As I sat for a coffee in Brunz the other day, sharing my table with a beady-eyed miner, I figured this is a conversation rewarded by authoritative insights. Who better to turn to than Tim Low – many readers will have heard him speak at the Byron Writers Festival. His book Where Song Began: Australia’s Birds and How They Changed the World (2014) Penguin Books Australia is a delight to encounter.
Low reveals that miners form colonies that co-operate to defend their area of occupation, against almost all other bird species through aggressive behaviour, physically attacking most other birds. As a result of their aggression, miners often comprise more than 50 per cent of all birds present and are increasing in abundance. They may break eggs and kill chicks of other birds.
Noisy miners are able to exclude almost all passerine (perching) birds that are similar in size or smaller than themselves. Birds larger than miners can be repelled but are not always attacked and may even cooperate with the miners. Tim Low cites experience of butcherbirds, crows and magpies joining in the attacks of other birds and pied currawongs foregoing meals of miner chicks to win acceptance.
Noisy miners are also believed to be culprits in the degradation and dieback of woodlands because their feeding habits do not remove as many herbivore insects (e.g. lerps) as other small birds. The activity of noisy miners is listed as a ‘key threatening process’ under the NSW Threatened Species Act in Sept 2013 and the federal EPBC Act in March 2013.
Low warns that as climate change occurs, noisy miners will also handicap eucalypts by reducing the mobility of pollen. To produce seedlings with a future, trees will need pollen from drier and hotter places, not pollen from the next tree. Droughts that thin forests will aid miners. Lorikeets, red wattlebirds and flying foxes will assume more importance in the future as they can spread pollen widely, little deterred by miners.
If our reader, dear editor, is interested further, then the ever-passionate Dr Anne Jones is worth a look. Noisy miners: when good birds go bad. The Secret Lives Of Our Urban Birds (www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rIAJTdvQxw). To discover more about Tim Low’s words about Australian birds you might like to watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isKgMfKkLfM&t=64s)
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