Australia & the Bay

BirdLife Australia — Migratory Shorebirds program & Shorebird ID Booklet

BirdLife Australia leads the National Migratory Shorebird Conservation Action Plan (MS CAP), the umbrella under which Australian-side EAAF conservation is coordinated. The Migratory Shorebirds program runs the volunteer count infrastructure across roughly 520 Shorebird Areas nationwide — including all the major Moreton Bay sites a Steward will encounter. The Australasian Wader Studies Group (AWSG), a special-interest group of BirdLife Australia, is the research arm; its data feed nearly every Australian shorebird paper cited in the other constellations.

The most useful single resource for a Steward is the Shorebird ID Booklet (Version 3.1) — a 28-page printed-pamphlet identification guide covering migratory and resident shorebirds at any Australian site. Species are grouped by similarity (plovers, lapwings, stone-curlews, oystercatchers, sandpipers, godwits, knots), with field identification points, size references, habitat notes and EPBC conservation status. Free to download as a PDF and free hard copies can be ordered from the BirdLife shorebirds team. The print booklet is what most Stewards keep in their field bag.

Why this matters for what we do

• The Shorebird ID Booklet is the recommended pocket reference for the field. Order a print copy.
• BirdLife coordinates the national framework that the QWSG counts at Moreton Bay feed into.
• The MS CAP is the document a Steward writing about national-level conservation should cite.

BirdLife Australia — Australian Shorebird Monitoring Project & Birdata portal

The national framework into which a Steward's records ultimately feed. The Australian Shorebird Monitoring Project — formerly Shorebirds 2020 — runs annual counts at 520+ key Shorebird Areas, generating the long-term population trend data that underpins every Australian shorebird paper cited in the program. Volunteer counts are submitted to Birdata, BirdLife's online national bird monitoring platform. Birdata is Australia's longest-running digital bird database, with over 30 million records across all bird species and a public-facing analytics layer that Stewards can use directly to look up site-level history.

The methodology is rigorous: counts follow standardised survey areas, are conducted on agreed survey dates twice a year (the November and February peak-migrant windows), and are verified against historical site data before being included in the national dataset. Volunteer expertise is built through workshops and mentoring — not unlike the FSB program structure. The aggregated data is what makes the population trend analyses in the Yellow Sea constellation possible.

Why this matters for what we do

• QWSG counts at Moreton Bay sites flow into Birdata. The same site's data sits in both Stewards' records and the national dataset.
• A Steward can use the Birdata public portal to look up the count history of any Moreton Bay site they're visiting.
• The 1,600+ volunteers contributing nationally is the citizen-science base your records sit alongside.

Queensland Wader Study Group (QWSG) — the Moreton Bay site-fidelity record

QWSG is the local arm — a specialist group within Birds Queensland, formed in 1992, that has run shorebird counts at Moreton Bay for more than three decades. The QWSG dataset is the baseline against which any change at any bay site is measured. When a Steward is asked "is this normal for this site at this time of year?", the answer comes from QWSG's count series.

The group's published work, including Coleman & Milton's site-fidelity studies, has shown that individual bar-tailed godwits, eastern curlews and great knots return to the same metre-scale roosts year after year — site fidelity is high enough that disturbance at a specific roost is not absorbed by displacement to a nearby one. Birds bond to sites; sites that are disturbed can lose their flock without those birds finding equivalent habitat elsewhere. This is part of the foundation for the FSB position that bird-first management at site-level is not interchangeable with management of "bay shorebirds" in aggregate.

Beyond the count series, QWSG runs the Moreton Bay leg-flag reading and reporting program. Most flagged baueri godwits seen at the bay's roosts have flag-read records held by QWSG. A Steward reading a flag and reporting it through FlagWatch is contributing to a record that has been continuously maintained for thirty years.

Why this matters for what we do

• The bay's count baseline is held by QWSG. FSB site reports use it as the reference series.
• Site fidelity at metre-scale means roost protection is not interchangeable across sites.
• FlagWatch records read at Moreton Bay are reported through QWSG's flag-reading workflow.