race known as tourists.
The other day, this rooster was posing for me, for no apparent reason. I didn't have any food to give him, and still he stood there glaring at me. I found myself noticing the uniqueness of a chicken eye and wondering why I had never noticed it before. In fact, I even found myself studying the different colors of feathers that this rooster had. And to make matters worse, I almost thought that chickens perhaps weren't as ugly and dirty as all that. But fear not, I stopped myself in time, remembering that these very same chickens love to crow at three in the morning, and realized that what seem to be beautiful feathers are really just a disguise to hide the roadkill beneath.
Not all wild animals are as detrimental to society as the chickens though. The geckos that we have in abundance are really rather cute and harmless. Some people find them annoying (because of the mess they tend to leave on windowsills and baseboards after an insect feast), but I don't mind them wandering around my house with their sticky feet and Australian accents.
This gecko was stuck contentedly on the ceiling over my bed one night, and do what I might to persuade him to find a more agreeable hideout, he firmly held his position. After a while, I lost him through his camouflage techniques, but eventually something (a tendency to narcolepsy perhaps) caused him to lose his grip, and he fell on my comforter. Thankfully, one of the resident knights caught him before he found his way to my pillow.
