Asian Bulbul

by Mara
(New Jersey, formerly Hawaii)

While living on Oahu for a couple years, one of my coworkers found a baby bird hopping around the parking lot at our job.

There were lots of mynah, and the baby was black like the mynahs, so we figured that must be it.

But all day we checked on it and at the end of the day everyone was concerned but nobody wanted to rescue it so I did.

I'm a northeastern US city girl so what do I know. I took it home and checked a bird book in the library for mynahs and found that they eat fruit, so I bought some at the store and borrowed a bird cage.

Apparently a fledgling, he became quite used to being hand fed and quite spoiled at being allowed to sit on the cage instead of inside.

In about a week he learned to fly and was making a mess in the room, so we made more of an effort to put him inside the cage where he would bang into the door with his head until we let him out.

Sometimes he'd keep it up until the area just above his beak was bleeding from the impact. He was stubborn.

One day my friend cut the skin off a mango and laid it on the top of the cage, and the bird went over to it, pecked on it once or twice, then carried it over to the edge of the cage and dropped it on the floor.

My friend saw this and picked it up and put it back, whereupon the bird repeated the carrying/dropping.

My friend said look how smart that bird is to carry it all over. I said look how smart that bird is to throw it away and watch you get up again and again to pick it up for him. That was the end of that game.

We had a teacup Maltese and she'd be on the bed with us while we watched TV, and the bird would fly off the cage and land near her, and several times we smacked the dog and took the bird out of her mouth (she only had 3 little teeth left) only to find out finally, as they stared at each other and circled each other like two Old West gunslingers, that the bird actually was the antagonist and would jump at the dog till she grabbed him.

We clipped his wings a little to keep him from flying so high and fast in our place, but they grew back so quickly it was a job to keep up.

We didn't need air conditioning on the north shore where we lived, so we only had a fan in the room, and you can imagine the mess the bird would make when he'd perch on the cage around the fan and just sit there for hours during which time it had to occasionally poop and relieve itself.

And then after about a month it started to change - it was all black except for this red spot under his butt.

His head and tail feathers, all black, looked like a cardinal. Oops, not a mynah bird. No wonder he wouldn't talk.

Back to the bird book to find that he was an Asian bulbul, brought to Hawaii where it's considered a "junk" bird.

Looks like a cardinal but has the personality of an obnoxious blue jay.

When he finally got to be too much work and was flying around like a fighter jet, we took him to a park and let him go.

He was a LOT of work and didn't seem to miss us once he was out.