05/12/2025
It’s never easy sharing stories that make people uncomfortable but sometimes we’re the only ones who see what really happens. When suffering is unfolding right in front of you, and you know the victims don’t even share a language with us, you realize you have a responsibility not to look away. Since we are the only conservation organization doing this kind of work every single day, if we don’t tell these stories, no one will ever know they happen...
One of todays’ cases began with a call about a nestling African Hoopoe (a. Hoephoep; z. uZiningweni) that had supposedly fallen out of its nest. When we arrived, two Indian Mynas were actively attacking the chick on the lawn. It was maybe 4–5 days shy of fledging - too young to be out of the nest - so we immediately started investigating what actually happened.
The caller explained that the chick had squeezed out through a gap in the ceiling into a built-in cupboard in a home with a vaulted ceiling. While observing the area, we noticed a parent Hoopoe trying repeatedly to approach the baby, only to be driven off every time by the Mynas. That told us everything we needed to know.
By tracing the Mynas’ activity, we found exactly what we expected: they had taken over a Sparrow’s nest on the corner of the roof (a very common behaviour). Given the location of the ceiling gap and the timing, it became clear the Mynas had chased the Hoopoe chick out. Remember, Hoopoes often have 4-7 chicks per brood. If this was one escapee, there may be five or six we’ll never see.
They had already displaced the Sparrows too, leaving behind at least one abandoned egg that would never hatch. If it had hatched – the baby would just have been left to starve.
In the photos that follow you’ll see the original Sparrow nest, and then the typical Myna behaviour: adding layer upon layer to their nest with every brood, expanding it until it becomes a one to two square meter dry fire hazard packed with debris. Inside that mass of material, we found evidence of at least three lost indigenous birds and four parents who will now never nest on this property again.
This is exactly what “Alien Invasive Species” means: a species that outcompetes native wildlife that has spent millennia evolving together in a balanced ecosystem. AIS are tougher not because they’re “better,” but because we selected them for surviving human captivity and then brought them into environments where they have no natural predators, few limiting diseases, and where their broad diets give them an unfair advantage over specialists.
Is any of this the Mynas’ fault? Absolutely not!!
Animals are purposeful - they do what they’re built to do. This one's “job” simply isn’t meant to be done HERE. This is our fault: we created an artificial pathway for them to spread, one nature might never have taken on its own. Or at least not for thousands of years.
Urban wildlife faces many threats, but the biggest is us.
We need to stop focusing on who looks better to us and denying they have a function beyond pleasing us. We cannot keep blaming mysterious ancestors – the ones who aren’t here to fix our mistakes.
Instead WE need to take collective responsibility and acknowledge that it was OUR past behaviour - our species that did this to theirs and WE ARE HERE NOW. .
