After watching the crows commuting over our garden I started to notice others. The most obvious were the mynas. Early morning and late afternoon, flocks of them come zipping over, much lower than the crows and only just skimming above whatever's in the way. They seem to use the irrigation canal as a kind of route-guide and often swoop up to land on the wires near our house where they pause and chatter before moving on.
If I leave bananas out for the wildlife early enough in the morning then I can guarantee there will be a squabble of 20 or more mynas on them within half an hour.
These are great mynas, the most common species where we live. The very slightly larger common myna is also around but never in high numbers. Somehow I think these names are around the wrong way for our patch - the "great" is more common but the "common" is larger!
They almost follow the same line as the crows but it's a little south of the corvids' route and this time I know exactly where they are going. Drive through the town at dusk and you will hear them. They roost on wires and buildings and for the hour or so it takes for them to settle down they produce incredible noise.
Just wanting to check that "my" mynas were going where I thought, I followed them on my bicycle one evening. I found them congregating where I had heard them before and stopped for a while to enjoy the white noise. A father was encouraging his young son to shine a laser pointer at them. I think they wanted to scare them away but I suspect they just prolonged the racket.
Cycling around a bit to get a better idea of how big an area they covered I realised that I could hear more of them further away somewhere over the river. With such noise it could not have been easier to track them down. Separated by just a few hundred metres was another roost with even more birds. They particularly seemed to enjoy the large government buildings. Just how many roost here is really hard to say, at least several thousand.
On the far side of town I knew there was a another roost so I cycled over there to check it was still being used. And on the way I found two other myna roosts! Both were quite small, with perhaps less than a thousand birds in each, but still loud enough to hear from over a hundred metres away. The second of these answered one of my questions: do the two species roost together? It was all common mynas whereas the others had been all great mynas. They like to sleep separately. Actually that's not quite true, none of them are 100% one species. There is always at least one of the other kind mixed in, plus usually a handful of pied starlings and in one case a very lonely budgerigar that must have been an escaped pet.
This other big roost was still being used but I started getting a feeling that there must be even more of them so over the next few evenings I cycled around further. When I found the ninth roost (two mostly common mynas, seven mostly great mynas) I gave up. Months later I am still finding an occasional extra one and have lost count. They clearly like the town but even the wires and billboards along big roads can attract good numbers.
And this is the real point of this post. Good numbers. Absolutely phenomenal numbers more like. Within the boundaries of our town at night outside of the breeding season there must be tens of thousands of mynas in total. If I include the main roads and other nearby urban pockets then... I have no idea.
It is easy to see that they are common but only when they congregate can you see just how common, and then when you look more closely at how many congregations there are it becomes a little mind-blowing.
As species they are as good as any others at living with us and benefitting from our ways. If I am travelling around at the right time I am now very alert to the sound of them roosting which always makes me smile. But even during the day I enjoy spotting the mess they leave on the ground below their roosts.
So, chattering flocks of mynas skimming over my head in the evening, I know where you are going and I salute you!