The Great Aussie Bird Count is happening today. The annual citizen science initiative invites people to observe and record birds in their local area.
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00:00All we need people to do is this week, carve out 20 minutes, find your favourite patch
00:08of green.
00:09It could be the backyard, it could be the patch of bush, it could be the lake.
00:13Download the Aussie Bird Count app and sit for 20 minutes, letting us know all the birds
00:17that you see and hear.
00:19Most people probably know more birds than they think they do, but absolutely not everybody
00:25is a massive bird nerd like us at BirdLife Australia, so we've made it easy.
00:30In the Aussie Bird Count app, there's actually a bird finder.
00:33So you put in a little bit of information about how big the bird was, what sort of features
00:39did you see, what sort of colours did you see, pop that in, that will then give you
00:44a list of possible birds and you can just look at the photos and tick it off that way.
00:49This is our 11th year of doing the Aussie Bird Count and this is helping us build a
00:54bit of a census of how birds that live where we live are faring.
00:58So by going out and doing this at the same time every year, we're getting an idea of
01:02which birds are doing really, really well, which birds in our sort of more urban spaces
01:06are not doing so well, and then we can also put that into our bigger set of data at BirdLife
01:12Australia to get an overall idea of how birds are faring across the country.
01:16Bird Week is always the third week in October and it stems from a national bird day that
01:21started in the early 1900s.
01:23It's also spring.
01:24It's a great time to be out seeing birds, you know, everybody's out busy nesting, being
01:29very vocal and so it's a really nice opportunity to celebrate the season and get out and see
01:35some birds.
01:36The Aussie Bird Count is all about just getting data wherever you are.
01:39So we would always encourage you wherever, even if you think you're in the middle of
01:43the CBD and you're not going to see much or there's going to be a whole heap of counts
01:46coming in, doesn't matter.
01:48We want data in from everywhere and for the most part this is of course around the birds
01:52that live where people live.
01:54So where we've got lots of active people watching birds is where we're going to get some great
01:57data.
01:58I think what's always really exciting for me is that the sheer number of birds, so I
02:03think we had over three million birds counted last year, but also the number of species.
02:08So in Australia we have somewhere, you know, it varies around 840-ish bird species.
02:13We saw just under 600 of those bird species last year in the Aussie Bird Count.
02:18So that's one week in October with a whole heap of people keeping an eye out and we're
02:23seeing a huge number of birds.