00:02Getting ready for the final leg of a massive journey.
00:06I love seeing Australia's environment and I love being able to see those boom and bust cycles.
00:14The Eastern Australian Waterbird survey has been going for 44 years
00:19and Richard Kingsford has been along for the ride for almost all of them,
00:24counting birds with the skill of a race caller.
00:27One egret, one egret, one pelican, one large egret, one silver gull, one silver gull.
00:33From Queensland down to the Murray Mouth in SA,
00:36the researchers criss-cross the country travelling 38,000 kilometres.
00:4150 pelicans, 50 grey seals.
00:43Over the decades, Richard Kingsford says he's seen a 60-70% decline in birds,
00:49something he puts down to increased water extraction and drought.
00:52A few wet years and the return of some environmental flows have seen populations stabilise,
00:59but now there's a new threat.
01:01This is really probably the largest surveillance program at the moment for bird flu,
01:06because we're surveying somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 wetlands.
01:10The good news this year is that bird flu doesn't appear to have spread inland.
01:16It's kind of smouldering along at the moment, like we're getting the odd positive here, there.
01:21That's still happening.
01:22But is it going to go into a full range, big positive leading to mass mortality?
01:28We really don't know.
01:32Mr Kingsford says they saw some dead pelicans in the survey,
01:36but he believes it's likely the result of a normal boom and bust breeding season.
01:41It's great news for this year, but I absolutely think it's going to happen.
01:46It's just a case of when does it spread into our waterbird populations.
01:50This is the first survey the team has done since bird flu arrived in Australia,
01:54and they've got specific protocols for reporting any deaths they see.
01:59And when the disease does hit inland,
02:02the bird survey team says it'll be an important part of mapping the size and scale of the outbreak.
