Top three birds all backed by
more than 10,000 votes in Guardian Australia and BirdLife Australia poll that
attracted 150,000 votes
Sunday 10 December
2017 23.54 GMTLast modified on Monday 11 December
2017 06.09 GMT
The Australian magpie has been
crowned Australian bird of the year for 2017, upsetting the early favourite,
the white ibis, and winning 13.3% of the vote.
The magpie received 19,926 votes,
followed by the Australian white ibis with 19,083 votes and the laughing
kookaburra with 10,953 votes.
They were the only three species
to win more than 10,000 votes, to the chagrin of fairywren supporters who feel
the chubby little blue bird was robbed. The fairywren vote was split between
the east and west coasts, with the east coast superb fairywren getting 6,366
votes and fifth place and Western Australia’s splendid fairywren coming 10th
with 4,129 votes.
The superb fairywren won BirdLife
Australia’s bird of the year poll in 2013.
It is the first year the BirdLife
poll has been run in conjunction with Guardian Australia. Almost 150,000 votes
were received before the polls closed on Saturday.
The result was the subject of
some criticism, called either a boring choice or an unworthy one given the
magpie’s propensity to swoop anyone who crosses their territory in spring.
BirdLife’s Sean Dooley, speaking
on ABC News Breakfast, said despite their violent reputation magpies had
cleverly befriended a number of humans, which may have swayed the vote.
No comments:
Post a Comment