Ep 105: Bush Bird Classifier _ Dr David Watson

What if the birds on your farm could tell you how healthy your landscape really is?

In this episode of Salt of the Earth Farm Stories, we sit down with the endlessly curious Dr David Watson — ecologist, innovator, and passionate advocate for woodland birds — to explore a fascinating piece of technology that could change the way farmers understand their environment.

Dr Dave and his team have developed the Bush Bird Classifier, a free and easy-to-use tool that automatically identifies bird species from the sounds around your farm. Using smart algorithms and acoustic monitoring, the technology gives landholders real-time insights into biodiversity and ecosystem health — without needing specialist bird knowledge.

But this conversation goes far beyond birdsong.

We unpack:

• Why woodland birds are such powerful indicators of landscape health
• How biodiversity data could play a role in future farming income streams
• The connection between healthy ecosystems and productive farms
• Why practical, low-cost technology matters for regional communities
• Dave’s genuine passion for helping people reconnect with the natural world around them

This is a conversation about curiosity, innovation, and learning to “listen” to country in a completely new way.

Cutting-edge science meets practical farming 

The Bush Bird Classifier project was funded by the Federal DCCEEW under their Innovative Biodiversity Monitoring scheme.

Vicky Austin and Lance de Vine, two research fellows who are also dedicated to the project.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to Start of the Year Farm Story.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Put this box, attach it to a fence post, there's the baseline data for a year. It's going to be a legitimate off-farm income for many, many small to medium large agricultural enterprises.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

What if your farm could listen to itself and tell you exactly how it is? Today we're joined by the ever-curious Dr. David Watson, professor of ecology, innovator, and a bloke who genuinely likes up when he talks about birds. And not just any birds, woodland birds are his gem. He and his team have developed something pretty remarkable, the Bush Bird Classifier, an easy-to-use free tool that uses smart algorithms to automatically identify up to 183 bird species from the towns around your farm. No guesswork, no specialist skills, just real-time insight into what's happening in your environment. But here's where it gets interesting. This isn't just about birds, it's about understanding your landscape at an ecosystem level. Because when the birds are thriving, chances are your farm is too. Just start to pull in this treasure trove of recordings that we knew would be valuable. And in a world pushing towards a nature-positive future, this kind of data could even open up the door to new income streams without changing a thing. It's cutting-edge tech meets practical farming. And you can hear the passion in Dave's voice every step of the way. Let's get into it. Dr. Dave, great to see you, mate. Good to see you, sir. Mate, I always enjoy popping a microphone on you because I never know what I'm going to get. Lucky dip. Dave, can you explain where we are right now?

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Sure thing. We're in the shade of some red gums. Here's some magpies carrolling behind me on the banks of the Murray River. So nice chunk of bush. There's some cows around. I heard some just before. So really nice mix of some watery sounds, some bushbirds, and reminders that we're we're in the country.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Beautiful. Now mate, you've been busy working on something really interesting. Can you tell me about that?

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Happy to. So you would have heard various government types talking about nature positive. Nature positive, this, nature positive that. You know, what is that? What does it mean? You know, in real terms. Um, and so the current federal government, they've come up with a new scheme, a new funding scheme to develop a whole range of tools to measure what's going on in the natural world so that we can quantify, so we can put numbers around how is the environment. You try a few different things, is it getting better? Is it getting worse? Are we making a positive difference? So this came out of the Federal Environment Department called the uh Innovative Biodiversity Monitoring Scheme. Very competitive. They only gave out 12 of these grants, and my team was lucky enough to get one of those 12, and it was to build an automatic bird identifier using sound. So for many years, myself and other researchers have been using sound to monitor the environment. You put out machines that record what the environment sounds like, and that gives you a surprisingly high-resolution window into how the country's going. Is it going well or is it struggling a bit? Up until recently, drilling down into the detail of that and working out who's who required an immense amount of work. You basically had to pay a programmer for a year to come up with a bit of code to say, okay, that's a cane toad by sound, and that's that's not. It was very expensive, and you can only really do that for either really rare things or really invasive things. So the the bad guys and the really, the really needy things. But in the last few years, AI has changed that completely. And so some very clever propeller heads have come up with these recognizers they're called. It's it's software, it's an algorithm that automatically identifies things to species, but not just one recognizer for one species and another recognizer for another species, but all at once. And so these regional classifiers, you can run over recordings, like weeks, months of recordings, and it will identify every single call to species. So that there's a couple of those that exist now. They're mostly used in the US and Europe, where there's a lot more training data, there's a lot more need for it. You can get them off the shelf here and try them in Australia, and they don't work because they haven't been trained on our dodgy accents and our birds. Uh, and so we've done that. We've done that for the southeast of Australia. So any woodland in southeastern Australia, basically inland of the divide, you can run our tool over the recordings and all be for free. There's no money involved here. It's it's we've we've built that and we're giving it away. Mate, this is a big deal. It is, and it's the first of its kind in Australia. It'll be the first of many. We're on the cusp of something that's pretty bloody cool. For for a bloke like me, we're gonna be able to monitor all species in all places continuously. We're not ready for that yet. I mean, it's gonna take us years to come to terms with what we can now do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Years. So you'll be able to track perhaps some of their movements, migration, all of that, um, numbers, all of that. Well yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

