The Two Birds
Raymond Tekorako Ruka
Dedicated to all our incredible daughter’s who’ve had to put up with our crumbs.
No longer, I pray.
I dedicate these stories to each one of you…
My friends there are a species of bird in New Zealand that nest in the eaves of houses, cardboard cartons, plastic liners, letter boxes and an assortment of holes in trees and poles.
The birds, which belong to the Starling family, are called Mynas and were introduced from Asia in the 1800’s by the Ministry of Agriculture, to rid the land of invertebrate pests. Myna’s are an ornery bird and are about the size of the Blue Jay that we have in the State of Ohio, USA.
They flock, but you usually will find them in pairs. They have a horrible shrill, raucous call and are very territorial.
These birds eat bugs, other creepy crawlies, vegetable matter and fruit. In New Zealand, you will commonly see them deftly avoiding traffic while foraging for fresh road-kill, insects or the myriad of other delectable offerings that surreptitiously fall from the hastily lowered window of passing vehicles.
Standing guard on the roadside, on the lookout for interlopers, the pair challenge any bird, smaller or larger, to dare come anywhere near that part of the busy highway that they’ve claimed as their own. Sometimes they are so eager to lay claim to, what was moments ago a living insect, the most recent victim of a passing vehicle, startled motorists, who are not familiar with their antics, are taken completely by surprise at the birds seeming audacity and have been known to almost run completely off the highway trying to avoid running over it.
Since introduced to New Zealand, their numbers have steadily increased and now, with the Myna’s belligerent relationship with native bird life and the damage they inflict on fruit crops, the poor, hapless birds, are now themselves in danger of being considered “excess to requirements,” by the country’s lawmakers, whose former colleagues, long since gone themselves, brought them here in the first place.
Imagine for a moment my friends, what it would be like, to be unceremoniously packaged up in box-like cages and shipped away from your own native habitat to a strange and faraway destination. Without your permission, you’ve been removed to help a foreign stranger “rid” himself of his unwanted aboriginal “pests”. Those stranger’s themselves, in a time long past, a newcomer to that land as well. After your nightmarish journey, and re-orienting yourself to this “what-seems-a-fairy-tale-place” and without so much as a “thank you,” you bring that strangers pest situation to a controllable level, for nothing in nature is completely extinguished.
Now, freed from your non-contractual obligation, you unabashedly reward yourself by reaping the rewards of your own sterling effort from the incredible variety-packed smorgasbord that this astonishing new home provides.
“There for the taking,” is the most referred to term you’ve heard being used by the host of exhausted, bent and buckled locals, who weren’t quite up to the task themselves of whittling down the numbers of the myriad of varied, succulent, populations – try as they mightily had!
Over time, insidiously at first, then quite brazenly, you find that your host who was instrumental in arranging with the authorities for your legal immigration here, and who welcomed you as royalty in the first place with open arms, intimates that he no longer requires your services. In time, he posts around your own neck a label reading the same as all those original, unwanted, natives that you labored so earnestly to remove had worn – PEST!
But there is a shining light to this saga. It certainly has not ended, for there are incredible Kiwi people who love this so called “unlovable” bird, and Thank Goodness, my peace-loving family of Waitaha is a willing host to them! Our grandmothers of today are avid Bird Watchers and Lovers.
Dedicated to the safe preservation of all New Zealand’s Birdlife.
Those that really know “The Myna’s Song – It’s Journey,” know importantly that these pair of so-called despotic territorial, bug-killing machines, mate for life. When one of them gets killed on the road by a vehicle, the other will more often than not, stay there in that same exact location on the side of the road, by itself, for the rest of its days.
When we were kids in an impossible fairyland place based squarely in Nature called Brynderwyn (A Welsh name) we would befriend those lonely hearted, left on their own to defend for themselves.
For they mirrored us and we them. Survivors, innocents – trying their best to survive in a hostile environment, where the only friends who understood the truth were your fellow Myna’s and so it was, from the Nature of Circumstance not of Scholarly Research to learn a lifelong teaching.
Thankfully in those days of the early/mid 1950’s where we lived, although it was the main arterial route, traffic was sparse, but the lack of traffic intensity in those times, was nullified by the Myna birds own intensity. So lost in concentration to the task at hand…
From the eyes of an unknowing person, a stranger to the Myna’s history and life. This frightened winged Angel, ripped from his or her own homeland, after their horrendous kidnapping, finding themselves unknowingly arrived at Eden while still in the flesh.
My friends – I think to myself, thank goodness for our own human experience and growth. Thank heavens for all that is so innocent and brave, and thank our lucky stars there are also human beings not unlike those two Myna birds keeping station on our highways in New Zealand, and around the world, reminding us about our readiness or not, to make judgment on others, we might deem different to ourselves.
Be careful, my elders would caution, lest we prove the Myna bird right!
As a growing adolescent, one particular Myna’s “Being” shared with me the most transcendent smile when I spoke and told him our Ancestors navigated the early oceans and drew pictures in stories that we might follow their same pathways and never hold doubt as to their directives and our safe arrival. Myna’s eyes spoke with a whisper of a smile and said the Mother Wind holds all their information and if he and his particular kind needed to have come here to our insignificant landmark, She, the Mother, would have already brought them, for the Myna and his family still hold the confidence of all the Elements to do what they deem Myna should do. Irrespective of his being shanghaied against his will and being transported to Aotearoa (a very new name he never recognized).
Myna said his Ancestors are the Most Ancient, even more so than his much younger relation Tuatara, a name he did recognize.
Family, we must be very careful when we hold the memories of our Ancients in past tense, lest they appear before us in little fragile form – flesh and blood forms, garmented in the originality of their living breathing feathered korowai/cloaks and not the human type, artfully constructed and artificially colored. Deceased Things. All dreamed into being and stamped for extra measure with our human frailty of possession and with each group’s unique signature, wherever that family grouping be situated, claimants, always claiming, ours, mine!
One fragile the other frightened but both unmistakably beautiful – just different perspectives, perceptions.
And in time – expressed as Elder and Younger Brother…