Bathing Birds Initiative : Which Birds Are Using Your Birdbath?

Just this weekend I came across a citizen science initiative that I knew we could easily support as a family. I grabbed my iPad and signed us up quicker than it took T to say “so what actually is it?”.

Bathing Birds  is proudly presented by the National Parks Association of New South Wales in partnership with BirdLife Australia’s Birds in Backyards Program and The University of Sydney. The initiative seeks to explore which birds are using birdbaths, how it changes between seasons and how gardening habitats influence which birds are present.

As registered participants our family will begin collecting data on Friday the 27th of June right through to Sunday the 27th of July, 2014. We will repeat the process again in January 2015 to discover if different birds use our bath in contrasting seasons.

I became a little overwhelmed after I discovered this but quickly realised that we only needed to collect data for a 20 minute period, up to 3 times a week. At a minimum, we could do it once a week!

So what’s the purpose of the study? Turns out that there isn’t much information about which birds use birdbaths in Australia even though so many of us have them in our gardens. I predict that we will find lorikeets, Asian minors and magpies are the most common birds in our garden.

If you’re interested in signing up click here and follow the prompts.

Happy bird watching!