At at a scale previously unimaginable. Because back in the day, and not that long ago, like 10 years ago, if you were doing a monitoring project, if you're looking at birds in the desert, let's say, half your budget is travel. Because you've got to get out there, do your thing, and then come back. With this, while you're sitting on the couch watching you know England lose another test match, the data is streaming in. Right. So, what is this called? Okay, so we've called it the BBC. I think the vacuum is available. Um, I don't think it's it's taken. So it's it's the Bushbird classifier. Perfect, yeah. Uh, and so it's for it's for South Eastern Australia, so Southern Queensland, all New South Wales, all of Vic, into South Australia and Tassie. If you're away from wet forest, so the really wet stuff we don't include, but if you're in the bush, our tool works for you. And it's not, it's not a it's not going to be used for your phone, where you can point your phone at a bird and say, hey, Siri, what's that? It's not that kind of an algorithm. It's based on recorded data. It works with any any machines available, uh, but it's for longer duration recordings. So days, weeks, months is what it's for. It's for it's for a whole range of purposes. It's it's primarily for monitoring. It's to keep tabs on what's going on. Because the whole promise of Nature Positive is to say, look, farmer Betty down the road has been really grazing her property really carefully, leaving the fallen timber on the ground, the birds are responding. Put this box, attach it to a fence post, there's the baseline data for a year, it's going well. A few years after that, that management, can we can put numbers on exactly how well those populations are travelling and pay her for it. So not just like a patronizing pat on the back, you know, good on you, but actual money in your pocket. It's going to be a legitimate off-farm income for many, many small to medium large agricultural enterprises. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

And we're looking at one of these boxes now, and really they're quite, I mean, they're very cleverly set up, but quite simple.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

It's it's it's it's low-tech stuff, it's a digital recorder. And the newer ones have been made specifically for us, have an integrated solar panel in them. It's literally take it out of the box, stick it on a star picket, push go. Right. And it just records 24-7. It's got onboard storage of about a year. So it goes onto SD cards. So a human does need to go out once a year, switch around the SD cards, replace the microphones, and then you've got second by second soundscape of what happened within CUI of that spot for a year. And what species are you going to be focusing on? Are you mainly looking at woodland birds? So um, I'm a pretty broad scientist. I do a lot of work on parasitic plants, I do a lot of work in South America on rainforesty things. In the Australian bird space, woodland birds are my jam. I mean, seabirds to me are just grotty. Um, so yes.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Say that to your wife.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Well, it she she says disparaging comments about my birds, I'll have you know. So it's a two, it's a two-sided coin, that one. But yes, the target here is woodland birds, and so those are birds that you know that you you find in in in woodlands, you know, right across the country. And we're worried about a fair few of them because a lot of the really choice bits of the country um have been converted to to agriculture. And so what we've got left often struggles, especially when it gets hot and dry. It's a drought in those places every year. And so managing them is a challenge, but getting good data at scale has always been out of reach. This is going to make that possible.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Right. Well, if we want to talk about woodland birds, for example, sure. What do woodland birds tell us about a good farming system?

