This paper by Rogers et al. is about our local “agro” Aussie avians, i.e. which birds fight and why! To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest species interaction network published for Australian birds, which is interesting, in part, because Australian birds are generally considered to be some of the most aggressive birds in the world.

Some noteworthy findings include:

1. Aggressive interactions were dominated by the invasive common myna, the native noisy miner, and the native rainbow lorikeet.

2. For the common (Indian) myna, individuals that nest in natural tree hollows are likely to have a significant impact on native hollow nesting species that are similar in body size.

3. On average larger birds won aggressive interactions more frequently, with the exception of the common myna which won 26 of the 29 interactions against the larger native rainbow lorikeet.

These findings have some important implications for the applied management of invasive species such as the common myna. You can read more about it here.