Is it a Miner or a Myna?

The Miner, or more correctly, Noisy Miner, is the familiar grey, white, black and yellow honeyeater that is very territorial and aggressive to almost all other birds. The Myna, or more correctly, Common Myna, is the recognizable brown, black and yellow introduced bird from South-east Asia. Neither the native nor the introduced bird do a whole lot for avian diversity around our town.

Noisy Miners will sometimes unite in large, aggressive flocks to gang up on other birds and even some mammals and reptiles – Noisy Miners have been recorded hassling snakes, goannas, cats and dogs. While they have the typical honeyeater tongue for lapping nectar from a variety of native and introduced trees and shrubs, a large part of a Noisy Miner’s diet consists of insects and other invertebrates, fruit, and seed. Noisy Miners have also learnt to scavenge around parks and picnic grounds.

The native Noisy Miner honeyeater

Common Mynas were introduced to Melbourne in 1862, ostensibly to assist eradicating pest insects in the city’s market gardens. They quickly spread to other urban areas and have now become widespread throughout settled regions of SA, Vic, NSW and Q’land. Common Mynas often use gaps in structures like old sheds and outbuildings in which to construct their nests of sticks, feathers and rubbish. Unfortunately, they also adopt natural tree hollows for the same purpose, often aggressively chasing away native birds and mammals.

The introduced Common Myna

A close relative of the Noisy Miner is the easily recognizable Bell Miner – easily recognizable in our town and its surrounds by dint of its tinkling bell-like call. Bell Miners are the Bellbirds that are often heard and sometimes lauded in this district. Bell Miners have a very strict diet of lerp, an exudate of a sap sucking insect that exists on eucalypt foliage.

The other native honeyeater, Bell Miner or Bellbird

 

Bell Miners are sedentary colonisers. A colony of fifty or so birds might exist in the one, sometimes quite small location for many years. Like their Noisy Miner relatives, Bell Miners are aggressive toward many other birds. Some references now say that Noisy Miners and Bell Miners are more responsible for the decline in the number of other native bird species in some locations, than are Common Mynas and other introduced species like Starlings and Blackbirds.

 

Note:

The Noisy Miner has another very close relative in more arid areas of Australia, the Yellow-throated Miner. One variation of the Yellow-Throated Miner, the Black-eared Miner is extremely rare and highly endangered – but that is a story for another day.