SPEAKER_00 8:47

They tell us a stack because a lot of them aren't migratory, a lot of them are there year-round. And so if you've got 20 woodland birds in your chunk of bush, that's sort of entry level. That's you know, you've got magpies and butcher birds and you know, maybe one robin, but then the bloke over the road, he's got 40. And what does he do differently? Why are there 40 and so and then you start looking, it's like ah, so there's a few more shrubs in the understory, a bit more nectar around for those for the nectar feeders. And then there's because of the age structure of the trees, there's more leaflet, so there's more bugs. Little things. And because when a tree dies, he leaves it there, he doesn't knock it down for firewood, so there's hollows, so there's there's room for lots of things to have a home. So it's 101 little things, and we know this science. That's been it's been well done. Many colleagues have worked on this stuff. Each little thing that we know makes a difference. We haven't yet had a way to measure that at scale, and that's what we've delivered to the feds.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

So with a healthy, healthy farm, we have healthy birds, but that's going to create healthy insects and healthy bugs to fight the bad insects, perhaps, on a good farm? Yeah, spot on.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

We're focused on birds because they're vocal. They're vocal animals. We can use this tech and basically eavesdrop on the conversations they're already having. There's many other things in that woodland. There's bearded dragons, there's all sorts of little mammals running around that don't vocalize that we don't know about. But we've done a bunch of those comparisons and have shown that sure enough, you know, in a woodland where there's lots of chatty birds, there's lots of quiet lizards, there's lots of those little antikynos and dunats running around as well. So they're a good indicator of what's going on at the ecosystem scale. So, yes, this is a tool for birds, but the the power of it extends well beyond that to the whole of community, ecological community. Yeah, so if we've got a healthy environment, we're going to have a healthy farm, aren't we? There's so many, so many studies that have found that. And in ways that we're just starting to work out. So every farmer is a custodian of healthy soils. You can't farm sustainably unless you're paying attention to below ground. And so much of what we're seeing in a diverse ecosystem is a reflection of what's going on downstairs, of what's going on in that root zone, where the carbon gets stored, all those exchanges of nutrients, because Australian soils are so weathered that, you know, plants have come up with 101 wacky strategies to make a living, and the animals are just right there as well. So, yes, it's all about productivity. And so this is a way of basically listening in to those really highly productive sites and then using that to tweak our management. So this could be the perfect tool for farmers. Look, it's it's great because it doesn't need any paperwork, you don't need any ethics, you don't have to worry about people leaving gates open. It's just put a machine where you want to put the machine, and then that data will be then freely analyzable, shareable, and it's it's at arm's length. People weren't involved in that. There wasn't someone making a decision about, oh, I think that's a this or well, I didn't hear that. It's always on, it's always recording. And with this algorithm now, it's just it just works. It's a legally defensible, um, archivable treasure trove of what was going on in this place. And so for comparisons through time, it's going to be really, really important. I mean, think of, I mean, many, many people will have gone through this, that they they bought a house and they made a few changes and they got lots of photos of how crappy it was before they fixed up the back porch, before they put on the extra addition. Think of how powerful those those images are of the one place through time, and you can see that because you forget, you forget what it used to look like. And so this is doing that for the whole ecological community. It's like that's the way it was, and look at it how it is now. And that changed, you can see it, you can see the change that's that's occurred, and that's going to inform progressively more and more targeted management. Because it's like, well, we tried a few things, didn't see much of a change there, but we tried a different mix of things here. Look at that, look at that. Things are going through the roof. Let's let's do more of that.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

And this could be perhaps more ground cover or more shelter belts, and next minute within 12 months to 24 months, they've seen or heard a difference from their data.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

And see, that's the other great thing about birds, is they fly, and so you get almost instant gratification. And I've seen this with my own place. We've got 12 acres of recovering farmland. We've planted about 3,000 trees and shrubs. And I tell you, you go for a stroll in a little woodland that you've planted and a new bird pops up, I can't stop myself. I pat myself on the back, it's like job well done, Dr. Day. There it is. That's thanks to me. Um, and so lizards take a long time to scurry over the hills to get to the good spot. But birds are always zipping past, and if it's if it's good gear, they're gonna stop and take a look, and if it's really good gear, they're gonna stay and breed. So it's a really nice way of getting a window into recovery. So farmers can bring woodland birds back. Oh, completely. They're they've they're holding all the carts, and I think the more I do work in this space, the more I realise that many of our reserves, many of our of our protected areas, that was the kind of scrappy country that it wasn't cleared because it wasn't that productive. It wasn't that good country. It's the rocky ridges that doesn't hold much water when it gets dry. Whereas those valley floors, that's the good stuff. So that little packet of bush in the back paddock on your average mixed farm, that's gold. That is gold. And it's not a case of lock it up, you know, get no production out of it. Just realize that it's it's serving many functions. And if you care about clean water, and if you care about pollinators, and if you care about insectivores, all those dudes that work for free on your place, giving them that little corner to thrive just comes back to you 10 times more. 10 times, yeah, absolutely. So is this something a non-scientist can actually use? That's that's exactly who it's designed for. The the kit itself is it's taken some pretty advanced computer programming to get to where we've got. But the next challenge is to make that as accessible as possible. So organizations like Lancare organizations, LLSs, they'll have project officers that can just feed data directly into this thing. We'll probably need to get more grants to make more accessible interfaces so that everybody can use it. But at this stage, what we've delivered for the feds, it's mostly geared towards consultants, NRM type professionals to use. But it's all there, it's all publicly accessible. And we're looking now at adding a functionality. So you've got your six months of recording from your backpack, there it all is, there's your list of birds. There'll be another button you can push, export all those records to Atlas of Living Australia. So you can get live updated effectively, distribution maps for all these critters.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

