Marcia Dale and Rod Morris, together with plenty of help from volunteers, ran the fourth annual bird call workshop at Portobello last month.

The workshop is timed to tune-in volunteers’ eyes and ears to the sounds of the native and exotic birds encountered on the Peninsula prior to the start of the bird monitoring season. But it’s also much more than that. Rod talked about the benefits of increasing birdsong and how we can achieve that. His insights may surprise you.

More native birds equal more native trees.

Feed the birds not the rats by dispensing sugar water not seeds.

Trapping rats and possums increases bird populations. There is little point feeding birds and installing nest boxes if you aren’t trapping predators.

Your efforts controlling rats and possums will be rewarded with increasing birdsong, known to relax the listener.

Every spring, trained volunteers conduct bird surveys along their designated 1km transect. There are 25 bird walk transects across the peninsula, each of which is surveyed 8 times. This outcome monitoring helps us measure the success of the possum control programme.

Rod’s presentation was filmed so that it can be made available on OPBG’s website so eep a look out for it!