Variation in abundance of nectarivorous birds: does a competitive despot interfere with flower tracking?

Adaptive resource tracking in space and time may be disrupted by the modification of resources and competitors. Major global change drivers (e.g. land‐use change) have induced declines in many native species, while facilitating only a few. Given that many resources are predicted to become increasingly scarce under the joint effects of climate and land‐use change, disturbance‐tolerant species that are able to defend high‐value resources may further limit the persistence of disturbance‐sensitive species. We sought to determine which nectarivorous birds track variation in flowering and if relationships between nectarivores and flowering are affected by on‐transect vegetation structure or the occurrence of a native, hyper‐aggressive species, the noisy miner Manorina melanocephala, which has become more prevalent. We measured eucalypt flowering and abundances of nectarivorous birds over the course of a year; we measured vegetation structure on the same forest transects. Nectarivores tracked spatial and some temporal variation in flowering, but this relationship was disrupted by noisy miners. Where present in sufficient numbers, the noisy miner excluded small‐bodied nectarivores (