Australia is blessed with around 850 species of native birds, but some are more cherished than others, as a startling photograph taken last week has highlighted. Snapped by a gardener, as he enjoyed a beer in his NSW North Coast backyard, it shows a laughing kookaburra with the lifeless body of a noisy miner clenched in its beak.
Kim Hogno said the scale of responses to his photograph “blew me out a bit” as thousands of people weighed in online. Kookaburras are known to eat large prey, including rats and snakes, so it wasn’t the size of its meal that had people talking. Instead, most were excited that it had killed what many Aussies think of as a pest species.
“Well, that shut him up,” one person wrote after seeing the dead noisy miner. “Go kooka,” one person wrote.
Related: Kookaburra revived after swallowing unexpected household item
Why do so many Aussies dislike noisy miners?
Birdlife Australia avian expert Sean Dooley believes that a key reason many Australians dislike the noisy miner is that they mistake it for an invasive species, something that was clear in many of the responses to Kim’s post online.
“There’s a lot of confusion between the noisy miner and common myna because they have a similar name and they look quite similar, and that makes them partly maligned,” Dooley told Yahoo News.
It’s easy to tell the two species apart — the noisy miner is mostly grey, while the common myna, which was introduced from India, is brown. Despite looking alike, the two species are not even closely related, but they do share one key behavioural trait — aggression.
Common mynas will attack and kill other birds around their nest. But surprisingly, it’s native noisy miners that can be a bigger problem, as they’ll attack anywhere, anytime. And it’s our fault that they’ve become a problem.
Why have noisy miners spread into the suburbs?
A native noisy miner (left) and an invasive common myna (right). Source: Getty
Like rats and cockroaches, noisy miners have followed humans as they’ve spread along Australia’s east coast. That’s because with our neat backyards, sparse trees, and lawns, we’ve created ideal habitat for them that replicates woodlands with little undergrowth.
“Because they’re such an aggressive species, they come in and dominate. They basically bully anything smaller than a magpie. Not just other honeyeaters that they competed for food with, but sparrows, willy wagtails and spotted doves,” Dooley explained.
The species relies on strength in numbers, which they use to their advantage when they’re attacked or want to dominate a larger bird.
“They form these super-colonies. If one noisy miner is in distress, sometimes literally hundreds of birds will protect them,” Sean added.
A gardener was enjoying a beer in his backyard when a kookaburra swooped down and grabbed an unlikely meal. Source: Kim Hogno
Is it rare for kookaburras to eat noisy miners?
Because of their aggression, it’s rare to see larger birds take out a noisy miner. And kookaburras are even less likely to do so, because they tend to pounce on their prey and prefer to take young birds from nests rather than adult birds. For these reasons, it’s highly likely the bird was already injured or even dead.
Recalling the moment the kookaburra struck, Kim said he was having a quiet beer at his South West Rocks home when all of a sudden the bird swooped down.
“There were some loose timbers against my shed, and it came out of them with this bird. We’ve had some really wild weather up here the last week, so maybe it was injured,’ he said.
“I took a couple of shots and it took off into the next yard. You’d imagine there would be a bit of flapping and a few feathers if it was still alive, but there was none of that. None of the other noisy miners came around and harassed it.”
Humans have created the perfect habitat for noisy miners in the suburbs, helping them to spread. Source: Getty
How can residents encourage other bird species?
To stop the spread of noisy miners into new territories where they can wipe out diversity of other species, culling has been trialled, but it tends to have little impact on numbers long-term.
But experts believe residents in suburbs and cities can take active steps to encourage other birds, by adding plants to their gardens that discourage noisy miners.
“This means denser plantings of ground cover and undergrowth, and mid-storey foliage that (a) noisy miners don’t like, and (b) gives other smaller birds a chance at some respite from their aggressive tactics,” Dooley said.
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