The first wild Common Mynas Acridotheres tristis in Java: colonists or aviary escapees

Although the original distribution of the Common Myna Acridotheres tristis probably extended only from Uzbekistan and Iran in the west through the Indian sub-continent to southwest China in the east, since the early 1900s the species has spread throughout southeast Asia (see Wells 2007). It was not recorded on the Thai-Malay Peninsula until the 1920s, and in Singapore until 1936 (Hails & Jarvis 1987), but it is uncertain whether these populations were derived from natural range expansion or escaped aviary stocks (Wells 2007; Craig & Feare 2009; Seng 2009). The species was first recorded in Sumatra in 1975 in Jambi province, and although it was recorded from North Sumatra to South Sumatra over the following decade, no breeding was recorded, and all birds were considered to be the offspring of captive birds (Marle & Voous 1988; Holmes 1996). In Borneo the species was also first reported in 1975, in Brunei, but is now known to occur in cities in Sabah and Sarawak, as well as in plantations in East Kalimantan (Mann 2008; Phillipps & Phillips 2009; Iqbal et al. 2013). These populations are often presumed to be derived from captive stock, but could have originated from natural or ship-assisted colonisation (Mann 2008). This note describes the first records of the Common Myna on the island of Java.