Unlike magpies, which Sean Dooley from BirdLife Australia said tended to fly “behind you and hit you hard”, other birds take a different approach.

Magpie-larks (which resemble but are unrelated to magpies) and noisy miners tend to dive in from the front.

“I’ve even had a magpie-lark hover in front of me with its claws out as it tries to drive you away [from its young] … so they can cause some severe damage, especially if they come into contact with your eyes,” Dooley said. Masked lapwings, also known as spur-winged plovers, will swoop “aggressively and make a really big clattering noise”, in contrast with other plovers, which typically run away and pretend to be injured to distract potential threats, according to Dooley.

He said the swoop of the noisy miner, previously described by the Australian National University ecologist Richard Beggs as “Australia’s most hated bird”, was also big on bluff.