Noisy miners: when good birds go bad | The Secret Lives Of Our Urban Birds

This former golf course is now being transformed into a wildlife reserve. The plan is to create a perfect haven for native birds in the city, with expanded wetlands, grassy woodlands and dense shrubbery. But there's still a long way to go. There's a bird living here that's keeping other species away. The noisy miner is a native honey eater that has adapted extremely well to the parks and gardens across Melbourne that favour open lawns and tall eucalypts. The problem is noisy miners are extremely territorial and will do anything to protect their patch. Gio is going to show me what that means for the smaller birds. We'll see what happens here. I have a Beautiful spotted pardalote corpse unfortunately and now spotted pardalotes used to be really common in this area along with a whole host of other small birds which have just disappeared in the last decade or so. It's a gorgeous thing. And is that going to be what you're using to help us create a mobbing effect? Yeah, so we'll see what happens if we play a few pardalote calls, maybe a few other small bush bird calls. The noisy miners should be right onto that and we'll get a sort of a bird's perspective on what it's like trying to live in an urban park like this. So we'll pop it up here. So it's sort of going to act sort of like a lure? That's right, yeah. Most of the local small bush birds know not to come into the parks anymore, so this just shows why that's a good spot. Here they come, one, two, three, four, we've got like eight birds in the top of this eucalypt. They're checking the crown of the tree first, that's usually where a pardalote would be. Yeah, they're not stupid are they miners, by any stretch of the imagination. And they're really gathering in numbers now. Oh there's even more, so we've got at least 10 birds up there I reckon. I can do this. Okay now they're starting to descend. Here we go, they'll probably just find it in a matter of seconds now. Oh my god. That's the end of the pardalope. The thing is that, like, that is a classic mobbing behaviour, isn't it? They're screaming, they're pecking, there's feathers flying, look at them! Yeah, and if that was a live bird and that were to fly away, it would be incessantly followed. Wow. It's quite brutal to watch, but of course that's happening on a day-to-day basis to real live birds when they're just trying to live in these parks. Incredible behaviour isn't it, like the social bond between these birds is one of the factors that makes them such a force to be reckoned with isn't it. And that's why you need really really good quality shelter where a small bird can go and not be followed, where they can actually get proper respite. This demonstration clearly shows how noisy miners restrict small bird biodiversity in the urban landscape. But small birds like the pardalote have an incredibly important role to play in nature. They feed on insects called psyllids, or plant lice, that can sicken or even kill some trees. And the psyllids are covered by a protective, sugary coating called a lerp. A food source that noisy miners rely really heavily upon, and other birds do too. The difference is noisy miners tend to leave the psyllid to then make another lerp. Another bird will come along and just chomp the whole thing. This tree is totally overrun with them and that's a classic symptom of noisy minor domination. So it can end up really affecting the health of the trees when there's no small birds to control these insects. So what are the implications for people out there with their gardens in their backyard? If you're planting a tree in your garden and your area is prone to noisy minors, as most most urban areas are. Look at stringybarks and peppermints before you start looking at gums, foxes and ironbarks and things like that. Even better than going for a eucalypt, go for a wattle or a she-oak or something like that. Something that provides a bit more of a dense cover. I can't wait to be back here in a couple of years to see what it's like. It's going to be really exciting. Not for that part alone. Here at the Elsternwick Reserve, I've seen the ripple effects of human change on the landscape. Our decisions impact right through the food chain, from plants to insects to birds. All the smidgens of green that are in this city, along the sides of roads and in your backyard, or even on former golf courses like this one, we can make a real impact to bird diversity in this city. All we have to do is choose the right plants, just like what Geo's done here.