Noisy Miners

["Philip Veerman" <>]

I think the curious thing of the story of the Noisy Miner, at least based on GBS data, is that they show as relatively stable over the 21 years of assembled data. Especially for a species that mostly occurs in colonies, the fluctuations are explainable by simply the variation in sites included from year to year, probably more so than the population of birds. There isn't a period of more than 3 years during which their abundance has increased (or decreased) each year before reversing the trend. Yet they are conspicuous so not easily overlooked and moderately widespread, with F = 19.00%, means they are recorded at least once on about one fifth of the charts per year on average (although on less than 5% of observer weeks). There has not been any trend of increase in the proportion of sites recorded at either. Yet looking around Canberra suburban habitat, one would think there is a huge scope for them to increase. Of course that doesn't mean that they won't have a population explosion in future, just that there must have been something holding them back so far. The steady increase of the Red Wattlebird doesn't match anything in the population trends for the Noisy Miner (at least from the GBS graphs). In strong contrast to the obvious changes for the starling and myna.

 

I'm a little biased by the observations of the 1970s in Blackburn Lake reserve and surrounding suburbs in Melbourne where I would watch the changes over a few years where the Noisy Miner and Bell Miner colonies would displace each other backward and forward over patches of territory. Thought that is another issue.

 

Lastly I wrote before about the "talk given by Kris French at the BE seminar". That is a goof, "BE" should have been "BA" or indeed "SNAG of BA".

 

Philip