General News
22 October, 2025
Aussie Bird Count takes off this week
THIS week officially marks the 2025 Aussie Bird Count and Heytesbury District Landcare Network (HDLN) are hosting two community counting days to encourage everyone to get involved.
The Aussie Bird Count runs from October 20 to October 26 and encourages people from all over Australia to take 20 minutes out of their day to stop and count the birds they see around them.
Once registered with the Aussie Bird Count through BirdLife Australia, you can enter the species and amount of birds you see within the 20-minute window.
The count encourages citizen science and allows BirdLife Australia to get a broad snapshot of both native and introduced bird species across the country.
The first community counting day will commence today (Wednesday, October 22) at the Timboon barbecue shelters at 4pm and the second will be at the Cobden lake this Friday, October 24 at 12noon.
HDLN project officer Kate Leslie said since she was participating in the count herself, she thought it would be fun to encourage the community to get involved and share knowledge as a group.
“I just thought – why don’t I do something that anyone can come along to?” she said.
“When I’ve done that before, the whole kindergarten has come along, and I didn’t know they were coming but they’ve come which was awesome.
“If you don’t know what the bird is, that’s alright – you can just ignore it, but hopefully someone will know.”
Ms Leslie said the count, as a national effort, was essential for BirdLife researchers.
“All people around Australia are doing this so Birdlife Australia gets a much better idea about what birds there are and they can look at trends over time,” she said.
“They can see which birds are on the rise, what that means, and which birds we’re not seeing as much as we used to in certain spots and what that means as well.
“It gives a population sample and Birdlife are able to extrapolate from that and look at particular trends.
“They can take into account how many people are doing the bird count, and over time they can get a sense of what the changes are in different pockets of the country.”
For anyone who worries they don’t know enough about birds to participate, Ms Leslie said there was no need to fear as everyone could get involved.
“You know more birds than you think and it’s lovely to come together with a mix of different experienced individuals who you can learn from in a group,” she said.
“Together you’ll work out, ‘That’s a galah,’ and it’ll all come together.
“One person who has registered with Birdlife for the bird count will put in the results in on their phone, which are counted by the group.
“If there’s 20 people and the group say that they’ve counted 10 different magpies, one person will enter that in.
“It’ll be fun.”
Ms Leslie said it was especially essential for residents in the Corangamite region to get involved in the count.
“This area is considered under researched,” she said.
“We have great biodiversity here but it would be good if more people were participating in citizen science and telling researchers about the biodiversity we have.”
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