My cameras are not well suited for flying animals, so we won’t see many other birds. The common Myna is in this blog though because of its status as 3rd worse alien species, between the African Land snail and the Tiger Mosquito. I would like to shine some positive light on them. In Australia they even made this bird to ‘The worst problem of 2008’, so they could use some promotion.
Originally coming from India, their feeding habit (Acridotheres means locust-hunter) tempted Europeans to release these bird in all kind of places around the globe, to control crop-eaters. We have had that with the snail too, releasing animals never works well. Mynas do not only eat crop-eaters, but also all kinds of more popular species, including parrots and other birds. Is it fair to first introduce a species, and later call it an invasive species? I don’t think so!
This bad reputation is for sure not the reason why some 250 years ago Carl Linnaeus himself called it ‘tristis’ (sad, gloomy). It might just have to do with their black color?!
Fun fact: The Myna was described already 6 years earlier by an ornithologist called Mathurin Jacques Brisson. He called them Merula Philippensis. There is a lot of history in the air, read the story here! If I get the story right, then Brisson was the bird expert of this time, while Linnaeus was rather into plants and the overall systematics. Both had a system to describe species, and Linnaeus simply ‘borrowed’ Brisson’s descriptions and changed the names in most cases. Linnaeus’ work was the more successful and popular, so I guess Brisson is the other gloomy dinosaur in our story. Any ornithologists who can explain the story better, please leave a comment!
Anyways, in Asia this bird is THE bird, you see them everywhere. They feed on trash, they come close to your table, and they are many! Compared to other birds it is obvious that they have larger legs, and that combined with rattling sounds make them the perfect velociraptor! Not the 2m Deinonychus-like raptor from the movies, and still smaller than the real raptors which are more turkey-sized, but still you wouldn’t want to become their enemy! Gloomy though is their name only.
But how is the relationship of bird and dinosaur? This is described so well here. In short, birds evolved from small dinosaurs which constantly developed more and more bird like attributes. There hasn’t been a huge jump but rather a sliding evolution. Once they were small and could fly, the evolution gained speed though. Interesting is that they didn’t really invent new parts, but the modifications started with the dino the embrio. Thus birds resemble dinosaur (and alligator) embryos!
What comes to my mind is the comparison to phones. It took a hundred years from the first phone to a push-button phone, but only 40 years from the first commercial mobile phone to the Smartphones we have now. In the same way the birds developed feathers and wings and beaks over a loong time, and then it turned out to have real benefits and development gained speed resulting in about 18000 species. The total number of birds is somewhere around 50 billion and 430 billion. Birds!
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