Australia Post has released a series of stamps to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Aussie Bird Count and the birds they have chosen may surprise you.
Unless of course, you are one of the more than 100,000 Australians who have taken part in what has become the country’s biggest citizen science project. You would know that when BirdLife Australia release the results of all the surveys that they participated in, the species that feature – rainbow lorikeet, noisy miner and Australian magpie – have been the three most common birds in every year of the Aussie Bird Count so far.
Birds sing the story of our land but it’s a tune to which we are all too often tone-deaf. If we had started the Aussie Bird Count 100 years ago, the birdsong that would have dominated the soundscape in most Australian back yards would have been supplied by a radically different choir of starlings, blackbirds, sparrows and other European imports. These sounds would have reflected an industrial landscape of innercity factories and the English cottage-style gardens of most suburban yards.
The nature of our cities began to change in the urban landscape of Australia during the 1960s and 70s with the emergence of growing Australian native plants, not just in private gardens but also in our parks, streets and highways. The species favoured were those with showy clusters of flowers – eucalypts, banksias, bottlebrushes and grevilleas – which regularly produced a profusion of rich blossom that attracted an entirely different suite of birds, chief among them the nectar-loving honeyeaters and lorikeets.
The Rainbow lorikeet was once common along the east coast down into Victoria and South Australia but persecution by orchardists on the fringes of the growing colonial cities saw them shot out of existence in many districts. As those once-rural areas were consumed by suburbia, the change of landscape saw the lorikeets expand into their former range and then some. Populations of escaped aviary birds found cities such as Perth and Hobart to their liking and the raucous screeching of the lorikeet began to dominate the soundscape of those cities too.
Similarly, the noisy miner – a native honeyeater not to be confused with the similar-looking common myna that was introduced from India – was still only considered as moderately common by bird experts in the 1960s. The park-like landscape we have created since then in our parks and quarter-acre blocks has replicated the open eucalypt woodlands they would naturally occur in and their numbers have boomed. The Aussie Bird Count results have shown these pugnacious birds to be the second-most common back yard birds in Australia despite the fact they are only found in the eastern third of the continent.
While the Australian magpie lags a distant third in terms of numbers, it is actually the most commonly encountered bird throughout the Aussie Bird Count with more counters seeing it in their surveys than any other bird. The difference is that when we see magpies it is usually as single birds, pairs or small family groups, in contrast to the large flocks of the top two species that are usually encountered. Magpies have proven to be the real survivor of our native Australian birds, and despite some downturns at the beginning of the century, seem to be holding firm in our urban landscapes during the 10 years of the Aussie Bird Count.
To have three native Australian birds at the top of the Bird Count may appear to be a cause for celebration, but their dominance masks another trend that is showing up in the Aussie Bird Count results: we are seeing the disappearance of most of our small bush birds. The changes in the urban landscape have created an avian homelessness crisis where smaller-bodied and specialist birds that feed on insects and nectar are being squeezed out of our cities.
Most of the Top 20 birds seen each year in the Aussie Bird Count are either introduced species or larger-bodied indigenous birds that are more aggressive. While there are a few prominent winners in the urban bird real estate market, the smaller, less bold species have lost their homes as bush is replaced by housing developments with ever-larger houses with ever-shrinking gardens comprising less shrubby plants that the smaller birds can use as refuge from the bullying of the larger, more aggressive species.
In the first decade of the Aussie Bird Count we have observed a drop in once-familiar smaller species such as silvereyes and willie wagtails. After another 10 years, without a change in the way we do cities in this country, the urban choir of our future cities may still be loud but will be missing a great variety of voices.
The 10th Aussie Bird Count will be held 16-22 October
Sean Dooley is national public affairs manager for BirdLife Australia
