Tasmania: every day's a birding day

Name: Codi
Price range: $

Tasmania is tiny by comparison with the mainland, but we have 12 species here that you cannot find anywhere else - 12 endemic species in Tasmania. As BirdLife likes to say, it punches well above its weight.

Partly because it's an island, you tend to get specialisation just like Galapagos finches and so on. Tassie has a full gamut of habitats and the specialist species that end up in these habitats. Wherever you go there's a bird and that's part of what I love - you can be sitting at the traffic lights, driving down the road, and you look out your window and there's a bird!

Every day's a birding day and that's a nice way to live.

Tasmanian thornbill Kim Murray — Tasmanian thornbill. Image: Kim Murray

Bruny's the island off the island off the island and you can get all 12 of the endemics here, plus a whole range of other species as well.

Bruny's so special from that point of view and it's also special for our critically endangered swift parrots, because it's one area where there are no sugar gliders to predate on them. If it's a year where swift parrots breed on Bruny, their success rate is way higher than years where they breed on the mainland and get predated by gliders.

That also adds to Bruny Island's specialness and importance in protecting some of these really critically endangered species.