Participate in The Guardian’s ‘Bird of the Year’ poll – its good for you.

Bird of the year is back – reminding us why joy matters in difficult times

25/09/2025

Graham Readfearn

The red goshawk’s deep, powerful wings emit a faint thrum as it accelerates under the canopy towards its prey. Rainbow lorikeets are no slouches, but they’re no match for the speed and agility of Australia’s rarest bird of prey, which banks and swoops like a feathery fighter jet. But this spectacle – once seen all the way down Australia’s east coast – is disappearing.

As researcher Chris MacColl told me, it is going extinct “right under our noses” and now only perhaps a thousand of them, and maybe fewer, are left across Australia’s far northern tropical savannahs.

The red goshawk is just one of a host of stories we’ll be telling over the next two weeks as we gear up for our bird of the year poll – an event Guardian Australia runs every two years in partnership with BirdLife Australia.

We’ll also look at the plight of Baudin’s black cockatoo, the southern emu wren and the beleaguered orange-bellied parrot. We’ve already published pieces on how the glossy black cockatoo is losing its trees and how the climate crisis threatens the mighty albatross.

Bird of the year gives us a chance to highlight Australia’s incredible diversity of birds – we have about 850 native species, and nearly half of them are found nowhere else on the planet. The most often-sighted bird across the continent is not a drab pigeon (sorry, pigeons) but the ridiculously colourful rainbow lorikeet.

But it’s also about something else. With all the bad stuff going on in the world, it’s more important than ever to find some joy and to make time to be grateful for the amazing things around us (being consciously grateful is brilliant for our mental health).

Right now, we are going through thousands of reader nominations for species that will make it into our final 50, ahead of 10 days of frantic online voting starting on 6 October. Nominations such as the currawong, which one reader told us greets an entire street with its song at sunset; the magpie, known for swooping to protect springtime nests but “spends the rest of the year just being great”; or the tawny frogmouth: “Look at it, it’s awesome.” Amen to that.

Anyone, anywhere in the world, can vote – and people do in their many thousands. When we last ran the competition we got about 321,000 votes. That’s 321,000 times people were not thinking about terrible things, but were instead weighing up the merits of the superb fairywren (a former winner, so named because they’re superb) against the spotted pardalote (someone should call them the Zoolander bird because they’re ridiculously good looking) or the bin chicken (also known as the Australian white ibis).

Already this year, we’ve run stories about how one of our regular writers loves the vengeful magpie so much, he had one tattooed on his arm; how a visiting blackbird eased the grief of losing a mother; and how fairywrens sing to their eggs (and other weird things you probably didn’t know about why birds sing).

You can vote for whichever bird you like, as long as that bird is the red goshawk. Yes, we are all allowed to lobby, and we are encouraged not to miss any opportunities that arise. Like this one.

What you shouldn’t do is try to rig the vote. Our data team have become adept at spotting voting anomalies (looking at you, #TeamPowerfulOwl).

Most of us at Guardian Australia have our favourites. The editor’s unfailing support for the gang-gang cockatoo has so far failed to bring home a win, and the well-liked tawny frogmouth has been a runner-up three times.

Could this be the frogmouth’s year? (No, because you’re going to vote for the red goshawk.)