Common myna | Acridotheres tristis

Voice

Loud, sustained and very varied, but without the sliding whistles of a common starling. The repertoire is built from short motifs repeated two or three times before another takes over: clear kweek-kweek, gurgling churr, hard rattles and sharp screeches. At the nest and in disputes a raw, screaming kweeer. A communal roost in a fig or a palm produces a deafening, swelling din in the last quarter of an hour before dark. Heard all year, most of all early in the morning.

Identification

Bulky and compact, the size of a starling but heavier, longer-tailed and longer-legged, and always upright. The body is warm chocolate-brown, the head, throat and upper breast glossy black, and behind and below the eye lies a bare, vivid yellow triangle that shows at long range; bill and legs are yellow too. In flight it is unmistakable: a large white patch at the base of the primaries flashes with every beat, the black tail has broad white corners and the undertail coverts are white. The sexes look alike. Young birds are duller, with a browner head, a dull bill and a smaller, paler face patch.

Confusion species

Within this region the vinous-breasted myna is the only real confusion species, and the head settles it: that bird has a creamy-white head with a black mask and an orange-red bill, without a trace of the yellow face patch, and its underparts are vinous rather than chocolate. Common starling is smaller, shorter-tailed, heavily spangled and sharp-billed, and scurries rather than strides. Tristram's starling is wholly black with an orange wing patch and belongs to cliffs, not to café tables. House crow is half as long again and shows no white in the wing. A second test is the flight: nothing else in the area flashes that white primary patch.

Habitat

Almost entirely tied to people. Streets, squares, parks, gardens, hotel terraces, seafront promenades, car parks and refuse bins, together with watered lawns, playing fields, date and banana plantations and the margins of irrigated fields. The nest goes in a cavity: a gap under a roof tile, an air duct, a hollow lamp post, an abandoned woodpecker hole or the dead crown of a fan palm. Nest site and feeding ground lie together; it forages on foot over short grass and hard surfaces and eats almost anything, from insects and fruit to rubbish.

Range and movements

Native to southern and south-eastern Asia, from Iran and Afghanistan through India and Sri Lanka to southern China and Indochina. Within this region Israel is the stronghold: after the first breeding records near Tel Aviv in the later 1990s it spread over the whole coastal plain and on into the Jezreel valley, the Jordan valley, Galilee and the northern Negev, with the highest densities in the urban belt from Ashkelon to Haifa. There are further colonies in Turkey, centred on Istanbul and the southern coast at Antalya, Mersin and Adana, and in Jordan, Sinai and the Nile delta. Outside the region it is established across the Arabian peninsula and in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and on many islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

• Resident
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

No effort is required: sit down on a terrace in Tel Aviv, Haifa or Eilat and the birds come to you. For the image that sticks, go at dusk to a row of fig trees along a busy street and wait for the roost to fill — the birds arrive in small parties, circle once and then crash jabbering into the crown. In spring it pays to scan dead palm crowns and air ducts: where one pair has settled there is usually another ten metres along.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened (IUCN: Least Concern) and common to locally damaging to agriculture across its native range. Beyond that range the picture is different: since 15 August 2019 it has been on the EU list of invasive alien species of Union concern, and it is one of the few birds ranked among the world's most damaging introductions. The objection turns on cavities. Mynas are heavy, aggressive and numerous, and they evict hole-nesting birds smaller than themselves: in Israel hoopoes, rollers, Syrian woodpeckers and scops owls have been driven from occupied holes, and eggs and chicks of smaller songbirds are taken as well. On top of that the species profits from everything people build — lawns, irrigation, refuse, buildings — and so grows with the town. Israel monitors the population and removes nests in places, but nowhere has a real reduction been achieved.