The “bully boys” of the bird world, noisy miners, were muscling up one afternoon when a flock of starlings strayed onto their patch outside the Hobart Aquatic Centre on the Domain.
The starlings didn’t stand a chance when they arrived to hunt insects in the mown grass surrounding the pool complex. They were soon sent on their way.
Noisy miners are often mistaken for an introduced species with a similar name, the Indian myna found in mainland cities. The noisy miners are actually members of the honeyeater clan which not only feed on pollen and nectar in foliage but also hunt invertebrates on the ground, much like the old-world starlings of which the myna is a family member.
Noisy miners, though, also display the aggressive, pushy behaviour of the starlings and prove a serious problem for gardeners trying to establish a bird garden – the noisy miners will simply drive other birds away.
I’m fortunate not to have noisy miners in my garden because they favour more drier habitant than the wet forest surrounding my home.
But I make the miner’s acquaintance regularly on my visits to the swimming pool and it is there that I get a chance to study them. Over the years I’ve been intrigued to discover that there is one bird species that is able to tolerate the anti-social behaviour of the miners. Surprisingly, this is the eastern rosella which seem adept a keeping out of the miners’ way.
As anyone visiting the Domain will observe, the two species exist in harmony, the rosellas finding seeds while the miners pluck insects from the kangaroo grass.
The rosellas and miners are among the Tasmanian birds which have been the focus of more than 50 years of research by Birds Tasmania members and, along with data on population trends, regular surveys have thrown up interesting aspects of bird distribution and behaviour.
In this regard, light was cast on the beneficial relationship between the miners and rosellas by researcher Mike Newman at one of the regular meetings of the organisation.
Although the presentation was supposed to be about an increase in population of another parrot species, the musk lorikeet, data compiled over many years also revealed that numbers of eastern rosellas had remained steady in areas they shared with noisy miners.
Mike Newman offered an explanation: noisy miners always attack and drive off starlings from their patch, as they do on the Domain. Because starlings are cavity nesters this frees up holes in trees for the other 27 bird species which require hollows, eastern rosellas among them.
I’ve never been a fan of noisy miners, at the same time regarding the beautiful eastern rosellas as one of my favourite birds. But despite my reservations, I now view the “bully boys” in a new light.