Canberra's most endearing native neighbourhood bird, the bold, brainy and playful Australian magpie, has emerged from this year's Aussie Backyard Bird Count as also the city's most noticed bird.
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The results of the BirdLife Australia count, which was held as part of National Bird Week during October 17 to October 23 and which involved residents taking note of how many birds they spotted in their community over a 20-minute period, found Canberrans were especially engaged with the census.
More than 1060 Canberrans submitted 953 checklists.
Canberra's hard-to-ignore magpies (lots of Canberrans would testify to magpies coming to doorsteps, peering through kitchen windows with quizzical expressions on their faces and being daily patrons of bird baths) were the most reported species.
Nationally, too, magpies were ubiquitous. They were the third most frequently-noticed species. The national "winner" was the rainbow lorikeet, blessed by nature with the plumage equivalent of the most startling of Hawaiian shirts. The colourful species topped the count for the third successive year. Noisy miners, hard for eyes and especially for ears to ignore, came second.
Almost 1.4 million birds were counted in this year's census, according to BirdLife Australia. The figure is a 40 per cent increase from the previous year.
This year's twitching bird counters – more than 85 per cent of them testifying to being only novice or intermediate birdwatchers – recorded more than 583 species.
BirdLife Australia's Sean Dooley said the results of this year's count would give the organisation a much stronger sense of what was occurring to Australian birds across the country.
The full results of the census are available at birdlife.org.au. Next year's Aussie Backyard Bird Count will start on October 23.
