A Noisy Miner Research project: initial work

Following the publication of my article about Noisy Miners in Canberra Bird Notes a researcher drew my attention to an article talking about the impact of Noisy Miners on the birds in 2 properties in the Armidale area.    This has led me to contemplate my limited knowledge about the Noisy Miners on our property and to start a small research project to overcome those limitations.  In essence it is to record the bird species that I see on part of our morning walks around our property.

At this stage the objective is simply to establish some baseline information about the number of Miners and what other birds are around.  After I have been doing that for a while I will try to develop some hypotheses which may be helpful in understanding the inter-relationships between the Miners and other parts of the environment.

The core recording area will be a section of the walk about 600m long (shown in white in the following image) with a specific recording area 20m either side of our path.  I will also record, separately, birds seen in the general area but outside that corridor.

At this stage the only other items I will be recording will be the:

• time of visits (I'll do the same records when in the area for other purposes such as spraying weeds or fungus/insect hunting);
• habitat used (an eclectic classification, trying to get some sense of which birds use trees and which the undergrowth);
• temperature (degrees C)
• cloud cover (in 10ths) and
• wind strength (subjective scale - calm, light, moderate, strong; very strong).

Notes of anything interesting about the visit of the birds will also be taken.