The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons Read online

  THE CRESTED MYNA is endemic to China, Vietnam, and a few of the smaller and potentially more dangerous nations in Southeast Asia, where they are presumably doing quite well, thank you very much. As far as anyone knows, they were brought to Vancouver as pets by Chinese immigrants in the 1890s. But nothing remains captive forever. When it comes to mynas in Vancouver, some people imagine an accidental escape, while others speak of an ornery ship’s captain or an insane customs agent who intentionally let them go. My own pet theory is that a couple of birds outlived their owner, and the family, growing tired of their raucous din, tossed them out to fend for themselves. In any case, one or possibly two pairs of mynas managed to establish themselves in the wilds of metropolitan Vancouver in the dying years of the nineteenth century. Considering the City of Vancouver itself wasn’t incorporated until 1886, mynas must surely have some claim to landed immigrant status.

  From these humble beginnings, the randy little beggars managed impressive population growth. No one undertook a really good population estimate at the time, but at the mynas’ peak there may have been as many as 20,000 individuals in four city blocks of Vancouver. They roosted in sufficient numbers that residents in the affected neighbourhoods protested about the great mounds of myna faeces they had to wash off their cars each morning. Mynas went on to establish a breeding population in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, and another in Seattle, Washington. Unlike the population in Vancouver, these did not persist. They tried to set up shop in Victoria in 1946, but ran afoul of a little shotgun-aided population regulation.

  And then, for reasons not fully explored, the myna numbers went into something of a tailspin. By the 1960s, they were down to a few thousand, then to a few hundred in the early 1990s. An extensive survey by members of the Vancouver Natural History Society in 1999 revealed just five individuals. As my flight left the tarmac in Calgary, there were thought to be only two Crested Mynas remaining on the entire North American continent. I was off to find them.

  How hard could it be? Vancouver has an area of 113 square kilometres, and two Crested Mynas sitting side by side occupy approximately one one-billionth of that area. I gave myself a 50/50 chance. There was a 50 percent chance that I wouldn’t be able to find one, and a 50 percent chance that I would be able to convince myself that I had seen one, even if I hadn’t. At the very least, it would be a chance to visit my family and give them further proof of my bird-related insanity.

  I had been told that the best spot to search for the remaining two birds was the slightly dishevelled warehouse district south of False Creek at the intersection of 1st and Wylie. Mynas had been known to nest in a building occupied by Maynards Auctioneers and to roost in a building across the street occupied by Best Facilities Services Ltd. These buildings had the advantage of having lost some of their bricks. The owners had never replaced the bricks, giving the mynas access to the space behind. Instead of occupying one of the many beautiful parks in Vancouver and surrounding communities, Crested Mynas had decided to make their last North American stand in the sort of neighbourhood even a mugger might shun on a foggy night but for the security provided by the local constabulary one block south and the police dog training centre one block north.

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my mother explained to my teachers that I was “sensitive” and had to be handled gently. Even now, I think that my mother feels that I am at risk of being mistreated by a cruel world. Therefore, when I told her about my journey to find mynas in a beaten-up warehouse district she was more than pleased to tag along to take care of me.

  As I peered out through the windshield of her Honda Civic at the grey February drizzle, I could swear that a myna was sitting on the power line just above the car. It was black, just about the right size, and if I squinted, I could see a crest and some white on its wings. When I got out of the car for a better look, the bird transformed itself magically into one of the few hundred European Starlings that I was to see that day. Well, that would have been too easy anyway.

  Mynas are non-migratory. When they set up shop, they don’t wander very far afield, and so we had a pretty small area to cover. We walked the alleys, and twitched at every starling or crow that flew by. Local bird experts had instructed me to kick dumpsters where mynas might be feeding and shake bushes where they could be roosting. This stirred up only House Sparrows. The area has probably never had designs on being posh. There was an automobile axle repair shop, a windshield repair shop, offices of a radio station, and a dealer of concrete garden gnomes. I spotted starlings, robins, crows, sparrows, and gulls, but not a single Crested Myna.