So you upload that data and then you get a report back. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Yep, straight away.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

And it'll be of a particular bird species. So every five seconds, the algorithm says who's calling. Who's calling, who's calling? If it's far away, or if there's two birds singing right over the top of each other, it'll get confused. And so there's a confidence threshold around every single call ID. And I we're still working out thresholds with this, but I'd reckon anything under 80%, don't worry about it. Just set the threshold at 80%, and we reckon about a week of data, of audio data, is going to tell you exactly who's living in your in your backpack. And then it's over to the LLSs, the state and federal government to work out what they're going to do with that data. But it's going to give this completely transparent line of reporting for what's going on on the ground. If the feds are serious about this nature-positive caper, new money is going to come in to reward best practice. Fantastic. Can this tool track improvement year on year? That's what it's built for. So you get into a little bit of strife if you're comparing two or three different places, like more dense vegetation sometimes, sounds doesn't travel as well. So you might think there are differences there, but it's not so much about the birds, it's about the structure between the bird and the and the microphone. That goes out of the window with comparisons with one site through time, because all that stuff stays the same. So yes, you're going to be able to hand on heart show very, very clearly for this place, things are going up and up for these species, things are staying the same for these species, and things are going downhill for these other species. And we know who these things are. So it's like, ah, so it's the ground nesters that seem to be getting smashed, need to do some cat control, need to get onto the foxes. Because things that are up in the trees, they're fine. But those poor buggers that are on the ground, they're getting hit hard. It allows you to tweak management.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

So, with better management, how quickly can birds respond?

SPEAKER_00 17:09

See, that's the beauty of our little Aussie battlers. Like, think of a Willy Wagtail. Like they'll go in a good season, they'll back to back nest three, four, five times, put out 12 chicks. Really? So in a good season, woodland birds they make hay if the sun's shining. So within two years, if you tweak your management, if there's structure there, if the things that they need are there, it's not subtle. It'll be bloody obvious.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Yeah, mate, we've just got a couple of birds over your shoulder there at the moment. Um, we're looking at a cooker burrow, but there's a couple of other little uh wrens around too. Excellent. Yeah, it's a grey fantail calling. Very nice. And mate, one of my favourite birds is the kingfisher, the zoo. What a beast. They're like a little jewel. Yes. You mentioned stewardship payments before.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

