Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 2, 2016
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The noisy miner (Manorina melanocephala) is a bird native to eastern and south-eastern Australia in the honeyeater family. It is grey with a black head, orange-yellow beak and feet, a distinctive yellow patch behind the eye and white tips on the tail feathers. Its almost constant vocalizations, particularly from young birds, include a large range of calls, scoldings and alarms. Primarily inhabiting dry, open eucalypt forests without understory shrubs, noisy miners are gregarious and territorial; they forage, bathe, roost, breed and defend territory communally, forming colonies of up to several hundred birds. Birds that live close to each other form stable associations called coteries. Temporary flocks are formed for activities such as mobbing a predator. The noisy miner is an aggressive bird, chasing, pecking, fighting, scolding, and mobbing both intruders and colony members throughout the day. The bird's numbers have increased significantly in many locations across its range, particularly in human-dominated habitats in which avian diversity has decreased. (Full article...)