  After about an hour, another myna hunter showed up. He told us that he was from Toronto, in Vancouver on business. As a birdwatcher, he couldn’t resist the thrill of the hunt. After thirty minutes of walking and twitching together, the insistent drizzle turned to a very convincing downpour, and our new friend from Toronto gave up and drove away. What a wimp! Five minutes after that, my mother drove off in search of a coffee shop. My own mother! A quitter! Didn’t she realize the importance of this quest?

  I wasn’t crestfallen. I wasn’t disheartened. I may have been just a teeny bit bored. I noticed that Maynards was having an End-of-Season-Clearance Event. King- and queen-size duvet covers were going for $24.99, and a dressing gown would set you back only $30. If you could see past the February rain with optimism, you might be in the market for a summer halter top for $10. The bras and panties were probably flying out the door at $10 and $5, respectively. I couldn’t imagine what an auction house was doing with scads of ladies undergarments. Perhaps they had previously been worn by someone famous.

  The workers at Maynards gradually trickled in to work. They knew all about the mynas. After all, people from all over North America had been flying to Vancouver to see them for years. The workers seemed bemused that people would spend a perfectly good Saturday morning standing in the rain looking for some stupid birds. One of the employees stood behind me making loud “chirp! chirp!” noises. The workers might have felt themselves considerably less foolish than I, but I felt I had the ultimate revenge. I was enjoying myself on a Saturday morning. They were emptying garbage cans at a warehouse. Further, when I go to work, nobody makes me wear a purple pinafore with the company name on it and auction off cheap panties.

  It started to rain harder, and the day’s best myna-spotting time had already passed. I didn’t want my efforts to be a complete waste, so when my mother returned from her coffee hunt I suggested that we check out some of the spots in Vancouver that had been associated with the Crested Myna in decades past. First we drove to Sir Guy Carleton School, which had, according to local myna lore, housed large wintering flocks as late as the 1960s. It is a grand old monolith of a school, with the sort of crevice-rich gothic architecture that roosting mynas loved and that frightened the High Holy Hell out of five-year-old children on their first day of school.

  Having seen the scary school, I suggested that we try the neighbourhood around Carrall and Cordova streets, which had, half a century before, been the epicentre of Vancouver Crested Myna activity, with a cast of thousands assembling in midwinter. Buildings in the area had been described to me as elaborately corniced. Although I have no idea what a cornice is, it sounded ideal for a Crested Myna. “You know that’s right downtown?” my mother asked. It seemed an odd question. “Are we in a hurry? I thought we had the whole day free,” I replied. “Oh, we do, we do,” came her response in a voice that sounded as though she knew something important that I didn’t.

  We got to the indicated intersection and I jumped out of the car with my camera bag, ready to get a few shots of the building facades that had made the neighbourhood so popular with mynas. My mother stayed in the car and immediately locked the doors. It was then that I realized that I might have stepped into the wrong sort of neighbourhood for a guy in dress slacks, a mountaineering jacket, and a camera bag full of expensive gear. The neighbourhood was falling to the wrecker’s ball, but not nearly quickly enough. Oh well, how bad could it get?
After all, there was a gaggle of eight police officers across the street. As I walked toward a likely looking photo opportunity, the police officers jumped on an uncooperative gentleman, tossed him into the back of a van with no windows, and drove off. This left me without any backup.

  With no disrespect to the perfectly nice people who live and work in that district, I figured that I might be in some kind of trouble. A dishevelled-looking character shuffled toward me. He seemed to be able to focus on me only if he used one eye at a time. “Nice-looking camera.” “Uh, yeah” was the only really appropriate response I could think of, composing and focusing as quickly as I could. “How much is it worth?” he asked. Oh Lord! In a scene straight out of the film The Omega Man, a small crowd of zombies started to form around me. I snapped a quick photo of an old building, any old building, repacked my camera bag, and walked smartly back to the car, trying to hold my shoulders in a way that suggested that I might be tougher than I actually am.

