Love them or hate them, most people are bound to have an opinion on plans to poison the pesky Indian mynah birds that have colonised South Africa’s suburbs.
Jennifer Kemp, an office-bearer at environmental NGO Earthlife Africa, contacted the Mail & Guardian this week to express concern that poisoning mynahs, which are classified as an alien invasive species, would lead to indigenous birds like starlings also being poisoned.
Plans to use chemicals to kill mynahs are being discussed by the national ornithological society, BirdLife South Africa, because the noisy invaders tend to take over prime bird estates and kick the natives out.
“They are highly territorial. Near their nests they attack and chase other birds away,” explained Professor Adrian Craig of Rhodes University on a recent episode of 50/50 on SABC2.
He described mynahs as “very adaptable and clever birds. We have to keep in mind that they have lived with people in cities for at least 2 000 years.”
These great urban survivors often drive their human neighbours to distraction. M&G photojournalist Nadine Hutton described a typical interaction: “Not long after a couple of mynahs moved into my garden, they were snacking on my cat’s very expensive veterinary diet. So I moved the cat’s food inside, leaving a window open for him.
“Within a week, the cheeky birds were coming in to eat, but they weren’t always cunning enough to get back out. They would squawk in their irritating language and crap on my walls, windows, curtains and — the worst — my 1950s period furniture.”
Her cat was too chicken to take on the mynahs, but her dogs managed to catch one every now and then. She stumbled upon a solution in a moment of frustration: using an old squash racquet to stun the birds and then pushing them out the door so the dogs could grab them.
“I agree something must be done, but I wouldn’t poison them,” Hutton said. “What if one of my dogs ate it and got sick? Nah, I prefer to help nature along a little: Why not rather arm a few unemployed people with some old racquets and let the games begin?”
BirdLife’s approach to the mynah’s cousin, the Indian house crow, is to provide food at a site until the birds become habituated and chase all the other birds away. Both Indian species are popular pets because of their ability to mime and were released in South Africa by accident.
Once the crows are habituated, they are poisoned and their carcasses are disposed of. Gerhard Verdoorn, BirdLife’s director, said this had to be done by people who were properly qualified, or non-target species and even people could be poisoned.
“The crows are a big problem in Durban, but we are managing to keep their numbers down,” he said. Mynahs were more of a scourge, because there were so many of them all over the country and they were so cunning.
“The mynah problem is virtually insurmountable. We are going to have to think out of the box if we want to solve it,” he said.
Whatever the solution, Verdoorn emphasised town-dwellers were not allowed to shoot mynahs. “People using pellet guns are a huge problem for us. It is illegal and dangerous to shoot any firearm in built-up areas,” he said.