2021 Australian waterbird survey shows improvement from previous years

November 8, 2021

“Two-hundred pelicans breeding, 20 whiskered terns, 100 grey teal, 30 black swans, one little pied cormorant …”

Richard Kingsford, a veteran ecologist, is rattling off the waterbirds he’s spotting below. He clutches his voice recorder closely to overcome the engine noise as our Cessna banks steeply, tracking the shoreline of Lake Brewster, a large lake in central-west New South Wales.

We’re on a three-day trip that is part of the annual waterbird survey, now in its 39th year. One of the world’s longest continuous bird counts, it’s also among the largest, spanning 2.7m square km – 11 times the size of UK or six times California.

“It’s exhausting. We’re putting in eight-hour days [in the air], flying at low levels in conditions like this at times,” Barkell says as a rainstorm sweeps across Dubbo airport where we are preparing for the final leg back to Sydney.

Bird tallying of more than 50 species can only be an approximation and requires skills that can be honed by computer simulations such as Wildlife Counts. The birds’ colour, shape and size are among identifying cues, as are their flight patterns when they are disturbed by the plane.

“Separating out the little black from the great cormorants, and the little pied from the large pied [cormorants] is a challenge,” he says. “Then there are the Australasian shoveler, which are rare and can look like a black duck.”

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The daily results are fed back to the University of NSW, where they are processed by a team and provided to the state and federal agencies such as the Murray Darling Basin Authority that finance the research.

“It’s looking really encouraging,” Kingsford says after we land back at Bankstown, in Sydney’s west. “There’s water in the Paroo, there’s water in a bit of the Darling and the Macquarie and a little bit in the Gwydir [rivers], but there’s not a massive flood” that would spark mass breeding.