The Black-eared Miner is a nationally endangered colonial honeyeater that once lived in the Murray Mallee region of South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. Today, it is now absent from much of its former range
Black-eared Miners need
- large amounts (>13,000 ha) of mallee-spinfex or mallee with an open understorey
- mallee that has remained unburnt for at least 45 years for breeding
- mallee that is at least two kilmetres from clearings that exceed 100 ha
The Black-eared Miner’s marked decline has been attributed tohabitat clearance and to genetic “swamping” since 1950 by the abundant Yellow-throated Miner. Habitat clearing has now largely ceased.
Major current threats include:
- large wildfires
- too frequent fires
- genetic swamping by Yellow-throated Miners
- habitat degradation by grazing herbivores.
Population numbers and status
By the late 1980s, Black-eared Miner field workers thought that the species existed in only seven locations in north-western Victoria, with a population of fewer than 50 birds whose quality was declining rapidly due to hybridisation.
Then everything changed in late 1995 when several previously unknown colonies of Black-eared Miners were located just north of the Murray River in the Riverland (formerly Bookmark) Biosphere Reserve (BR) in eastern South Australia.
By 2006, recovery program project officers had calculated that:
- the Riverland BR supported an estimated 501 (270 – 927) colonies containing 3,758 (2,026 – 6,954) Black-eared Miners
- Murray-Sunset National Park (NP) contained about 53 (32 – 85) Black-eared Miner/hybrid colonies
- Scotia Sanctuary and Tarawi Nature Reserve (NR) in western New South Wales held about 14 colonies
- Bronzewing Flora and Fauna Reserve (FFR) in northwestern Victoria had about four colonies.
This stunning turn around in the estimated numbers of birds remaining in the Murray Mallee is tempered by the information that the Black-eared Miner’s effective population size is only about 10 percent of its total population size.
Foundation Projects
Black-eared Miner Monitoring & Species Management
The Foundation has provided $28,990 for a survey of Black-eared Miners across the Riverland Biosphere area. The results will be used to refine the ongoing monitoring strategy and to help ensure the species can be better managed to ensure future survival. This project begain in July 2010 and will finish in June 2011.