What does that actually mean for farmers? It's funny, you know, in some agricultural circles in Australia, um, the word subsidies is a bit of a dirty word. It's like, oh, I don't need subsidies, I know what I'm doing. It's like, that's fine, but the rest of the world has embraced subsidies for all sorts of things. Like in Switzerland, farmers are paid to just keep that flock of cows grazing in that meadow because culturally the Swiss government has decided we think that's an important part of our culture and we'd like to reward you, even if you're not making enough money from it, but we still want you to keep doing that because we think that's important. And we as a country can decide: look, it's all very nice to export lots of wheat and lots of canola and lots of lamb and lots of lots of beef, but we also like azure king fishes. And we also really like those red capped robins. They're they're a snappy little dresser, and we can we can decide to do both. It's so many arguments in the agriculture environment space end up being polarized. It's like the greenie versus the farmer. The the current thinking now around nature positive just completely goes against that that polarization says you really can have both. You really can have win-wins in this space. It's more sustainable agriculture has been working their way towards this for years. No-till ag, embracing native vegetation, shelter belts, there's always benefits for from a production angle. But as a society, we need to realise that farmers can't continually dip into their own pockets to fund this stuff. That's just not reasonable. It's not sustainable and it's not reasonable. And if we've decided that we think as your kingfishes and red cat problems are worth hanging on to, well then that needs to be reflected in the balance sheet of the nation's coffers. And that's where these stewardship payments come in. That's where the nature-positive framework comes in. The Fed's deciding that clean air, drinkable water, productive soils are things that we should all work towards. In order to do that, you need to keep tabs on things. And we've come up with one way of keeping tabs on this group of things that tells us so much about what's really going on in the system. Thank you. So this data, as you said before, they will be able to track their improvement, won't they? Yes. Individual landholders can do whatever they want with their data. And I understand that there may be privacy concerns. And you think, look, I don't want every Tom, Dick, and Harry knowing that I've got powerful owls, you know, in my little back paddock. You can blur locations. Your data, your rules, you're the boss. And so you don't need to have this publicly available to use these tools. You can do that yourself. But if you want to, you know, show off to your mates and say, Yeah, I got I've got more powerful owls than you do, well, then you can share.

SPEAKER_01 20:33

It's it's it's your call. And I think you and I both know a couple of farmers who love to go out quietly of an evening and sing a few songs out in the bush, don't they? That could be interesting data. It's funny.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

We uh we pick up all sorts of fun things um with these machines, because I listen to a lot of these recordings. Deer, surprisingly chatty, goats are always carrying on. Uh, and yeah, you hear you hear the odd human noise uh that keeps you chuckling. But but um there's there's that algorithm we generally run over over long recordings. If we're not too sure where it is, it just gets rid of human voices. Yeah, okay. Um it's like I don't care about that business. But birds are my jam. Good, because I'm not a very good singer, mate. Well, let's replace on-ground ecological surveys. No, it's gonna be a compliment rather than instead of. It's gonna give us a scale in terms of both over space, over the country, and through time that we never thought possible. You know, this algorithm isn't gonna sit down and have a cup of tea with a farmer, isn't gonna talk to a to a forester and say, yeah, you know, I've been thinking about your um about your your fire breaks and how we can manage those. It's gonna free up all those NRM people, all those researchers and consultants who are currently running around like a blue ass fly getting this data, trust in that tech, that's gonna keep coming in. But there's 101 other things that a trained, empathetic human can do very, very well. And so there's gonna be some retooling, there's but it's it's a compliment. It's it's as well as, not instead of. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 21:58

Mate, what area will This cover or where will you introduce this?

