WILD THINGS: A PARKING LOT TAG TEAM MATCH

It was 7:30 a.m. in the McDonald’s drive-through line. The sun was low, the line was long, but the service was pretty good and things moved at an impressively brisk pace. I was in that no-man’s-land between paying and getting your food when I saw it – a sight I should have never seen..

It was a fight – a four-way fight – among a laughing gull, a white ibis, a common myna, and a rooster. They were brawling over some scrap of food. A chunk of bun? A hash brown? It was impossible to tell. It was too early to be a French fry. Maybe it was a slice of bacon, as it did not pull apart easily and lent itself to some serious tug o’ war.

The action was taking place off to the right, next to where they make you wait if they screwed up your order, or if you ordered something difficult. Two guys were sitting in a van with the side door open, looking as if they’d just placed bets on the birds.

On paper, the safest odds would be on the rooster. Weighing about 3 pounds and standing around 30 inches tall, it had the bulk, not to mention some seriously powerful neck muscles developed from a life of pecking at the ground. He also would have had experience, fighting on a regular basis over territories and potential mates.

But the white ibis, standing about 25 inches tall and weighing around 2 pounds, also had some game. While it seemed like a leggy, classy creature – the kind where, say, the ancient Egyptians might take its head, attach it to a human body, and call it a moon god (see: Thoth) – its long, decurved bill would allow it to sneak in from something of a distance and snatch things up like a martial arts expert who specialized in chopsticks.

The laughing gull came in at about 16 inches and three-quarters of a pound, making it a longshot, until you add in the professional ruthlessness with which laughing gulls live their lives. Maybe it would use its superior flight skills to swoop into the scrum. Maybe it would just use its hard-wired cunning and force of will.

The common myna, at just under 10 inches tall and a quarter of a pound, was Lilliputian by comparison, a total outlier. Mynas are in the same family as starlings, though, and they’re all smart birds, so it had intellect on its side. And the fact that the other birds were mostly

ignoring it meant that while the Clash of the Titans was going on above, it had a chance of sneaking in and grabbing whatever it was they were all fighting over. If it could grab the disputed food and bolt under a car before the others caught it, it’d be home free.

It was a surprisingly even battle. The rooster would grab the food target, the gull would jump in and rip it out of his mouth. But then the rooster would peck at him, and the gull would drop the food to defend himself. Then the common myna, with its yellow bandit mask, would rush in below the radar and grab it, and try to make off with it, and the white ibis would extend itself, stab at the food thing and pry it away.

It went on like this, in varying low-grade combat combinations, for some time – a round robin of conflict without any robins.

Conflict and competition aren’t anything new in the natural world. They’re part of the evolutionary process, though survival of the fittest is not quite the winner-takes-all principle that a lot of people believe.

What made the parking lot scuffle outside the natural order of things was that two of the species shouldn’t have been there – or even in the same hemisphere.

A rooster, a white ibis, a laughing gull and a common myna were seen fighting over food recently in a McDonald’s parking lot. MARK HEDDEN/Keys Weekly

Laughing gulls and white ibis are both native North American species, having evolved in the ecosystems in which they live, and generally thriving. Chickens and common mynas are both Old World species.

Chickens are more properly called red junglefowl, or Gallus gallus if you want to get Latin about it. They evolved in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and wandered out about 3,500 years ago, when cultivated rice patties started showing up in their neighborhood. It used to be thought that they were initially domesticated not as a food source, but because it was fun to bet on cock fights, but current thinking is they were somewhat revered. It is thought they made it to Europe about 2,800 years ago, Africa about 11,000 years ago, and the New World with the first Europeans, about 500 years ago.

The chickens we see in Key West and the Keys aren’t wild, but domesticated animals gone feral, basically products of a long process of unnatural selection that we, as a species, have pretty much abandoned.

The common mynas are the newest of the bunch. They also evolved in southern Asia, but were released in places like Hawaii and New Zealand, outside of their native ecosystem, as a form of insect control, though most agree the unintended consequences, such as raiding crops and making a lot of noise, outweighed their intended benefits.

Common mynas were first spotted in North America in Dade County in the 1980s, though they were most likely not intentionally introduced, but rather escaped pets. They were first seen in Key West in the mid 1990s.

While considered something of a plague in other places, their South Florida population has been rather slow growing, possibly even shrinking. (They used to breed in the sign at the Kmart plaza Publix, but haven’t in recent years.)

At the drive-through window, the woman had to grab my attention to give me my bacon, egg and cheese biscuit. I pulled into traffic after that and headed north. It wasn’t until I was across Cow Key Bridge when I realized I should have stuck around and watched to see how it all turned out.

Mark Hedden is a photographer, writer, and semi-professional birdwatcher. He has lived in Key West for more than 25 years and may no longer be employable in the real world. He is also executive director of the Florida Keys Audubon Society.