In early October the comedian Geraldine Hickey went looking for tawny frogmouths, a charismatic bird with a frog-like beak and mottled feathers.
“They’re a good-looking bird,” Hickey says, though it hasn’t yet appeared in her annual bird calendar, a project she started as a “lockdown thing” that has gained its own dedicated audience.
“Someone told me, ‘You go down to the river, and it’s in this particular spot, and there’s some paperbark trees,’” she says.
“I didn’t think I was going to find them, I didn’t even know if I was in the right spot, and I’d forgotten my binoculars.”
Hickey decided to look anyway. After a couple of minutes she spotted one. And then another tawny frogmouth. And then another. “I just felt like a bird god,” she says.
“Birds are great,” she muses. “There’s so many. You think you’ve seen them all, and you’ve barely touched the surface of how many there are.”
This week thousands of Australians have the opportunity to try 20 minutes of birdwatching as part of BirdLife Australia’s annual Aussie Bird Count.
Hickey is excited to be among them.
“Having an excuse to take 20 minutes out of my day to go look at birds is pretty awesome because it’s such a meditative thing,” she says.
Sean Dooley, BirdLife Australia’s self-proclaimed “chief bird nerd”, says the event is aimed at the “bird curious” rather than the hardcore birder, “although we love to get their input too”.
Between 14 and 20 October, Dooley says everyone and anyone “who kind of likes birds” is invited to spend 20 minutes getting to know their local inhabitants: in their back yard, street, balcony or local parklands.
“This is a nice, gentle way to open your eyes to the little soap operas that go on outside your window every day,” he says.
The annual citizen science event has been running for a decade. Last year more than 60,000 people counted about 3.5 million birds.
Rainbow lorikeets have been the most commonly counted across Australia by twice as many as the next species. The “mind-blowingly spectacular-looking birds” are easy to identify, colourful, loud and often in big flocks, Dooley says.
The native parrots have returned to urban areas, likely due to the popularity of native plantings in the 60s and 70s: profusely flowering eucalypts, bottle brushes and grevilleas.
“That’s encouraged the larger, more bold, aggressive nectar-feeders back into our cities, and they’ve boomed.”
Contrary to bird watching’s “daggy” reputation, Dooley says people who love birds come from all sections of Australian culture and society.
“Part of the idea behind the Aussie Bird Count was to break down that rarefied bird club atmosphere and make it as easy as possible for people to get involved no matter where they are.”
Dooley says people take part from office blocks in the middle of Sydney or Melbourne, from outback properties in South Australia and Queensland, and others in their suburbs.
“What I’ve seen change over the last 10 years, and Aussie Bird Count had something to do with this as well, is that people are less self-conscious about a love of birds.
“It was just social death as a teenager to talk about the fact that I liked going out spending my weekends looking at little birdies.”
He adds: “There’s literally millions of people who rate a connection with native birds as an important part of their life.”
His tip for counting more birds is to try early in the morning, when birds are feeding and more vocal. “They’re up and about, and they’re letting each other know that they’ve survived the night.”
