South West Bird Search Program

The SWBSP is my little effort to democratize what we know about birds in south west Victoria.
As an idea I'd had it in my head for a long time. The turning point came in 2001 (during a social work placement with the North Central CMA) when I met Terry White from Maryborough - who had developed a bird search program for kids in WA. It sounded like it was an incredibly successfull program and I liked the way that Terry had faith in kids capacity to create new knowldge. The program supposedly went national but I haven't been able to find out what became of it. Anyway this is my version of bird search.

The broad vision of the SWBSP is to help kids & community volunteers in creating & sharing knowledge about native birds in South West Victoria. There will be two arms to the program. One arm will fit into the South West Environmental Volunteerism Initiative (which I'll describe in another blog in the next few weeks), while the other will fit into primary and secondary schools in the region. I'm hoping to run a pilot of the SWBSP in Port Fairy primary schools - starting second term 2009. If all goes well, hopefully we can roll the program out in schools throughout south west Victoria.

The core aims of the SWBSP will be :

1. To create greater awareness of local birds & threats to their survival
2. To empower kids & community volunteers to become knowledge brokers
3. To empower communities to take responsibility for caring about local bird species.

To make the SWBSP work, three things have to happen - first I need to create fruitfull partnerships with key conservation groups, schools and volunteer groups; second I need to create a Bird Search Manual; and thirdly I need to engage local artists to develop a folio that we can integrate into the program.

I'm currently hard at work on developing a manual which will cover birds from about Mepunga to Warrnambool to Yambuk to Hawkesdale and Woolsthorpe. Most of the focus will be on coastal areas but in time I hope to expand the manual out to more rural areas. There is likely to be some 70-80 species included in the manual, maybe more. I'm unsure yet just how much to put in, as I'm keen to make it as kid friendly as possible.

What Id like to imagine is that the SWBSP will be a user friendly program that schools can easily integrate into their environmental studies courses and can be tailored to both primary and secondary students. It will be innovative and allow kids to create their own information and share it with the world.

The second aspect to the program will be developed for community groups that are part of the South West Environmental Volunteerism Initiative and will focus on specific project sites, such as Tozer Reserve, Hawkesdale Common and Tower Hill.

Eventually it would be nice to roll the program out to farmers and connect it with the Birds on Farms work that Birds Australia have done.

On the pragmatic level it will involve kids and community volunteers, going out and learning about the kinds of habitats in which birds live, identifying birds, recording numbers and locations of sightings and uploading information to a local database, Google Earth, Viridans and Birds Australia databases. Program participants will be able to create a Google Earth Tour of what birds are in the area at different times - and share that with the world. It should be fun and has the potential to bring in bird lovers from all around the world.

Naturally, their are many groups out there allready doing related things and I hope in time to create fruitfull partnerships with each of them and dovetail with what they've allready given kids. Groups like local DSE, Parks, local Bird Observers Clubs, local Field Naturalist Groups, The Gould League and Birds Australia. I don't intend on reinventing the wheel but what I would like to do is develop an integrated approach for kids and community volunteers that empowers them to create and share knowledge in a way that hasn't been done before. As a Twitcher once said to me, "Why should government agencies and scientists have all the information about birds ?".

Ultimately it's really about bringing science and a love of nature back to the people.

And when it comes to kids, who better to lead us into the future, then the next generation.