Angry Mynah bird blows up traffic camera on highway – NBC New York

An angry mynah bird has become the star of a viral video after landing in front of a traffic camera in New Zealand.

The black-and-yellow tropical bird looks curiously at a camera overlooking a stretch of road near Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, its beak open and what appears to be a loud squawk. It then flies off and returns for a few more seconds.

The video was posted to Facebook on October 21 by the New Zealand Transport Agency, which operates the cameras, and joked that the bird “needs to mind its own business.”

“The mynah bird is a pest of New Zealand – it is aggressive towards our native birds, destroying their nests, eating native fruit and taking over the territory of other birds, so this was definitely not a welcome cameo on our cameras,” the agency said. said.

Mynah birds, which can imitate human speech and are often kept as pets, are native to Asia. First introduced to New Zealand in the 1860s, by the mid-20th century they had spread across the North Island and began to disrupt native ecosystems, leading to them being classified as an invasive species.

“This type of myna irritation can make it difficult to monitor the road,” the agency said. “Fortunately, the myna didn’t stay here for long and we were soon able to restore a bird’s eye view of the road.”

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