One year. Thirty-five people. The bay.
All figures here are illustrative, drawn from a model of plausible activity at the program's current cohort scale. They are not a forecast and not a record of actual visits. They are an answer to the question, what becomes possible if we work together.
A working group of this size, distributed across the bay, produces what an institution alone cannot: continuous attention. The figures above describe roughly that.
From Jacobs Well to Pumicestone Passage.
The program is anchored by three delivery partners, each working a stretch of the bay they know in detail. Together they cover the bay end to end.
Pimpama River, Russell Island, South Stradbroke, Wavebreak Island, mangrove edges of the Jacobs Well district. Feeding flats accessed by EDUCAT vessel from Queensland's first purpose-built field study centre, established 1974.
Deception Bay foreshore, Hays Inlet, Nathan Road Wetlands. Mixed-use roost and feeding flats; mangrove-fringed foreshore. The Deception Bay Environmental Hub at 7 Joseph Crescent is the program's centre-north working base.
Pumicestone Passage end to end: Kakadu Beach (constructed roost, king-tide critical), Toorbul Esplanade (roost and feeding flats), Buckley's Hole sandspit (all-tide roost). The Bribie Island Environmental Protection Association coordinates Steward presence on the Passage.
The 28 monitored sites in the sample dataset spread across these three regions: roughly twelve in the south working out of Jacobs Well, eight in the centre and north under REF coverage, and eight along Pumicestone under BIEPA. Sites are not divided cleanly between partners; some are shared, some rotate.
Five things the dataset is for.
A record on its own is one observation. Records added together, across people and across months, become five different kinds of useful.
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1.A baseline that change is measured against.
Without continuous monthly counts, no one can say whether this year is better or worse than last year. The dataset is the bay's memory of itself.
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2.Evidence behind a council submission.
When a coastal development is proposed near a roost, planners weigh whether shorebirds use the site and how heavily. A dated dataset is the answer they need. Eyewitness counts, dated, signed, with photographs of disturbance, carry weight that anecdotes do not.
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3.The discovery of new sites.
Three ad hoc roosts in the sample dataset are sites no one had on a list. A king tide forces birds off Toorbul; the overflow goes to a sandspit nobody had named. Because someone was there with a phone, the spit is now on the map. Without the records, the spit is invisible. The next development proposal would treat it as nothing.
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4.The link to the international flyway.
Flag reads contributed by FlagWatch users feed BirdMark, the international resighting database. A flag read at Toorbul this season may match a bird seen on the Yellow Sea two months earlier and the Alaska coast eight months before that. The Steward's notebook becomes one entry in a chain that spans hemispheres.
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5.What the work does for the watcher.
Standing at the waterline for two hours, in the company of others doing the same, is what it is. The research literature now describes what happens to attention, mood, and social connection across a season of such practice. The bay gives something back. Read the note on what the watcher receives →
The migratory window is half the picture.
From September to April, the bay holds its peak counts: 40,000 migratory shorebirds dispersed across the flats and roosts. But the bay is alive in May and June and July and August, too. ShorelineWatch records continue.
The stay-behinds are there: Pied Oystercatchers, Beach Stone-curlews, Bush Stone-curlews, residents who never left. Their breeding success is a measure of the bay's health that the migratory count cannot show. The Beach Stone-curlew pair at Kakadu Beach hatched a chick on 21 December 2022 and again in subsequent years; that record exists because someone was there.
Off-season records also catch the events that don't time themselves to peak migration: a king tide in June that floods Toorbul and pushes birds to a previously unrecorded site; a storm in late winter that strips a roost of vegetation; a new dog-walker pattern that emerges before the migrants return. The records that catch these things are the off-peak records. A program that only watches in summer is half-blind.
The 480-record figure across the year is what year-round monitoring looks like. Roughly 240 records in the migratory window. Roughly 240 in the months either side. Both halves matter.
This page is not a forecast. It is a possibility.
The figures here describe what 35 attentive people, distributed across the bay, can produce together in a year. The program at the time of writing is closer to the start of that arc than the end of it. The point of this page is to make the arc visible.
The path in is two doors. ShorelineWatch is the public observation tool, no course needed, free to use, records logged from a phone in a few minutes. The Shorebird Steward Program is the trained-cohort version, six months, A$95, with field practice at Jacobs Well and the full toolkit including FlagWatch and Gazza as your tutor.
Either door contributes to the same dataset. The more people working the bay, the more the figures on this page become real, and the more the bay's records can do the five things in the section above. The work needs people. The bay rewards regulars.