Noisy miners are known to be the bullies and ruffians of the Australian bird world and the miners along the waterfront of Melbourne’s St Kilda are stand-over merchants in a class of their own.
The introduced Indian common mynas – with which the noisy miners are often confused – stood no chance in this battle of wits and street smarts one day as both species fought for fast-food discarded by the human-in-a-hurry inhabitants of Melbourne’s beach playground and the edgy backstreets beyond it.
The cityscape of urban Australia with its towers of concrete, steel and glass leaves little room for leafy habitant and its wildlife. The miners, though, have proved to be great survivors in a brutalist world even if, like many human habitants of the city, the pressures of an urban lifestyle can create stress, belligerence and raised voices.
The noisy miners are by nature the most pugnacious of the honeyeater family, adept at muscling in on territories of pollen and nectar, putting even the bigger wattlebirds to flight. When there is a lack of native vegetation and ground cover, the smaller birds like fairy-wrens and robins do not stand a chance. There is no hiding place.
As I watched the miners going about their bullying business in St Kilda last month, I recalled reading a bird study which proved birds become more aggressive in a city environment.
On my return to Hobart I decided to study the nearest noisy miner population to my home, on the Queens Domain, to compare the behaviour of the miners there to those in Melbourne and see if I could detect any difference in attitude.
The noisy miners certainly appeared far more relaxed and less combative in the wild, open spaces of the Domain although they still resorted to their natural bullying tactics directed at other species. The noisy miners certainly ruled the roost, a bird mafia straight out of The Sopranos.
My simple citizen science project might not ruffle feathers among scientists who study bird behaviour but it was backed up by some other hard evidence from a team of professionals at Aberystwyth University in Wales. They have studied a European species that has taken up residence in the cities – the great tit.
Two groups of city birds were studied alongside rural populations. The city great tits were far more aggressive and bad tempered, developing a different “personality”.
It has also been established that city great tits have developed their own “urban music’’ to deal with traffic noise.
The urban song is higher-pitched and faster than that in the country. The birds are adapting their songs to be heard over the low-pitched rumble of traffic, something I discovered myself visiting London a few years back. There in the tough inner-city area of Deptford where I was staying, I discovered a new band of great-tit rappers had taken over the ‘hood.