Tawny frogmouth named 2025 Australian bird of the year winner | Australian bird of the year 2025

The Tawny frogmouth has been named Australia’s bird of the year for 2025 after taking second place three times in a row in the biennial Guardian/BirdLife Australia survey.

More than 310,000 votes were cast after the polls opened on October 6, and the tawny led the attack from the start, despite being hotly and persistently pursued by two cockatoos: Baudin’s black cockatoo and the ever-popular gang of cockatoos.

But a tawny frogmouth victory was far from assured. Voted for second place in 2019, 2021 and 2023. He also led the voting in the final stages of the 2023 competition, but watched the swift parrot fly past on the final day.

This year, 11,851 votes were cast for the tawny in the final round, giving him first place comprehensively ahead of Baudin’s black cockatoo, which placed second with 7,688 votes.

The red-crested cockatoo, Canberra’s favorite with its voice like a rusty hinge, came in third place with 6,256 votes, as in 2021 and 2023.

In fourth place was Willie Wagtail with 4,947 votes. The snipe came in fifth place with 4,370 votes, while the laughing jackass came in sixth place with just nine votes (4,361).

Tawny frogmouths are found only in Australia, but can be seen in almost any habitat except dense rainforests, mountain steppes and treeless deserts. They are nocturnal, territorial and mate for life, nesting (indiscriminately) on large horizontal branches of old trees.

Tawny birds and other frogmouths, so named for their flat, open beaks, are often confused with owls, but they are more closely related to nightjars. Their mottled silvery gray and red plumage resembles tree bark, making them difficult to spot, although they are common throughout the country, including in cities.

Despite their camouflage abilities, a 2021 study in Germany found tawny frogmouths to be the world’s most Instagrammable bird.

Birdlife Australia’s Sean Dooley said public response to this year’s survey had been “really joyful”.

“It’s such a joy, and maybe a little ridiculous, to be involved in something that feels like celebration and fun… it reminds people how wonderful the lives of our birds are, but how precarious many of our species are,” Dooley said.

“It’s really important to highlight something like the rocket launch site being built on truly vital habitat for the giant wren of the southern Eyre Peninsula, or to talk about how expanding bauxite mining leases in the jarrah forests around Perth would be a brutal blow to the beautiful Baudin’s black cockatoo.”

skip past newsletter introduction

The southern emu wren finished seventh in the final round with 4,323 votes. Only four votes separated eighth and ninth place; The spotted pardalot’s 3,474 votes are just ahead of the wedge-tailed eagle’s 3,470 votes. The little penguin ranked tenth with 3,268 votes.

The debutant Baudin’s black cockatoo is found only in the south-west of Western Australia, between Albany and Perth. Researchers have argued that the species should be classified as critically endangered because the population has declined sharply due to ongoing deforestation, but the WA government has so far not reclassified it.

“We know that birds in Australia are facing an extinction crisis. The rarer things are, the greater the impact of one-off events,” Dooley said.

The 2025 bird of the year announcement coincides with Birdlife Australia’s national citizen science bird study. Australian Bird CountIt starts on Monday, October 20th.

This is the first year that the magpies, winners of the opening poll in 2017, have failed to make the bottom 10. Previous winners include black-throated finch (2019), magnificent fairy wren (2021) and swift parrot (2023).