> After 10 hours of sleep, I feel better.
> About the chicken thing:
> I've been to Kauai three times now and the first two trips I seem to remember seeing a chicken or two, but this time they were wall to wall. Mostly banties, these chickens are wild ones that have excaped, living off the land and reproducing like crazy. The roosters are really funny. At the beach one day a little red banty rooster was running around challenging any thing with feathers. He tried to pick fights with sea gulls, sparrows, mynahs, and other roosters. The gulls just gave him the "you stupid idiot" look and flew off. The other roosters ran like chickens.
> We had lunch in old Koloa town in one of those open-air restaurants that are so common in Hawaii, and there were chickens wandering around picking up stray French fries off the floor. The waitresses tried chasing them off but they kept coming back. You could hear roosters crowing from daybreak until dark no matter where you were. We saw chickens from the beach to 4000 feet. They outnumbered any other wildlife.
> Speaking of wildlife, we saw a couple of rare Hawaiian monk seals. They just hauled out on the beach and took a nap in the middle of a crowd of tourist. No wonder they are on the endangered list! I always thought of them as small seals but they are several hundred pounds. They aren't the least bit intimidated by chickens.
> Howard

Heh. Just like Samoa. Chickens everywhere. The roosters did a brief warmup at around 3am, then you got the full blast at dawn, lasting about an hour. There wasn't a chance of going back to sleep.
Samoa probably beats Hawaii on the pig count, though. Even in Apia (the town) there are little pigs running around everywhere.

There are enough fur seals around NZ that they're not too difficult to find on land, if you know where to go. They're cuter in the water -- on land they smell awful. :-) However, every couple of years it makes the news here when an elephant seal comes ashore and decides to hang around some hapless seaside town. These things are about the size of a car and they can cause a lot of damage. There was one ashore just the other month, somewhere, which hung around wrecking parked cars and knocking over trees and telephone boxes and rubbish bins. They put up concrete road barriers around him to try to keep him on the boat ramp where he arrived, but he pushed them over. Apparently they get itchy when they moult, and like to rub up against things. Unfortunately for many people, it seems insurance companies don't accept "My SUV was crushed by a moulting elephant seal" as a valid excuse.

You also wouldn't believe the number of idiot tourists who were going up and trying to pat the thing. ;-)

Brunnen-"aww! a giant car-crushing wild animal with four-inch teeth! let's stand next to it and take a photo!"G