  My mother was laughing to the point of choking. Perhaps her laughing would save me the trouble. She was still laughing fifteen minutes later, barely able to navigate her car. She had spent a chunk of her working life in a government office building just a couple of blocks away. Unlike her innocent son, she knew that the neighbourhood had the worst reputation for violence in western Canada but had chosen not to tell me. I hope that she is still laughing when it occurs to her that I will get to choose the retirement complex that she will eventually have to live in.

  IT WAS A TIME TO CALL IN a big gun. Brian Self is a head bird guru with the Vancouver Natural History Society. Hearing that I had come up empty on Saturday, he enthusiastically offered to have a go with me on Sunday. As my mother and I set off for our second trip to the warehouse district, the skies were peeing down, but by the time we arrived it had settled into a light gullywasher. To show our enthusiasm, we arrived fifteen minutes before the appointed time. Even so, Brian had arrived fifteen minutes before that, no doubt hoping to find the birds and be ready to point them out the moment we stepped out of the Honda Civic. To that point, his efforts had yielded exactly zero mynas.

  Brian was my perfect image of a bird enthusiast in Vancouver in February. Imagine the character Gilligan, played by actor Bob Denver in the mid-’60s sitcom Gilligan’s Island. Age Gilligan by about forty years. Give him a grey beard and a ponytail. After all, the castaways were bound to have run out of razor blades and broken all of their styling scissors after four decades on a tropical island. By this time, Gilligan was probably in need of eyeglasses and would have figured out that a raincoat, rain pants, and stout rubber boots were more appropriate for a tropical island. They were certainly perfect for Vancouver on a rainy February morning, even though the well-worn canvas hat was still part of the ensemble.

  Brian and I spent ninety minutes walking the same streets and back alleys that I had covered the previous day. Mom remained behind in the car, promising to watch the warehouse buildings for likely looking birds. Like me, Brian has developed the endlessly valuable talent of being able to walk almost silently, even in rain pants. Also like me, he had a twitchy gait and spoke in sentence fragments as an endless stream of starlings flitted by, each requiring a quick scan with binoculars. He pointed out spots in alleys that had been favourite foraging spots for mynas before a new coat of blacktop had replaced the previous cracked and weedy surface.

  We covered all of the likely spots twice, with an increasing sense that we were probably out of luck. Brian spoke about suspected roosting sites further to the south, but he didn’t seem wholly convinced. Only once did he allow that maybe the Vancouver birds had shuffled off this mortal coil, passing away quietly in a crevice in an old building. Even so, after following the comings and goings of mynas for many years, he wasn’t in a big hurry to write them off.

  Ask any four bird enthusiasts in British Columbia why their Crested Mynas went into a tailspin and you will get fourteen and a half different theories. Mynas really like fruit and insects, but the foraging opportunities afforded by Vancouver in its earlier days no longer exist; a lot of agricultural land has been turned over to urban sprawl. Railways eventually figured out that spilling grain was not particularly cost-effective, so that source of myna food was cut off. Some people suggested that horse droppings had been an important source of food for mynas, now lost. I would like to suggest that if mynas hadn’t been able to find anything better to eat than horseshit, they may all have committed suicide.

  The neighbourhood around the Cambie Street Bridge has its fair share of fast-food restaurants. Brian felt that one of the best ways to find mynas was to kick open-topped dumpsters, where they had the opportunity to forage for discarded French fries. Perhaps the Crested Myna was another unfortunate victim of the fast-food industry.

  It also seemed that mynas had never really figured out that Vancouver was colder, damper, and generally more miserable than their native Southeast Asia. The concept of paying a lot of attention to their eggs and chicks in cold weather completely evaded them. When heating costs were low, buildings in Vancouver were poorly insulated, so there was abundant opportunity to breed in the comparative warmth of cracks and crevices. When heating costs rose and buildings became better insulated, myna reproductive success fell.

