The poor old, much maligned, Noisy Miner

What if we changed our mindset to them? They are native and here to stay.
It’s a mid-sized bird, mostly grey, with soft barrings on the neck, a black face mask and cap and a yellow bill, feet and patch behind its eye. They live in small colonies in open woodlands and grassy forest, feeding mostly on nectar and insects and building twiggy nests to bring up their young. As the moniker suggests, they are noisy, but their repertoire of calls includes the melodious. Right now, they are doing a kind of raucous time-share thing in my Eucalyptus leucoxylon, cleaning up an over-abundance of lerps. The other time-share birds include Pied Currawong, Red and Little Wattlebirds and White-plumed Honeyeaters.

Noisy Miner, photo by Arimbi Winoto

Current popular opinion is that miners are aggressive. This is based on observations that they chase smaller birds away from their patch: a denigrative term for their territorial behaviour. A popular TV/YouTube segment showed a flock of noisy miners pecking a fake Spotted Pardalote “to death” as it was stuck onto a mid-level tree branch and thus unable to “flee” the “mob.” This behaviour, in an engineered situation, caused outrage and hatred from humans towards the species.
Lovely us backing the underdog.

Yet, in bird surveys in which I’ve participated, at sites where noisy miners are present, we nearly always hear, or see, the spotted pardalote high up in the canopy, if not tunnelling into embankments to nest. To be sure, many other small birds are now scarcer, or absent. This has been associated, or correlated, with increasing numbers of noisy miners, but this does not necessarily mean a causative effect. Other observers note the preponderance of Noisys in our beautiful parks and gardens and golf courses. These lovely human-engineered areas of open woodland, with expanses of neat mown lawns and the odd tall large flowered shrub are the perfect habitat for a noisy miner. If there is an imbalance of bird, insect and everything else species, it’s been caused by us humans. There will be a multitude of reasons, including wholescale loss and radical alteration of habitat. There will always be winners in this world and they are often created by us. Turning the miners into the sole culprits and scapegoats for loss of biodiversity isn’t helpful.

What if we changed our mindset and appreciated the service they provide other birds? They call out warnings of raptors overhead or even ground predators like snakes, so everyone else knows to take the appropriate evasive action. We then know to look into the sky for something rare, or interesting. In terms of solutions to some sort of restoration of habitat, “it’s not the full story without the understorey!” In other words, plantings of thick, dense, prickly mid-to-understorey plantings and tall native grasses, that don’t need mowing, create different spaces for shelter and food sources. This may encourage a multitude of bird and non-bird species for a fuller interconnected and interdependent ecosystem.

I’m sure I haven’t changed many minds with this opinion, or won any friends, but I hope more people will plant more indigenous plants and see these birds as just doing what they do: not necessarily malicious in character!

   
A pair of Noisy Miners, photo by Arimbi Winoto

Some tips on making your garden welcoming to a wider range of birds — and other species:

How to create a bird-friendly garden (Birdlife Australia)
BIrd-friendly gardening (Aussie Bird Count)
Wildlife-friendly gardens (WIRES)