SPEAKER_00 22:02

As I said, uh, this is the first regional core classifier for Australia. So this covers the sort of southern Queensland, right the way through New South Wales and Victoria, most of South Australia, and the dry habitats of Tassie. So it's this whole corner of the continent, basically anything that's not completely middle of the desert or wet forest on the coastal side of the divide. And that corresponds with where a lot of people farm, where a lot of people live, and where a lot of conservation efforts are being devoted. But I'd say I gave a talk about introducing the BBC, the Bushbird Classifier, to the universe in Perth late last year. And I suggested that this might be the first regional core classifier. I'd say in two years-ish, there's going to be the equivalence of this tool for every corner of Australasia. So we're just first cab off the rank. The tools exist. It takes time to do it, it takes time to train, to train these uh algorithms to to with false negatives and positives, all that stuff. In in two or three years, monitoring biodiversity is going to be being done at the continental scale, minute by minute, across the entire nation. That's where we are now. Wow. Yeah, it's awesome. So this could be the future of environmental monitoring in agriculture. Or not even in agriculture, just generally. I think just like you wouldn't think of going into the field without taking your camera and taking a few pictures of what you're doing. I've been telling my colleagues for years, just take one of these recorders out there, just strap it to a tree with a bloody hockey strap, go and do your business before you leave, take it, and there'll be more data collected in that box than you'll have done in your whole field trip. And now we've finally got the tools to develop that. So when we built the Australian Acoustic Reservatory, so me and a bunch of mates got together, convinced the feds to give us some money, we put 360 machines like this, we concreted them into the ground all around Australia to start to pull in this treasure trove of recordings that we knew would be valuable. We didn't have any tools to deal with those data at that point, but we thought, look, there'll be some clever little kid who's born today who'll develop these whiz-bang tools that we can't even imagine to make best use of these data. We never imagined it would be us doing it in less than 10 years. That learning curve is what AI has given us. So it's a it's a convolutional neural net, it's a complicated black box, and it just bloody works. It's amazing. So machine learning is if you're a bit sus about AI, fair enough, so am I. But what this is is just pattern recognition. It's like, hey computer, this is a kookabara. Hey computer, this is also a kookabara. Hey computer, that's a generator. That's not a kookaburra. And you do that a couple hundred times, and the computer's like, no, no, I've got this. I understand what kookaburas are now. Thank you. Next challenge, please. And so we've done that 183 times. Wow, this is clever stuff. So is this something that Land Care or Catchment Group could roll out? Most definitely. It's it's really well geared to that. Just like Land Care groups now, we'll often have a cupboard with like 10 uh camera traps in there, like motion treated cameras. If you want to see, you know, what's been coming to your dam at night or in the fruit trees, you can borrow the camera and find out. I can see there being a bank of these acoustic recorders in the same cupboard, and you want to see what's going on in your backpack, borrow the machine, attach it to the fence post, come back in a few weeks, and then the same people will have all the skills needed to upload that data to these uh national reporting schemes. So if a landholder is interested, how do they find out more? Well, so we we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves here because we haven't yet delivered this to the feds. So it's gonna be available June, end of June, and how the feds are gonna make that available, who knows? It's theirs at that point. But we're also gonna make it available through the EcoSounds portal of our colleagues at Queensland University of Technology. So if you just Google EcoSounds, there'll be a portal there and there'll be literally a button where it's like, okay, upload your data. It's like, okay, there it is, stick it in, up it goes. And then what would you like to do with your data? You want to just look at it, you want to look at rainfall patterns, there's all sorts of different algorithms that are already there. There's some particular recognizers for like power vowels or for koalas or for cane toads, and then the the Wushbird classifier will be one of those buttons, and it's just hit that button, and on their supercomputer up in Brisbane, it'll scrunch through that and then spit out a report telling you exactly what what's within 200 metres of that microphone over the specified time period. And if someone wants to learn more about it, where do they go? Yeah, so that's we're gearing up to do that now. So we've been head down bum up doing this work, but but now we want to we want to spread the good word and show people what it is, what it's good for, how to interpret the data that comes out of it. Uh, so we'll be holding a rolling series of workshops, probably primarily in capital cities, but some of the regional centres as well, just teaching people in the environmental space, in the monitoring space, geared primarily towards the uh consultants that do all this work, exactly what it is, how to use it, um, so we get that uniformity as well as that uptake. Well, this is big, it's clever, and really exciting.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

Now, Dr. Dave, we're gonna get to the off-the-wall questions, mate. Bring it. This is the fun stuff. These can just be short answers. If a farm is doing everything right, what does it sound like at sunrise?

SPEAKER_00 27:26

Oh, it sounds, it sounds like a symphony, Darren. It's it's like the surface of the sea. You've got all this complexity. You've got the nightbirds just having the last little chuckle before they go to bed. So you've got your you've got your of the of the frog whales and the of the owl at night jars, just just before they tuck themselves into bed. Then you've got the babblers and honey eaters starting up, then all the whistlers get going. It's I just can't wipe the smile off my face. It's gonna be it's gonna be spectacular. And it's it's as I said before, it's not subtle. That's one of the things we forget about, is not just the the different kinds of birds, but just the numbers of them. If you're walking around in a chunk of bush that's doing well for itself and the birds are happy, you've got to shout to talk to your mate who's just over there. It's loud. There's a lot of stuff going on.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

Well, mate, you just lit up more than what a sunrise could ever produce. That's great. What's the ultimate gold standard bird you want to hear on a farm?

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Oh, very good question. So if you're talking to woodland birds, there's a few. So Diamond Firetale tells me that there's a lot of good native grasses around. So that's the it's like a so if they're there, that that that's good. Stubble quail is very, they're very chatty. So if I hear they're supposed to say pippy wheat. That tells me that your foxes and cats are under control if there's uh if there's if there's quail around. But then I'd key right into a few things like the Yahoo bird, grey crown babbler. Yeah, they're site-specific, they're very faithful to the one spot, and they need a lot of leaves, they need a lot of bugs. And if you've got a few yahoos, that's their calling. Yahoo! Yahoo! If you got those in the background, I know that you're doing a very good job and you don't need to read any of my papers. Keep on doing what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

I love it. Have you heard farms come back to life through sound alone?