  Everyone loves a scapegoat, and in the bird world the European Starling is one of the favourites. Also an introduced species, numbering in the uncounted millions in North America, starlings expanded into the Vancouver region in the 1950s. Ecologically similar to mynas, starlings were likely competitors for limited food and cavities in which to nest.

  I am not convinced by any of this. My favourite explanation for the myna decline is a little more technical. If the North American population was founded by just one or two pairs, then every myna would have been involved in consanguineous matings for over a century. It wouldn’t have taken too many years for all mynas to be virtual clones of one another. Their contingent would have been so incredibly inbred, so horribly genetically impoverished, that they may have just run out of steam. For Crested Mynas in North America, the gene pool had become a little too shallow.

  There is an odd legal angle to the Crested Myna story. If these birds had been native to North America, or if they had arrived there under their own steam, when their population first started to decline they would have received the full protection and support of the governments of Canada and British Columbia. At the very least this would have involved protection of the mynas’ favourite haunts (here I envision a lot more dumpsters), allowance for suitable feeding opportunities (perhaps in the form of tax incentives for burger joints), possibly a captive breeding program, and probably a program of translocation of mynas from the Orient to supplement their impoverished reservoir of genetic variation. Instead, they represented members of an invasive species, introduced to North America by humans. Hence, when their population went into a tailspin, the species was absolutely and completely screwed. When all was said and done, it appeared that the Crested Myna had had its day in North America.

  I HAD TRAVELLED a couple of thousand kilometres to see the last North American Crested Mynas, and despite my best efforts I had been completely shut out. That isn’t really much of a story, and a bit depressing. But then I got a lucky break. I heard a rumour about a Crested Myna held in a wildlife recovery centre north of Vancouver on the Sunshine Coast. My older brother, Reagan, lives on that part of the coast, and I put him on to it. He called back a few minutes later, explaining that he had found the bird, and that its keepers would be willing to see me.

  Surely there is a special place in Heaven for people who devote themselves to the aid of distressed animals. If so, then Clint and Irene Davy will be strolling through passport control at Heaven’s gates while waving heartily at sinners. Sick and injured animals are presumably not the only things in Clint and Irene’s lives, but they represent a pretty good chunk of it. They operate a wildlife rehabilitation centre out of their home just off the highway that runs up British Columbia’s Sunshine
Coast. There may be a type of injured animal that they would turn away, but I cannot imagine what sort of beast it would be. Perhaps a three-legged skunk with tapeworms.

  One animal that they had not turned away was a Crested Myna that they had named “Morris” … as in Morris the Myna … as in Morris Minor … as in the car. I am not a real big fan of puns. In anticipation of my visit, Clint and Irene had dug through their files to find out exactly when Morris had come to live with them. It was May 31, 1986. Morris had been brought to them as a youngster, along with a sibling that had died shortly afterward. The Davys had been living in Richmond, on the mainland, at the time, and when Morris was healthy enough to release, they had been advised against doing so by folks at the Vancouver Natural History Society, who reasoned that with the Crested Myna population dropping so quickly, Morris could do a lot worse than to live out his life in captivity. Although there is little data available, the record for longevity in a Crested Myna in North America appears to be that of a banded individual who held out for eleven years and two months. Morris was demolishing that record.

  Although other rescued birds were put safely away in cages, Morris flew freely in the Davys’ “bird room.” He was particularly keen to perch on a tree branch toward the ceiling, out of the reach of the strange person who had just arrived to invade his world. It wasn’t hard to lure him down, though; I just had to extend my left arm with a mealworm on my palm and then look away as if I wasn’t the least bit interested in him. Morris had beautiful shiny feathers, a clean vent and nostrils, and clear eyes. Clint and Irene put Morris’s great health at such an advanced age down to good nutrition. He was given an endless supply of grapes, bird seed, mealworms, and dog and cat food. He was noisy to the point where at times it was impossible for us to hear each other speak. There was an air of superiority about Morris. But then, I suppose he had a reason to feel a bit lofty. As far as I or anyone else could tell, he was the only representative of his species for many thousands of kilometres, and he wasn’t likely to ever see another bird quite like himself.