Somewhere near you right now a magpie is walking across a lawn like it owns the place, and this week BirdLife Australia would like you to write that down. Australia's biggest citizen science event, the Aussie Bird Count, runs from Monday 19 to Sunday 25 October, and taking part asks for exactly twenty minutes. Pick an outdoor spot you like, a backyard, a park bench, a beach, even a window with a view, sit for twenty minutes and note every bird you see, then submit the list through the free Aussie Bird Count app or the web form. You do not need to know your birds: the app has a bird finder built in that walks you through colour, size and shape to the likely name. You can count as many times as you like, in as many places as you like, all week. Register at aussiebirdcount.org.au and the app does the rest.

Read the full story: Aussie Bird Count 2026, BirdLife Australia.

Last year 63,990 people submitted 153,855 counts and between them recorded 5,014,889 birds of 621 species, the most ever counted. Australian magpies came out on top, with rainbow lorikeets second, noisy miners third, then sulphur crested cockatoos and magpie larks. "Because rainbow lorikeets are more social, hanging out in flocks, when we see them, we see more of them," Sean Dooley, BirdLife Australia's national public affairs adviser and self described chief bird nerd, said of the results. "But the magpie is the bird we encounter most often." Every count becomes a data point in a national picture of how the common birds are faring, year on year, suburb by suburb, which is knowledge nobody else can gather, because nobody else is sitting in all those gardens at once. Counts submitted between 20 and 26 October also go into a draw for five pairs of binoculars. Mostly, though, you get twenty quiet minutes outside, and the odd realisation that the garden has been full of company all along.

A black and white Australian magpie standing on grass
An Australian magpie in Sydney, the most counted bird in last year's Aussie Bird Count. Photo: Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Our short take: from BirdLife Australia's Aussie Bird Count 2026 event page and the 2025 results page, with Sean Dooley's words from the results page.