this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Huh weird. I didn’t get a notification for this reply.
Anyway, how can you tell? I always thought butcherbirds were brown and white, magpies black and white. The colour balance might make it a bit unclear here, but this guy was definitely black, as was his friend.
Butcher birds are generally smaller, have a different pattern to their colours, and are a bit different in their vocalisations. Magpies tend to warble, whereas Butcher birds generally have a distinct series of tones (that varies a bit around the country). They also tend to hop more than walk - much shorter legs. The beak is a tiny bit different to a magpie too.
The adults are black and white, but the juveniles are usually light grey and white.
The noisy mynahs tend to be a bit more paranoid around Butcher birds too. Maggie's are less likely to actively hunt them. ;)
If you hear a bunch of mynahs going off in a group, it'll most likely be a snake, an owl, or one of these guys.
I've done some more Googling, and it looks like there are multiple species of butcherbird. I was most familiar with the grey butcherbird, which stays grey into adulthood. These guys were probably pied butcherbirds, with their notable black "hood" that visually distinguishes them from magpies.
Noisy miners? Or Indian mynas?
I don't see mynas very often, but see miners all the time. They were a real dick yesterday, with one giving me a close swoop, and then proceeding to swoop to scare away a water dragon. These ones in the photo though were pretty chill. They hung out with the songbirds for the time I was watching, not particularly seeming bothered by them.
Pied: Bingo
Yep, noisy miners. They're aggressive little buggers. One of the reasons that park designers are encouraged to include small shrubs with thick foliage, is to give smaller birds somewhere to hide from the miners, otherwise you tend to get a bit of a monoculture of miners.
Yeah not too many mynahs around here thankfully. Partly due to the Butcher birds!