Bird baby

One of our dogs caught a baby mynah bird learning to fly. The kids brought it home and our next door neighbor gave us a small cage, which we used the first night. My wife's mother and grandmother, true-life jungle people, were here, and my mother-in-law stuck food down the little thing (about 2 inches wide and three long - was longer but the tail feathers fell out) with a toothpick. It was allowed outside, wandered about in the grass some. I brought it in - it really can't travel well! But due to it objecting to me (it didn't yesterday; too hungry and scared I guess) I was able to get food into its open mouth. One pellet didn't go down (mixed with banana made too big a lump I guess) so I tried the heimlick maneuver, then resorted to pouring a capfull of water down. Seems to have worked. The poor guy sure quieted down. Tired, I think...
We put it in a basket with one of the remarkable fancy nests one sometimes finds about here – see second photo … but due to very cool rain, it’s now back inside, sleeping with head tucked under wing.
A Facebook friend from Australia sez: “The common Mynah is a very serious threat to the survival of many parrots. It is illegal to release one into the wild… Mynahs… deprive the other birds form nesting sites… love humans and their food scraps… have been called feathered cane toads by many biologists.” Another FB friend: hummingbirds “can fly 500 miles without stopping. Black birds eat them… The black bird she pointed to could be a raven. They sometimes fly with their mouths wide open.”

When i first came here, 1988, the area was still largely forest, the population was small, few roads were even paved and most houses were wood. Now there are "metaled" roads everywhere, lots of cement shop-houses built 20+ years ago and never ever used, and ubiquitous wi-fi. We do have lots of national park, more than any other province, which I am glad of, but the forestry department competes well as most graft-filled (police, state railway and a few others run about neck and neck) and schools are mostly for nationalistic indoctrination. Our world's a mess; I think Chiang Rai is one of the finest places in it. But I will eventually release the crow or myna. If it chooses to stick around, that's OK too.

sorry about the picture quality. cameras having become obsolete, one uses hand-phones, but I don't. With much exasperation (!) I took those shots with an old lap-top...

When I was a kid, both in Decatur GA and Ft Wayne IN, local hardware store had a mynah on a post and it could say a few words. Light chain around a foot, though

A friend adopted a baby bird, raising it until it could go off on its own. She ran an outdoor bar, where I'd sometimes sit. The little bird would fly down to visit... she'd feed it sunflower seeds from her mouth.