Noisy miner
The noisy miner is a bird in the honeyeater family, Meliphagidae, and is endemic to eastern and southeastern Australia. This miner is a grey bird, with a black head, orange-yellow beak and feet, a distinctive yellow patch behind the eye, and white tips on the tail feathers. The Tasmanian subspecies has a more intense yellow panel in the wing, and a broader white tip to the tail. Males, females and juveniles are similar in appearance, though young birds are a brownish-grey. As the common name suggests, the noisy miner is a vocal species with a large range of songs, calls, scoldings and alarms, and almost constant vocalisations, particularly from young birds. One of four species in the genus Manorina, the noisy miner itself is divided into four subspecies. The separation of the Tasmanian M. m. leachi is of long standing, and the mainland birds were further split in 1999.
Found in a broad arc from Far North Queensland through New South Wales and Victoria to Tasmania and southeastern South Australia, the noisy miner primarily inhabits dry, open eucalypt forests that lack understory shrubs. These include forests dominated by spotted gum, box and ironbark, as well as in degraded woodland where the understory has been cleared, such as recently burned areas, farming and grazing areas, roadside reserves, and suburban parks and gardens with trees and grass, but without dense shrubbery. The density of noisy miner populations has significantly increased in many locations across its range, particularly in human-dominated habitats. The popularity of nectar-producing garden plants, such as the large-flowered grevilleas, was thought to play a role in its proliferation, but studies now show that the noisy miner has benefited primarily from landscaping practices that create open areas dominated by eucalypts.
Noisy miners are gregarious and territorial; they forage, bathe, roost, breed and defend territory communally, forming colonies that can contain several hundred birds. Each bird has an 'activity space', and birds with overlapping activity spaces form associations called 'coteries', which are the most stable units within the colony. The birds also form temporary flocks called 'coalitions' for specific activities, such as mobbing a predator. Group cohesion is facilitated not only by vocalisations, but also through ritualised displays, which have been categorised as flight displays, postural displays, and facial displays. The noisy miner is a notably aggressive bird, so that chasing, pecking, fighting, scolding, and mobbing occur throughout the day, targeted at both intruders and colony members.
Foraging in the canopy of trees, on trunks and branches, and on the ground, the noisy miner mainly eats nectar, fruit, and insects. Most time is spent gleaning the foliage of eucalypts, and it can meet most of its nutritional needs from manna, honeydew, and lerp gathered from the foliage. The noisy miner does not use a stereotyped courtship display, but copulation is a frenzied communal event. It breeds all year long, building a deep cup-shaped nest and laying two to four eggs. Incubation is by the female only, although up to twenty male helpers take care of the nestlings and fledglings. Noisy miners have a range of strategies to increase their breeding success, including multiple broods and group mobbing of predators. The noisy miner's population increase has been correlated with the reduction of avian diversity in human-affected landscapes. Its territoriality means that translocation is unlikely to be a solution to its overabundance, and culling has been proposed, although the noisy miner is currently a protected species across Australia.
Taxonomy
English ornithologist John Latham described the noisy miner four times in his 1801 work Supplementum Indicis Ornithologici, sive Systematis Ornithologiae, seemingly not knowing it was the same bird in each case: the chattering bee-eater, black-headed grackle, hooded bee-eater, and white-fronted bee-eater. Early notes recorded its tendency to scare off prey as hunters were about to shoot. It was as the chattering bee-eater that it was painted between 1792 and 1797 by Thomas Watling, one of a group known collectively as the Port Jackson Painter. John Gould treated the name Merops garrulus as the original description, and renamed it Myzantha garrula in his 1865 work Handbook to the Birds of Australia, giving it the common name of garrulous honeyeater, and noting the alternate name of chattering honeyeater. He noted the colonists of Tasmania called it a miner, and aboriginal people of New South Wales called it cobaygin. Que que gang was a local aboriginal name from the Blue Mountains.In the early 19th century, Australian ornithologists started using the name Manorina melanocephala instead, because it was listed first by Latham in 1801. This usage did not follow the letter of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, and in 2009 the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature conserved the current name by formally suppressing the name M. garrula. The species name melanocephala is derived from the Ancient Greek words melas 'black', and kephale 'head', referring to its black crown. Other common names include Mickey miner and soldierbird. Four subspecies are recognised, including subspecies leachi found in eastern Tasmania. The mainland population was split into three subspecies in 1999 by Richard Schodde—titaniota from Cape York Peninsula in Queensland as far south as Mareeba, lepidota from central Queensland and inland New South Wales west of Nyngan, and the nominate subspecies melanocephala from southeastern New South Wales, Victoria, and southern South Australia. There are broad zones where birds are intermediate between subspecies. Further study is required to settle the taxonomic status of these populations.
