Mynah birds: intelligent, loud, evil, profitable - and tasty.
Loud, intelligent, evil: mynah birds were the scourge of my parents' home in the 1980s. The damned pests would roost in the large bamboo stand which acted as a windbreak and privacy screen, then decide to hold a massive avian argument at 3AM, destroying M&D's sleep/wake schedule. In order to prevent the damn things from making a habit of roosting there, my father would fire off several rounds of bird shot in the late afternoon to frighten them off. This ended after a month or so when the local police arrived to notify my father his occasional gunshots were disturbing the neighbors. He quickly resorted to a bounty placed on each and every dead mynah bird I managed to deliver to him. $5/bird was a massive incentive in early 1980, so I spent some time zeroing in my air rifle, then proceeded to wait for the nasty creatures to arrive.

Mynah birds are very intelligent: the black bastards knew when I was sitting on the deck armed with an air rifle and when I had nothing to threaten them with. Their scouts would warn the rest of the flock away, then quickly give the all clear when my rifle was no longer present. I would stalk away once they had begun to roost, only to return to an empty bamboo grove. The early AM ruckus continued.

2 weeks after I had attempted to claim my first bounty, I discovered a solution to my plight. My mother walked into the master bedroom and quietly exclaimed, "what are you doing?" I was sitting cross-legged on dad's snoring bed (I'll save the details for a future marital bliss thread) with all the bay windows open wide and the screens removed. I was in the process of drawing a bead on a loud black-with-yellow pest and took the shot as my mother asked her question, dropping one of the feathered fuckers. I then turned to her and explained my solution to the mynah bird problem and dad's generous bounty. As our house had been designed by Hans Riecke in the early 80s, it took very little advantage of natural light for interior illumination. This meant I could easily see out of the bay window while the birds couldn't discern my threatening outline inside the house. I managed to kill another 3 birds before the rest of the group became alarmed and took flight. Mom was pleased with the solution, as was dad, and apparently killing a handful of the birds was enough to scare away the flock for a few days. Dad showed me how to clean my kills, and mom would cook them up, which gave us the double thrill of feasting on our enemies' remains. I would freak out the occasional friend who visited after school hours and hung around for dinner when we were serving that day's kills.

The rest of my high school years would see me return from classes to check on the status of the bamboo stand and, if populated, a brief but productive target session would ensue before I headed back out to play. I averaged about $50/week which meant I really didn't need to find any sort of part time job during my high school years, although I did end up working the ginacas and later driving the trucks for the local pineapple plant for my junior and senior years prior to leaving my home island for college in a neighboring county.
( Felis Concolor, Thu 29 Dec 2011, 4:42, Reply)