Australian bird of the year is almost here. Australia is host to hundreds of different species. There are so many ways to celebrate and enjoy this abundance of wildlife – become a birder and go looking in your neighbourhood, colour in one of these lovely colouring sheets, or make yourself an origami bird.
All you need is a bit of paper. You can easily turn an A4 sheet into square paper suitable for origami with a couple of folds and some scissors. If you have access to a printer, Bush Heritage Australia also has some wonderful templates of swift parrots and Carnaby’s cockatoos that you can print and follow the guides.
These instructions will be a lot easier to follow along if you have some paper at hand. Let’s begin:
If you get stuck with some of the folds, you can find guides online. This one shows you how to do the “inverse reverse fold” that we used to make the beak.
Voting for the Australian bird of the year 2025 starts on Monday 6 October, with the winner announced via blog and livestream on Thursday 16 October. Each day, the five birds with the fewest votes will be knocked out and the vote count begins again after midnight. Readers can follow the vote count live on the Guardian’s website until the final days of voting, when the count goes dark.
The bird of the year poll has been running since 2017. Previous winners include the magpie (2017), the black-throated finch (2019), the superb fairywren (2021) and the swift parrot (2023).
