verging_on_random

The real terrorist menace

November 5, 2007 on 9:10 pm | In Uncategorized |

Generally I’m a placid kinda guy. There aren’t many living creatures I hate. Sure I despise most of the Howard cabinet but that’s different to hating them. They’re a bit like a dog turd you step in and mutter under your breath while you wipe it off with rolled up newspaper … it nearly makes you vomit but you don’t actually hate it. It’s just what turds do, whether they come from dogs or the Liberal Party.

But there is one mongrel bastard piece of shit animal that I hate with a passion. It’s the Australian native bird called the noisy mynah (or miner, or minor, depending which university you went to). It’s evil made flesh to dwell among us. The grubby little flying scumbag that manages to embody every single unattractive human characteristic in its scrawny grey body.

Take a look at the vermin.

Did you ever see such a mixture of greed, cunning, stupidity and sheer malice on the face of anything outside a horror movie?

These bastards are quickly taking over every bit of cleared land where I live … which is pretty much all of it, given that land clearing is the area’s growth industry. The locals call these avian arseholes ‘mickey birds’ which is way too cute to my way of thinking. It doesn’t go close to conveying the sheer thuggish brutality of the little pricks. At least ‘noisy mynah’ is accurate in one respect … they make a godawful racket.

The chicks start yipping when they’re about three days out of the egg. They keep it up for about six months, getting progressively shriller and louder. They yip about every three seconds, slightly off key, with a piercing intensity that can be heard hundreds of metres away. I defy anyone to work when a noisy mynah chick is perched within five metres of where they are sitting. Not only are they loud and unmusical but greed shrieks out of every discordant yip. The fucking things breed like rabbits so it’s normal to find two or even three chicks squatting like feathered cane toads yipping for food, and when one of the adult birds approaches the siblings break out into such a competitive squealing of hysterical “Me me me memememememe!!!!!” caterwauling that you realise hyenas are actually quite kind and selfless animals.

The noise that these little shits make is bad enough but their true evil is evidenced in their philosophy, which can best be summed up in two words: locals only. Locals, in this context, meaning noisy mynahs from their immediate family. Any and every other living creature is to be driven from the vicinity and if possible, killed in the process. Thus in areas dominated by these winged street gangs you will look in vain for other birds that are smaller or even of a similar size. The mynahs kill them all, forming packs of 10 or 15 or sometimes several dozen to attack them until the victims are exhausted and can be despatched by an endless rain of tiny vindictive pecks.

If a bird smaller than a magpie is dumb enough to nest in noisy mynah territory, the chicks will be lucky to survive 24 hours after they hatch. I’ve watched the genocidal mongrels do their stuff several times. Once the other species is roosting on the nest, one or more mynahs is always in attendance, watching from a few metres away. Once the eggs hatch, they go and get a few mates. Eventually the poor bloody mother bird has to go and find food from somewhere and that’s it. The chicks are dead within minutes.

If an animal is too big for them to kill the mynahs torment it relentlessly. They’ve mastered the art of gutless bullying through pack tactics. Even crows, currawongs and kookaburras eventually give up and get driven off. Grounded creatures aren’t spared - I once watched a flock of them dive bombing a rabbit. Maybe they thought it was going to climb a tree and eat their babies.

This brings me to the sheer malice that these despicable birds exhibit. There’s no method in the hostility they display to other animals. They are obsessively selfish, killing and persecuting other birds that might possible compete with them for insects or nectar. But they don’t stop there. They also aggressively pursue other birds like seed-eating doves that don’t compete for food, and kill basically anything they can, for fun presumably. They’re psychopaths, the Pol Pots of the animal kingdom. If they were big enough, they’d cheerfully wipe out every other animal species on earth, just for the hell of it.

I declared war on the bastards years ago. The racket the chicks make is a huge weakness that in any rational world would have led to their extinction thousands of years ago. What is wrong with predators these days, can’t they use their ears to find a helpless baby mynah when you can hear the fucking thing yipping three blocks away? Maybe they don’t just act like turds, they taste like them too. Anyway once I started to wage my one man war I’d listen for the early bleatings and wait until they chicks were nearly ready to leave the nest. Then when the neighbours were out - it defies rational explanation but there are people who are still prepared to do the “Leave the poor little things alone” bullshit, it’s like listening to someone defend Adolf Hitler - it was a simple matter to knock the nest down and put the chicks in the compost where they could do some good.

The adult mynahs are smart and I only had to do this two or three times before they adopted a two-pronged defence strategy. One was to gather in a large flock and shriek abuse and dive bomb me whenever they saw me. Ha! Like that bothered a bloke who worked in industrial relations in the building industry for 20 years. The second arm of the strategy was to build their nests ever higher, out of my reach. But they reckoned without human ingenuity in the shape of ladders, and eventually a fishing rod with a light plastic rod attached that must have been six metres long.

Eventually they retreated to the topmost branches of a big gum tree where I couldn’t have reached them without a cherry picker. I was still trying to work out an excuse why I wanted to hire one in the caravan park when nature came to my rescue in the shape of the kookaburras and currawongs, who found the nest and reminded the arsehole mynahs why they were genetically programmed not to nest up high in the first place.

So that was my little bit of territory secured but it didn’t protect me from invasion from outside, and I couldn’t think of a credible strategy to go climbing all the neighbours’ trees at regular intervals. Still, I had some victories. Chicks that haven’t been out of the nest for long are suckers for the hose treatment. They sit there getting satched until finally they fall down. Heh heh. And I got a few with well thrown bits of wood. I used to have little piles stored outside in strategic locations, ready for instant use when the opportunity arose.

Perhaps my greatest triumph was a purely spontaneous gesture years ago, when I rounded a corner and saw a young mynah yipping at 120 decibels in a tree out the back, and I took off a thong and scored a direct hit. That was one mynah who’d never yip again.

The only qualms of guilt I had about massacring these pests arose when someone suggested they helped control insects. But I watched them for a while and it’s bullshit. They don’t eat insects, they eat spiders. I’d be super pleased that I had a thriving herd of St George’s Cross spiders in my vege patch and within a couple of days, they’d all have disappeared. Or a couple of those magic orb spiders would create huge webs and next day there’d be a ragged hole where the spiders had been. Mynahs. They spend hours a day looking for spiders. And since every spider kills well over its body weight in insects every week or month or something - IDK, look it up if you’re interested, I remember it’s a very impressive number - mynahs actually help insects survive and reproduce by killing their natural predators.

They reckon Mao fixed the common housefly problem in China by encouraging every person in China to kill a few flies every day. I reckon we should have a similar campaign in Australia - $5 bounty for every noisy mynah corpse brought to a control centre. Because mark my words, if we don’t have a war on them soon, we’ll find out that al Qaeda was the least of our worries.

PS: the little flapping Nazis are probably a protected species or it’s illegal to hurt them or something, so I should make it clear that this post is creative fiction and does not constitute an admission of wrong-doing in any court of competent jurisdiction. Thank you.