Feral Thoughts

Night of the Killer Grannies

If you go down to Wests Rugby Club in Belconnen in the Australian Capital Territory tonight, you're liable to get a shock. Around about seven, you'll notice a group of the more mature patrons back their stools away from the poker machines or finish off their veal parmigiana and move quietly to a back room.  Few opt for a second shandy when there is free tea and coffee inside.  For these folk have serious business to discuss; it's time to tote up the annual bird tally. How many Indian mynas has each of the killer grannies (or grandpas) added to the toll this year? I don't know if it's because they have more time, or because they remember BM time ("before mynas") but the myna-managers of Canberra tend to be on the more mature side.

The Annual General Meeting of the Canberra Indian Myna Action Group is one of the few times the killer grannies (and grandpas) of Canberra actually physically gather.  Perhaps a hundred of the three or four hundred that quietly go about their business in the privacy of their own backyard come together.  For they are the quiet killers at work in Australia’s national capital.  A city usually regarded as staid, boring, public-servanty.  These folk are far from boring.  They are on a quest.  A quest to rid the national capital of one of its most hated feral species: the Indian or common Myna.  One might think that a city that is inhabited by great influxes of the country’s elected officials during Parliamentary sitting seasons might have worse feral pests to worry about.  But the Canberra Indian Myna Action Group, or CIMAG for short,  don’t think so. They want the birds out of their city.

British fascinated by Australian myna-mania but they have their own peristerophobia

The British newspaper

The Guardian ran a story over the weekend on Australia's hatred of the Indian myna.  Only a few days earlier The Times of India ran a story that Indian mynas were becoming displaced in New Delhi by the common rock pigeon.  The Guardian's story talked about the complex relationship Australian's have with our wildlife, quoting a dingo preservationist as saying "Australia has a powerful rural lobby and when animals get in the way, we kill them".  I think it's reasonable to say that most societies have complex relationships with their wildlife.  Even many Britons exhibit peristerophobia, an unreasonable fear or hatred of pigeons, that is evident in a 2007 campaign by the London Lord Mayor to stop pigeon-feeding in Trafalgar Square. 

Indian Mynas still Canberra's most hated

According to our national surveying, the cane toad has passed the Indian myna as Australia's most unpopular feral.  But even with a local election looming, there is no doubt at all that the Indian Myna still tops the list of "most hated" in Canberra.

On ABC 666 Mornings with Alex Sloan we talk ferals every fortnight (www.abc.net.au/canberra/  if you'd like to stream from your computer).  I'm sure there are dozens of people that have the talkback number programmed into their speed-dial for the moment the words "Indian Myna" are mentioned.  This morning was no exception when we talked about the Canberra Indian Myna Action Group's Annual General Meeting and a new study underway at the Australian National University.

The Canberra Indian Myna Action Group, CIMAG, is a grassroots movement of people that are trying to restore native birds and knock back the Indian Myna invasion.  Since inception they've removed tens of thousands of birds through volunteers trapping in their backyards.  Individuals report local effects with parrots and other natives returning to breed successfully in hollows previously occupied by Indian Mynas.  However, we don't have any real evidence of an impact other than individual anecdotes.

Enter the Australian National University's Fenner School of Environment and Society, PhD student Kate Grarock and researchers David Lindenmayer and Chris Tidemann (http://fennerschool.anu.edu.au/).  Over the next few years, they'll be conducting an important study to look at the biodiversity impact of Indian Myna control.

Fifteen suburbs of Canberra have been selected for the study and these will be divided into three treatment groups:

1. "High" levels of Indian myna removal - backyard trapping plus Dr. Tidemann's "roost" trapping whereby Mynas in roost trees are removed;
2. "Low" levels of control whereby only backyard trapping will take place; and
3. "No" control suburbs where we'll ask people not to trap Mynas at all, during the two-year study period.

At the moment (September 2008), Kate is busily fitting 200 nesting boxes in each of the suburbs and organising baseline data of birds numbers and species in each of the suburbs; which are Hawker, Aranda, Flynn, Kaleen, Hackett, O'Connor, Campbell, Deakin, Red Hill, Pearce, Chapman, Bonython, Fadden, Theodore and Kambah.  If you live in one of those suburbs, we strongly urge you to report your trapping to CIMAG so that we can make sure it is taken into account (www.indianmynaaction.org.au).

Kate is also looking for volunteers to assist with data collection.  Email her at kate.grarock(at)anu.edu.au if you'd like to help (substitute the symbol @ for (at) - I'm trying to ensure Kate doesn't get more spam, she's a busy PhD student after all).

The study results will be really interesting.  They'll enlighten us whether removal of Indian Mynas only has a temporary local impact; whether we need to have "roost" control at the same time to have any impact at all, or a whole range of other scenarios.  I'll keep posting information here and put links on the sidebars.

Thanks Geoffry Dabb for the picture of an Indian Myna.