I Painted A Portrait of the World’s Most Hated Bird

The final portrait of two Common Mynas in watercolor and graphite.

If you visit Hawaii, you’ll probably see lots of birds: Red-crested Cardinal, Japanese White-eye, Saffron Finch, Zebra Dove to name a few. Problem is, these birds are not native to Hawaii; they’re introduced. Birders and biologists alike are distressed by the toll that invasive species have taken on Hawaii’s native birds, many of which have gone extinct. But non-birding tourists know none of this. To them, all these birds in Hawaii are just … birds.

This was the case for a woman who contacted me a while back. She had just returned from Hawaii and while staying at a friend’s home, she and her husband befriended a pair of Common Mynas.

Common Myna (Acridotheres tristis) is native to Asia but over the past 150 years has been introduced to various locations around the world including Australia, Florida, Madagascar, Japan, the Middle East, and Hawaii. Mynas are very gifted mimics (you can hear one talking in this video).

Not only are they very chatty but they are incredibly good at reproducing, earning them a place on the list of the One Hundred of the World’s Worst Invasive Species.

From the perspective of my new clients, however, these Common Mynas represented a wonderful experience in a beautiful place. In looking at these birds, they didn’t see an invasive species; they saw a pair of individual birds that they cared about.

Now if you know much about birds, you probably know that individual animals are often very difficult to tell apart. Males and females of some species may have plumage differences but all Common Mynas look identical to one another. Except in the case of the bird I was asked to paint: this bird had a limp.

Compositional studies of the Myna pair with the limping bird in front.

Leg injuries in birds are rare or at least, they’re not observed very frequently. I don’t know if that’s because birds don’t survive these kinds of injuries or if such mishaps don’t happen very much. When a bird has a broken leg and survives, it makes that individual easy to recognize. So it was with the Common Myna who caught the attention of my clients. When planning their visit, the homeowner asked them to feed these Mynas because he’d become fond of the gimpy bird and its mate.

Thumbnail studies in pencil. I spent hours trying to figure out the best way to depict the funky gait of the injured bird.

As a former bird biologist and being married to an avid birder, I knew all the backstory on Common Mynas and how they got to Hawaii. And like many folks who have some understanding of ecology, invasive species, and the like, I have to admit that I had a low opinion of them. But one of the things that got my attention about this commission was how my clients and their friend didn’t see a hated non-native species. They saw a bird with a funny walk who they could recognize and care for.

After drawing these birds over and over, I fell in love with them, too. I watched a fuzzy video frame by frame trying to figure out what the nature of the bird’s injury might be. I spent hours trying to capture the gait of the galloping bird. My sketches for this project are some of my favorites of all I’ve ever done.

Trying to capture the wonky gait of the focal bird.

The experience of drawing a portrait of what is perhaps the world’s most hated bird has affected me in another way. I see lots birds every day that I look down my nose at: House Sparrows, Starlings, Collared Doves. These are non-native species, too, living in my own little neighborhood in Corvallis, Oregon. I’ve always thought of them as bad, undesirable, unwanted, destructive. And maybe they are, to some degree. But on the other hand, they’re just birds, doing what birds do. They didn’t ask to get introduced; it’s not their fault that they don’t belong here.

I’d like to think that my art can contribute to the protection and conservation of birds. But on a deeper level, I want my art to stand for love and kindness. Ultimately, that’s what this illustration of a pair of Common Myna is about: compassion toward a creature who looked a little different. I think there’s a lot to be learned from that.

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