The campaigns are over. The votes are in. The scrutineers are in the tally room.
The winner of the 2023 Guardian/BirdLife Australian bird of the year will be announced at 12.30pm AEDT on this website, after voters culled a field of 50 down to 10 for the final day of voting on Thursday.
The finalists were the laughing kookaburra, swift parrot, tawny frogmouth, Carnaby’s black-cockatoo, spotted pardalote, Gouldian finch, gang-gang cockatoo, Australian magpie, willie wagtail and peregrine falcon.
Running totals of the votes for the final 10 were invisible to the voting public throughout the day.
Guardian Australia and BirdLife Australia started the bird of the year poll in 2017 and have run it every two years since. Previous winners were the Australian magpie (2017), black-throated finch (2019) and superb fairywren (2021). The winner is excluded from the next competition.
Although the competition is meant to be fun, it has a serious point to make. Many Australian bird species are under threat, and some face an increasingly dire outlook.
Several of the birds in the poll were chosen by organisers or nominated by readers because of government-sanctioned threats to their habitat, among them the swift parrot, bar-tailed godwit and hooded plover. The pink-eared duck can legally be hunted in Victoria. Numbers of once numerous birds, such as the Carnaby’s black-cockatoo, are dwindling due to the pressures of urban development.
The competition has proved controversial at times. Vote-rigging attempts have been thwarted, including one this year. There was the 2019 cockatoo incident and the 2017 powerful owl scandal, both involving a large volume of votes from the same source. This year’s votes are being carefully checked to ensure they comply with the rules.
Voting ended at midnight and we are closing in on the announcement of the 2023 winner. Join us from 11.30am AEDT for our dedicated bird of the year live blog.
Find all our bird of the year content
Guardian Australia has produced a glorious A3 poster of Australian birds that can be downloaded here as a high-resolution jpeg or pdf to be printed out. (The pdf is a large file so may take a while to load.)
