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Context Sex and age are frequently proposed as drivers of a number of behavioural and demographic patterns that can have important consequences for population dynamics including access to mates, sexual selection, parental care and lifetime productivity. Sex and age might also be important in shaping the movement patterns and colonisation processes of social species moving into vacant habitat. Such information is critical for the management of strongly interacting species such as the noisy miner (Manorina melanocephala), which structure ecological communities through aggressive exclusion of other taxa from areas that they occupy.Aims In Manorina colonies, young females are usually dispersive, while males remain in the natal colony as the philopatric sex. Following removal of individuals from an area, we aimed to determine whether female-biased dispersal, particularly of young females, would result in …