Vorstman's Guide
to the
Birds of Australia
and New Zealand

Approach and accountability

Australasia is the cradle of the songbirds. Almost six out of every ten bird species in the world are passerines, and the genetic tree shows that the whole group arose here, on the southern landmass that later became Australia and New Guinea, and spread out from here across the world — the crows, tits, thrushes and warblers of the northern hemisphere are all later branches. At the foot of that tree stand birds found nowhere else: the lyrebirds Menura, which reproduce their own surroundings for four minutes at a stretch, and the bowerbirds, which build and decorate without a nest coming of it. To watch a honeyeater or a fairywren here is to watch the oldest branch of a group that Europe and North America only see in its youngest form.

On the other side of the Tasman Sea lies the opposite case. New Zealand broke away from Gondwana eighty million years ago and spent all of that time without land mammals. Birds took over their roles: a grazer, a digger, a nocturnal insect-eater with a sense of smell and whiskers, a predator at the top. Many of them lost the power of flight, because there was nothing to fly from. Since people brought rats, stoats and cats, that has proved defenceless: the moa, the huia, the laughing owl and the Stephens Island wren are gone, and much of what remains lives on islands where the predators have been cleared. Extinct species are not in this guide — it is a guide for looking — but the story cannot be told without them.

The species stand in the order of the tree of life: by clade, order, family and genus. That shows at a glance why a Kea sits at the base of the parrot tree, why a kookaburra is a kingfisher that does not fish, and why a falcon belongs beside the songbirds rather than the hawks. The range map carries two layers: the seasonal colour of a state or region, and beneath it a density counted cell by cell from the records. What the data do and do not support is set out on the sources page.

About this site

Vorstman's Guide to the Birds of Australia and New Zealand is an educational site about the birds of Australia, New Zealand and Norfolk Island, made for people who want to go further than the first identification. The site is deliberately built light: static HTML, no trackers, no cookies.