{"id":1829,"date":"2008-12-11T21:09:44","date_gmt":"2008-12-11T13:09:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=1829"},"modified":"2008-12-11T21:09:44","modified_gmt":"2008-12-11T13:09:44","slug":"bystanders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2008\/12\/11\/bystanders\/","title":{"rendered":"Bystanders"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"blog-mynah\"I was driving home along Hougang avenue 7 one day and this little commotion on the road divider caught my attention as I was waiting at a\u00a0traffic light junction.<\/p>\n

It was a cluster of mynahs (members of the starling family) chirping away on the grass lawn of the divider. On closer observation, there were 2 birds in the center engaging in\u00a0a beak fight. One of them was obviously the tougher fellow as it was gaining on the other one. Were these two fellas fighting\u00a0over a\u00a0female mate\u00a0or territory?\u00a0It was quite a spectacle of birdie\u00a0aggression and tension\u00a0indeed.<\/p>\n

The other mynahs were, well, watching on. My goodness, as the fight progressed on, more and more mynahs landed and fluttered about\u00a0the perimeter of\u00a0the duel. There were at least 10-15 avian onlookers. They seemed to be speculating the outcome of the fight and cheering on or jeering at the fighters. What busy bodies and so like many of us!\u00a0 Did they pick up this behavior from living in close proximity to humans?<\/p>\n

I remember\u00a0one of my zoology lecturers mentioned about mynahs in road kills. He said that they were usually so engrossed in their\u00a0quarrels that made them oblivious to any on-coming danger such as\u00a0approaching vehicles.<\/p>\n

Yang\u00a0might tell you another human behaviour we saw in another mynah the other day near his parents’ place. :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was driving home along Hougang avenue 7 one day and this little commotion on the road divider caught my attention as I was waiting at a\u00a0traffic light junction. It was a cluster of mynahs (members of the starling family)<\/p>\n

Read More Bystanders<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[644],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything-else","wpcat-644-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}