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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan : The Hill Maynah : The Sunday Statesman : 01 March 2015
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THE HILL MYNAH

" THE Grackle or Hill Mynah is one of those birds which most people know better in a cage or aviary than in the native jungles for it is widely celebrated as a talker and a mimic. In fact, many consider it as finest mimic among birds, and it is not only in our country that it has this unique reputation - it belongs almost exclusively to India, but every cage-bird fancier in the rest of Asia, and in Europe, and in America, knows it.

However, I am no cage bird fancier, and I can tell you that few birds revel more in their freedom. It is not in every hill range that you can find the Hill Mynah, it lives exclusively in the treetops, and it is in well-wooded forests, above a certain elevation, that it makes its home. Though a most accomplished mimic with a considerable repertoire of clearly enunciated phrases and snatches of tunes when trained, in nature it has no song, nor even many calls - the commonest of these is a loud, rich, long-drawn call, suggestive to the human ear and mind of zestful joy. It is a bird that goes about in pairs and small parties, flying from tree to tree on quick wings.

At Siruvani, on the borders of Palghat and Coimbatore, I spent an afternoon last year on the shore of a dam-fed lake. The elevation of that place was not great, about 3500 feet or so, and the vegetation there suggested, except for the clumps of bamboos, an evergreen forest. Lofty trees, such as Poon, towered to the skies and the undershrub was succulent, broad-leaved and darkly green. The lake, reflecting the vegetative luxuriance that ringed it, was a deep viridian, with a sudden transition to cerulean in the middle where it mirrored the sky, and when a breeze stirred its surface there were ripples of glinting silver all over. I spent hours at this delightful spot, watching two pairs of Hill Mynahs.

They will perch on a leafless bough on top of the great tree beneath which I sat, coming out from time to time with low musical conversational sounds, varied by a harsher, more guttural note. Then one pair will fly away, with a brief warbled call, very reminiscent of the trisyllabic flight-call of the Common Mynah, but richer in tone; they will fly straight and fast, the white-banded wings whirring right across the lake to a tree on the other bank, almost a furlong away. I could see them quite clearly through my binoculars, but frequently they disappeared into the foliage of that tree, possibly to feed on their fruit - I could not identify that their rich-toned, fluent call will come clear across the water, and presently the pair on my tree will depart, with their quickly-warbled flight-call, to join their companions, or else to find their way to some other tree on the further bank.

Often the birds would fly right away, beyond the field of my vision, but invariably they returned to my tree, to perch on the naked top bough. Even in the open, beneath a clear sky, they looked black all over except where the sun touched up an irridescent green or purple highlight in the plumage, but the cadmium yellow of the wattles and the beak and the legs stood out clear against the dark body. The Southern Hill Mynah, not quite so long, but squatter and heavier in build.

These Hill Mynahs, are not, in point of fact, closely related to the true Mynahs, that they resemble superficially. They are classed apart in a family by themselves, and even in their habits they differ much from the ground-loving Mynahs, which eat quite a lot of insect food besides fruits. Hill Mynahs are wholly arboreal and are fruit-eaters. In captivity they are sometimes fed a little finely minced meat, and while it seems to do them no harm (any bird that eats figs takes in , willy-nilly, a certain amount of larval fare), I doubt if it does them any good.

Hill Mynahs seem to keep themselves to themselves, even outside taxonomical classifications. So far as I know, they do not seem to associate with other birds, as the true Mynahs do freely, at fig-tree feasts. Incidentally, they are by no means birds confined to evergreen forests. I have never seen so many Hill Mynahs as in the deciduous forests of Mudumalai, where the picture I offer was taken."

-M. Krishnan

This was first published on 28 December 1958 in The Sunday Statesman


#The photograph of pairs of Hill Mynahs perched on a leafless bough on top of a great tree is not reproduced here.