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Nursing care: Be feeds parent birds in her farm. — VNS Photo Going for a song : A bird fancier ponders the range of species on sale. — VNS Photos Van Vi

by Lang Nhi & Viet Thang

The hill myna would surely have something to say about the Vietnamese expression noi nhu khuou, which literally means to be as talkative as a songbird, but is used to refer to children and elderly people who are grandstanders or boasters.

This bird, known to Vietnamese people as either nhong or yeng and to scientists as Gracular religiosa, would never win a singing contest but almost always has something to talk about.

The bird is so highly prized for its speech that people often hold competitions to see whose hill myna is the best mimic of human voices.

It’s not as simple as simply talking to the bird as you feed it, and hoping it will pick up a few words. Like athletes, the birds must be fed carefully and trained regularly if they are put in a medal-winning performance.

However, the sounds of the mynas and songbirds are gradually disappearing from the forests and the countryside, as more and more of them are captured to be sold to city dwellers.

Although she has long profited from dealing in poached birds, 60-year-old Nguyen Thi Be is hoping she will be able to keep the birds in the wild where they belong, after she became the first person to successfully help the birds give birth in captivity in April last year.

Be, who lives in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau, is known as the Lady of Hill Mynas, and has been raising them and other caged birds for 10 years.

Bird lovers come from all over Viet Nam to either buy her trained birds, which are fluent in Vietnamese, Chinese and English, or to have her teach their own animals.

The myna breeder said she is keen to co-operate with any domestic or foreign wildlife organisation that wants to learn her breeding technique with the aim of preventing their extinction in the wild by repopulating their native habitats.

Cooped up

Be is a graduate of the Higher Art School, but she fell on hard times and had to give up her painting to work in a range of odd jobs in HCM City.

By chance, she met two men in a carpentry yard in 1995 when she was looking for materials to build a chicken coop.

The two men were also making bird cages, and she asked them what kind of birds the cages were for.

They said they were building cages to raise yen phung, or canaries, and she went with them to their homes to buy a few of their birds. However, she could only afford to buy a few of their weaker breeding pairs.

Through her determination, Be gradually taught herself how to breed the birds.

Eight months later, her first generation of canaries hatched, and they were more colourful than the canaries bred by the two men.

The two men did not understand how she could breed better birds than them, and asked her many questions. They even searched through her rubbish to see what she was feeding her birds, as if that held the secret to her success.

Not long afterwards, Be registered for the bird contest at the annual spring flower fair in HCM City.

She entered 50 colourful canaries that received much praise from onlookers, but because the judges only award prizes to the best and most unusual songbirds, she only returned home with a certificate congratulating her for her creative efforts.

Ever since then, Be has been one of the most successful bird breeders in southern Viet Nam. Bird lovers flocked to her and bought all of her bright canaries.

With the money she earned from the canaries, Be thought back to the prize-winning hill mynas at the bird contest and decided to invest in the talking birds.

She bought one breeding pair of hill mynas from a catcher in Binh Phuoc Province for VND800,000 (about US$53), but her lack of experience betrayed her. One bird died and the other flew away.

Disheartened but not discouraged, she returned to Binh Phuoc’s Bu Dang and Bu Dop districts to find an experienced catcher who could provide her with 20 birds.

The bird breeder was determined to convince her family to allow her to return to her native town of Ngai Giao, where she could raise the birds and teach them to speak.

To pay for the upkeep of the mynas, Be also had to raise rabbits, quail and ornamental fish. When the bottom fell out of the quail egg market, Be’s investment went up in smoke.

However, fortune smiled on Be. Her hill mynas began to speak just as her quails failed.

At the annual Tao Dan Spring Flower Fair in 1996, she won a gold medal for her hill mynas, who could say "Who’s that?" "Here comes a visitor," "Hello, I am a Vietnamese nhong," "How are you?" and "Goodbye" in Vietnamese, Chinese and English.

Be’s hill mynas scored her a hat-trick at the fair, as she won the gold in 1997 and 1998. Her talking birds are now famous across Viet Nam, and have fetched up to VND5 million ($333).

The breeder now says she’ll never forget the day her mynas first mimicked the human voice.

New challenges

As her business began to take off, Be wondered how she could protect the birds in the wild by breeding them in captivity. The hill mynas had never been bred in cages before.

Her attempts were frowned upon by others, who called her efforts silly – everyone knew it was impossible, so why bother?

Despite what people said, Be’s first hill myna chick hatched out of its shell on April 30 last year.

"At that moment, I wept for joy," she says.

The attention she experienced after winning gold in the late ’90s was nothing compared to her new-found fame, as she was written up in the papers and even described as the Lady of Hill Mynas.

"Hill mynas born in captivity are more intelligent and easier to teach to talk than those born in the wild, because they inherit the knowledge from their domesticated parents," Be reckons.

Her average bird now sells for about VND500,000, but demand far outstrips supply.

To keep her going, she trains other people’s birds to speak for a small fee.

"If you want to train hill mynas to speak, you need to be patient. The bird needs to know you, and you need to provide it with the right food and water."

Be gets up with the sparrows, at about 4am, so she can teach the birds to speak. Then she feeds them and cleans their cages.

Although the birds are widely believed to be picky eaters, Be begs to differ.

However, the birds should be fed just the right amount of meat each day to provide them with vitamins, and they must also be given pure water.

During the heat of the summer, the birds also need to be bathed as much as possible.

Be’s main source of income is now from breeding various kinds of birds and teaching the mynas to speak.

She charges about VND2 million for six months of training, but this is not enough to allow her to further invest in her captive breeding research.

The breeder has knocked back a few requests from foreign and domestic tourist operators, who have approached her with the idea of expanding her hill myna breeding programme.

Be confided to Viet Nam News that although she wants to popularise her breeding techniques, she only wants to co-operate with environmental agencies who use her research to ensure the birds do not go extinct in the wild. — VNS