🔗 Share this article

The annual bird competition acts as a welcome antidote to an ever more bleak news cycle, honoring Australia's remarkable and distinctive native wildlife. But, it's also a contest of statistics.

Taking past results as a guide, over 300,000 votes are expected to be cast over a nine-day period, starting at 6am AEDT on 6 October, as people from across the globe select their favourite Australian bird species for 2025.

The winning aviator (assuming it is a bird that flies – probable, but not certain) will be honored alongside previous winners: the Australian magpie, the black-throated finch, the superb fairy-wren and last year's winner, the swift parrot.

Australia has about 850 native bird species. Almost half are absent anywhere else on the planet. That total has been whittled down to 50 for this year’s voting, based in part on thousands of reader nominations.

While you are considering how to vote, here are some additional numbers to consider.

A increasing number of bird species are facing challenges. The federal government lists 164 as threatened. According to the Australian Conservation Foundation, 11 birds have been included to the list since the last bird of the year vote two years ago.

At least 22 species and subspecies have been pushed to extinction, primarily in the decades after European colonisation.

Most urgently, there are 18 bird species listed as severely threatened, placing them a single step from lost. They encompass some regular contenders: the regent honeyeater, the far eastern curlew and the swift and orange-bellied parrots. They may soon be joined by others, such as Baudin’s black cockatoo.

Hopefully that what to do to save them – and the roughly 2,000 other species and ecological communities deemed at risk – will be at the heart of the government’s work to revise the national nature law later this year.

Why this is important, and what birds mean to people, has been the central theme of a series of introductory stories, photos, videos and artwork in recent weeks. There’s much more to come.

But, for now, the number to focus on is: one.

Each day, everyone has a single vote to assign to their favourite bird that is still in the competition.

At the end of each day, the five birds that received the least votes will be eliminated from the race. The final round of voting will take place on Tuesday the 14th, when just 10 birds will be left. That voting closes at 6am on Wednesday the 15th.

The winner will be announced in a live stream at midday the following day.

In the words of BirdLife Australia’s Sean Dooley – a key organizer behind bird of the year – the coming days will be a “joyous celebration of the birds that save us” and a “call to action for us to work harder to save them”.

It should also be plenty of fun. Now is the time to cast your vote.