In response to
rain and mild temperatures, or simply out of season? ? a Noisy Miner
story
Earlier this
month I posted 2 messages: one on dy and one on nesting by Noisy Miners on the
ANU campus in mid April. This week I walked through the ANU in search of more
evidence of Noisy Miner breeding. Together with the earlier 2 cases I
encountered 10 groups of Noisy Miners (although I am not claiming to have
spotted all of them). All 10 had young: 5 x 1 dy; 1 x 2 dy; 1 x 3 dy; 1 Nest, 1
juv; 1 Nest, 2 juv. The single
young in the nest will certainly only fledge in early May: it still had some
down on its back.
Since then, I
have done a couple of spot checks of Noisy Miner groups elsewhere (3 sites in
Ainslie, 1 in Ngunnawal), albeit under time constraints or less ideal weather
conditions (this morning), and found no evidence of nesting, i.e. no begging
young or adults carrying food; unfortunately I am currently not able to continue
checking. However, it would be great if other observers could check Noisy Miner
sites known to them for signs of breeding activity or lack of it (in this case
negative observations are equally valuable), so that we can get a more
comprehensive picture of how this
species has responded in our region to recent climate events. I would be very
happy to have positive or negative obs. emailed to me (this, of course, does not
exclude that observers also report any late breeding event to the COG data
base).
For background:
Frith & Watts (Birds in the Australian High Country (1984) give Sep to Dec
as the breeding season in our area, although elsewhere it stretches from Jun to
Jan. Veerman (2003) in the GBS
report for the first 21 years gives the presence of dy in Canberra from the last
week of September to January, with 1 obs. in April.
Overall this
makes the ANU story quite exceptional.
Now also a
couple of other obs. indicating how our birds view the current environment:
1 loudly and
persistently singing Yellow Robin ANBG 20 April
1 pair of Galahs
copulating ANU 22 April
And coming back
to Benj Whitworth?s earlier thoughtful comments re. season vs climate for
viewing the (current) breeding events in our area, Henry Nix (1976) examined environmental control of
breeding in Australia (Proc. Int. Ornithol.
Congr. 16), and he certainly found quite close seasonality in breeding for our
area. But no doubt the boundaries are fluid, and may becoming more so. At this
stage it is probably best to get as many breeding records for any species at any
time of year, so that in due course we should be able to tell what is going
on.
Michael
Lenz
