Home | NZ Garden Bird Survey

24 June – 2 July 2023

Te Tatauranga o ngā Manu Māra o Aotearoa – The New Zealand Garden Bird Survey

Make our birds count

We need you to help make a difference

Strong bird populations can indicate the environment is healthy. We know a lot about endangered native birds in the bush, but we don’t always know what’s happening in the populations of all the birds around us, particularly in urban and garden environments.

That’s why we need you to help us count them.

What we learn from information about the birds in your garden collected by you and your fellow citizen scientists helps our researchers understand how birds are coping with environmental challenges. It also helps us build a long-term dataset to understand the impact of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity.

Add the 2023 Garden Bird Survey to your calendar

This year’s survey starts in

State of NZ Garden Birds 2022 | Te Āhua o ngā Manu o te Kāri i Aotearoa 2022

What are our garden birds telling us?

Birds keep our gardens vigorous, reflect the state of our environment’s health, and encourage people to get involved in conservation. In the 17 years the NZ Garden Bird survey has run, scientists have noticed a gradual increase in the numbers of native birds that people have seen. This is encouraging and suggests that habitat restoration and predator control initiatives are having a positive effect on our bird life.

Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research researchers use supercomputers to distill a substantial amount of data – there have been more than 44,000 bird counts since 2012 – into simple but powerful metrics.

Thank you to all the citizen scientists who participated in the survey in 2022. It was a great turnout.

Full report »