During my PhD, I conducted 1,500 bird surveys in residential suburbs of Melbourne. This equated to 250 hours spent standing in residential streets, urban parks and bushland reserves looking and listening for birds. Sometimes things got a bit lonely, but one day I had a very inquisitive visitor! I was standing in a quiet residential street in Hurstbridge (a bushy suburb north of Melbourne) when a bright red male Australian King Parrot landed nearby. He hopped right up to me as if to ask, “What are you doing here?”.

Meeting this bird truly brightened my day and helped remind me why I was undertaking a PhD in the first place, to help birds like Australian King Parrots thrive in urban spaces.

I’m a big fan of Australian honeyeaters, but despite our amazing diversity of nectar-loving species, we don’t have any true hummingbirds.

I would love to travel to Central America one day to see hummingbirds in the wild! Their colours and aerial acrobatics are just incredible!

Hummingbird fact time:

Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly forwards, backwards, and hover perfectly still. Their wings can beat more than 70 times per second, and their hearts can reach over 1,200 beats per minute in flight.

To survive that pace, they enter a nightly state called torpor, slowing their body right down to conserve energy.

Tiny bird. Extreme settings.

Birds are a big part of my everyday life. As an urban ecologist, I spend my days thinking about how our cities could be better designed to support both people and birds.

I work with designers and councils to create urban spaces that provide birds with food, shelter and safe movement corridors. Another big part of my work is sharing my love and knowledge of birds with the wider community, via talks and guided bird walks in urban parks.

Even when I’m not working, I’m still looking and listening for birds. From the Little Ravens that nest in our street, to the Australian Wood Ducks that visit our local pool, to the Black Swans that forage along Melbourne’s beaches, I’m always urban bird watching.