The noisy miner is one of four species in the genus Manorina in the large family of honeyeaters known as Meliphagidae. The other three species of the genus Manorina are the black-eared miner, the yellow-throated miner, and the bell miner. One of the most obvious characteristics of the genus is a patch of bare yellow skin behind the eyes, which gives them an odd 'cross-eyed' look. Within the genus, the noisy, black-eared and yellow-throated miners form the subgenus Myzantha. The noisy miner occasionally hybridises with the yellow-throated miner. Molecular analysis has shown honeyeaters to be related to the Pardalotidae, Acanthizidae, and the Maluridae in the large superfamily Meliphagoidea.
Description
Appearance
The noisy miner is a large honeyeater, in length, with a wingspan of, and weighing. Male, female and juvenile birds all have similar plumage: grey on the back, tail and breast, and otherwise white underneath, with white scalloping on the nape and hind-neck, and on the breast; off-white forehead and lores; a black band over the crown, bright orange-yellow bill, and a distinctive patch of yellow skin behind the eye; a prominent white tip to the tail; a narrow olive-yellow panel in the folded wing; and orange-yellow legs and feet. A juvenile can be distinguished by softer plumage, a brownish tinge to the black on its head and the grey on its back, and a duller, greyish-yellow skin-patch behind the eye.The noisy miner is similar in appearance to the yellow-throated miner and the black-eared miner; it has a dull white forehead and a black crown, while the others have grey heads.
Geographical variations
Size variation in the noisy miner over its range follows Bergmann's rule; namely, birds tend to be larger where the climate is colder. Adults from central-eastern and northern Queensland tend to have little or no olive-yellow edging to the feathers of the back and wings, and have a wider white fringe on the feathers of the hind-neck and back, giving birds from Queensland the appearance of having more distinctive scalloping than other populations. Wing length generally increases with latitude, yet M. m. leachi has measurably shorter wings than the nominate race, although no significant difference in wing length was found in a study comparing populations north of 30° S and south of the Murray River. The subspecies leachi also has finer scalloping on the hind-neck than the nominate race, a more intense yellow tinge to the wing panels, and a slightly broader off-white tip to the tail.The far north Queensland subspecies titaniota has a shorter tail, paler crown, larger yellow skin-patch, and paler upper parts without the yellow-olive of the nominate race; and lepidota, found in western New South Wales, is smaller than the nominate race with a black crown, and darker, more mottled upperparts.
Vocalisations
As the common name suggests, the noisy miner is an unusually vocal species. Previously known as the garrulous honeyeater, it has a large and varied repertoire of songs, calls, scoldings, and alarms. Most are loud and penetrating, and consist of harsh single notes. It has two broad-frequency alarm calls that are used when mobbing intruders into their territory, or when predators are sighted; and a narrow-frequency alarm call that is primarily used when airborne predators are seen, such as the brown falcon, or other large flying birds, including the Australian magpie and the pied currawong. The aerial predator alarm call is a series of high-pitched, slurred whistling notes. The broad-frequency alarm calls are a series of 'churr' notes, low-pitched and harsh, occurring at low and high levels of intensity. The narrow-band call is used in situations where the bird signals the presence of a predator and restricts information about its own location, while the broad-band alarm is used to attract attention, and can initiate mobbing behaviour. These churring calls vary between individuals, and laboratory tests show that noisy miners can distinguish calls by different birds. Hence, this may be integral to the complex social structure of the species.Contact or social facilitation calls are low-pitched sounds that carry long distances. 'Chip' calls are given by individual birds when foraging, and a similar call is given by nestlings that call at an increased rate as the mother approaches the nest. Where there is a high level of social activity, such as during territorial disputes with conspecifics, calls are a series of quick, regular, single notes. The noisy miner has a mating display flight song: a soft warble of low-frequency notes given during short, undulating flights by the male, and responded to by the female with a low-frequency whistle. The noisy miner is found in open woodland habitats, where it is an advantage to call from the air, so as to overcome sound attenuation. Another display call, described as 'yammer', is a rapid rhythmical series of notes that is uttered during open-bill, wing-waving displays. The noisy miner has a song described as the 'dawn song'—a communal song of clear, whistled notes emitted in chorus in the early hours of the morning from May through January. The dawn song, which is also sung at dusk, is audible over long distances and features duets that often involve antiphony.
A nestling begins to give the 'chip' call soon after it emerges from the egg, and it calls frequently for the first two-thirds of the nestling period and constantly for the last third. The call does not vary in the presence of an adult at the nest, so it seems likely that the call is not directed at the adult bird. The nestling becomes silent when an adult gives an alarm call, and makes a squealing sound when the adult delivers food. The begging call of a fledgling is similar to the call of the nestling, but significantly louder and covering a greater frequency range. The rate of calling, on average, is 85 to 100 calls in a minute, and in open scrub, the call can be heard up to a kilometre away. Subsong, a juvenile vocalisation comprising elements of various calls, begins to be uttered when the fledgling is around thirty days old.
The noisy miner also produces non-vocal sounds by clicking or snapping its bill, usually during antagonistic encounters with other bird species, or when mobbing a predator.