Australia Post has launched a sequence of stamps to have a good time the tenth anniversary of the Aussie Bird Count and the birds they’ve chosen might shock you.
Unless in fact, you might be one of many greater than 100,000 Australians who’ve taken half in what has change into the nation’s greatest citizen science challenge. You would know that when BirdLife Australia launch the outcomes of all of the surveys that they participated in, the species that function – rainbow lorikeet, noisy miner and Australian magpie – have been the three commonest birds in yearly of the Aussie Bird Count up to now.
Birds sing the story of our land but it surely’s a tune to which we’re all too usually tone-deaf. If we had began the Aussie Bird Count 100 years in the past, the birdsong that will have dominated the soundscape in most Australian again yards would have been provided by a radically totally different choir of starlings, blackbirds, sparrows and different European imports. These sounds would have mirrored an industrial panorama of innercity factories and the English cottage-style gardens of most suburban yards.
The nature of our cities started to vary within the city panorama of Australia through the Sixties and 70s with the emergence of rising Australian native crops, not simply in non-public gardens but additionally in our parks, streets and highways. The species favoured had been these with showy clusters of flowers – eucalypts, banksias, bottlebrushes and grevilleas – which recurrently produced a profusion of wealthy blossom that attracted a wholly totally different suite of birds, chief amongst them the nectar-loving honeyeaters and lorikeets.
The Rainbow lorikeet was as soon as widespread alongside the east coast down into Victoria and South Australia however persecution by orchardists on the fringes of the rising colonial cities noticed them shot out of existence in lots of districts. As these once-rural areas had been consumed by suburbia, the change of panorama noticed the lorikeets increase into their former vary after which some. Populations of escaped aviary birds discovered cities comparable to Perth and Hobart to their liking and the raucous screeching of the lorikeet started to dominate the soundscape of these cities too.
Similarly, the noisy miner – a local honeyeater to not be confused with the similar-looking widespread myna that was launched from India – was nonetheless solely thought-about as reasonably widespread by chook specialists within the Sixties. The park-like panorama now we have created since then in our parks and quarter-acre blocks has replicated the open eucalypt woodlands they might naturally happen in and their numbers have boomed. The Aussie Bird Count outcomes have proven these pugnacious birds to be the second-most widespread again yard birds in Australia regardless of the actual fact they’re solely discovered within the japanese third of the continent.
While the Australian magpie lags a distant third when it comes to numbers, it’s really essentially the most generally encountered chook all through the Aussie Bird Count with extra counters seeing it of their surveys than every other chook. The distinction is that after we see magpies it’s often as single birds, pairs or small household teams, in distinction to the big flocks of the highest two species which might be often encountered. Magpies have confirmed to be the actual survivor of our native Australian birds, and regardless of some downturns at the start of the century, appear to be holding agency in our city landscapes through the 10 years of the Aussie Bird Count.
To have three native Australian birds on the high of the Bird Count might look like a trigger for celebration, however their dominance masks one other development that’s exhibiting up within the Aussie Bird Count outcomes: we’re seeing the disappearance of most of our small bush birds. The modifications within the city panorama have created an avian homelessness disaster the place smaller-bodied and specialist birds that feed on bugs and nectar are being squeezed out of our cities.
Most of the Top 20 birds seen every year within the Aussie Bird Count are both launched species or larger-bodied indigenous birds which might be extra aggressive. While there are a number of outstanding winners within the city chook actual property market, the smaller, much less daring species have misplaced their properties as bush is changed by housing developments with ever-larger homes with ever-shrinking gardens comprising much less shrubby crops that the smaller birds can use as refuge from the bullying of the bigger, extra aggressive species.
In the primary decade of the Aussie Bird Count now we have noticed a drop in once-familiar smaller species comparable to silvereyes and willie wagtails. After one other 10 years, with out a change in the way in which we do cities on this nation, the city choir of our future cities should still be loud however will likely be lacking an ideal number of voices.
The tenth Aussie Bird Count will likely be held 16-22 October
Sean Dooley is nationwide public affairs supervisor for BirdLife Australia
