do you have any putting you on the spot here do you have any examples that you can point to of of scientific findings that have come from from the aussie bird count or maybe citizen science bird counts in general

yeah so there there is one that comes to mind it was a paper published earlier this year and it actually wasn't the aussie bird count but it's a really good example of why it's so valuable to have data through multiple decades there was one man who went to the same park near where he lived every single year or like multiple times a year for decades.

And during that period of time, he saw enormous change in the bird community.

So he was able to pinpoint when some of the smaller birds started to become rarer and disappear from his local park.

And also when one of my favourite birds to hate, the noisy miner, really moved in in huge numbers and just took over the place.

And this paper that he's pulled together with my former supervisor, Andrew Bennett, is super interesting because it looks at how much the urban bird community can shift over time and how there's lots of different things at play.

So it's interactions between different species, it's changes in the vegetation.

What would your advice be for people who want to make their spaces nicer for the birds that we share these spaces with?

Yep.

And it's something that Banyule City Council runs every year, and we get, you know, around 100 people who will rock up, as long as it's good weather.

Um, and what we do is we divide them up into about four groups, and we all go out and walk different routes within this park.

Um, so we'll stop at that swamp that we were at earlier, and we'll also take them off track to some cool spots to try and find some of those smaller birds.

And then when we come back together, we all have something to eat, and we kind of go through and make a list of all the different species that we all saw on the morning.

So it's kind of a way to census, um, the birds that are here on that particular day, and it's also just an awesome way to get people outside and thinking more about birds in their local area.

Like, y- I often have really good conversations with some of the people that come along, who will ask me about a bird they saw in their backyard or, you know, how can we get more of those in, in our local park or whatever it is.

What, what are your thoughts about some of these really nationally endangered species that are hanging on on the outskirts of the city?