LOST Magazine - The Extinction of Vancouver's Crested Mynahs
, Which means crested locust-tracker) is a largish blackbird, about the weight of a robin, with insignificant unblemished markings on the underside of its wings (just important when the bird is not flying), a thick yellow beak, and a tuft of deathly feathers between the eyes, where the beak meets the origin. It is not congenital to North America; it was introduced to Vancouver from southeast Asia in the last 1890s. There are several sombre legends about how this came about, most of them involving Chinese immigrants and birds in tenuous bamboo cages. One tells of an exasperated sea captain who, irked of the mynahs' unchanging chattering, smashed the cages and released the birds as one day as he caught wonder of dismount. The correctness is quite more tedious. Because of their mimetic skills, mynahs — not nothing but the Crested mix but also the more pushy Indian hill mynah — were amateur in Vancouver from the end of the 19th century until well into the circulate-war era. An beating the drum placed by the Vista-Sort...