SPEAKER_00 29:21

I've heard it at my own place, mate. I've heard it at my own place. So we bought, we bought six acres of clapped-out sheep country in a little on the edge of town, and then got the six acres next door a few years later. And there was not much going on. There are a few bedraggled galars, a few wood duck would come by the dam, and then they'd leave. It's like, nah, there's nothing in here for us. But by just putting in the hard work, building the organic matter back into the soil, leaving branches where they fell, giving the little wrens some hidey homes, hidey holes, we've now got a yard list of 195 species. So most definitely you can turn it around. I've done it myself. Yes. So and it's so rewarding as well. That's the thing. You do get that payoff, you do get that that pride because it's because that'll live on long after I'm gone.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

And there's big things for mental health, too, isn't there?

SPEAKER_00 30:09

Oh, I can work all day on some scientific paper just chipping away at one paragraph and feel frustrated by the end of the day, or just go out chipping Patterson's curse in the top paddock and hear these things I've been talking about come back with a beam on my face. So it's very good. It's very good for the for the headspace. Because it's there's a lot of bad news out there, but yeah, you give nature a uh a bit of room to move and she never lets you down. If birds could score a farm out of 10, what are they looking for? Yeah, nice one. So, in a word options, and it's it's what you need. It's if you're looking for a place to say, what do you need? You want you want shelter, you want food, you want some shade for when it's hot, you want a bit of warmth for when it's cold. Birds need exactly the same thing. So increasingly we're seeing microclimate really matters in those really stinking hot summer days where we're worried about fires, dense shrubs along creek lines, they are worth their weight in pickled onions. That's where everything just sort of gravitates towards the just like just wait this out, just wait out this this this terrible day. Yes, options. So cover, cover from predators, shelter from the elements, that thick, crunchy layer of litter. You want to hear crunchy, crunchy, crunchy when you're walking through the bush, because that's that's where all that carbon is going to be stored, developing that rich, rich humus that the plants are gonna be be feeding on and all the bugs that the insectivores thrive on.

SPEAKER_01 31:31

Yeah. And mess is best sometimes, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 31:34

It is, and we need to reject our European roots and the nice neat rows and embrace the embrace the shrubberies. Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 31:43

So, what's a dead give away when a system's in trouble?

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Oh, it's when you can see straight through it. If you just squat down and look below the grazing line where that where the hungriest cow has reached, and you can see clear, like 500 metres through a chunk of bush, it's like, holy moly, I might hear a wheelie wagtail in this place, maybe a crow. Not much else is going on. And I look at the waterways, how's it how the dams looking, how the creek line's looking. If if they're running clear, if there's some nice vegetation around there, if the frogs are calling, it's like, okay, we've we've we've got some we've got some hope here. Yeah, but that can turn around so quickly.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

And what's one thing farmers can do today to bring on more birds? Great.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

It's so structure. The biggest thing I'd say is structure. So when a branch falls down, if it's out of the way, leave it there. It's less to do. So I'm not about to tell farmers, I'm not going to add to their to-do list. It's already crowded. But there's a few things on there that we can take off. So sure, get your firewood, fine. But all that branchy stuff, leave it be, and you'll come by in two years and you'll see wrens frolicking in there and go, there you go. That's what I got for not doing that job.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

Pat on the back. And what excites you most about this space right now?

SPEAKER_00 32:57

Look, it's I'm so passionate about conservation on private lands because you can have a chat directly with the steward of that land over a cup of tea and affect change that will last generations. You can't do that in a in a national park. There's a process and you need to be very patient, and there's going to be turnover of three or four staff in the meantime, and you just keep keep keep chipping away, and you might get incremental change if you're really lucky and all the planets line up. Whereas I can go up the road to Holbrook, have a good chat to a person that I've been I've been chatting to for years. We can go for a walk, I can point out a few things, she can tell me a few things. We both learn from one another, and the populations benefit. So and and and so much of this is driven by that productivity lens that I was talking about. Little differences on productive country can magnify greatly. Do your best management on a on a on a crappy reserve on a ridgetop, it's gonna be 30 years until you see a change. But start tweaking management on a floodplain in two years, it's gonna be unrecognizable. And this device will prove that, won't it? It will, it will. And it's gonna be verifiable, it's gonna be objective, it's scalable. And if the feds are serious, it's gonna be there's your payment. Carry on.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

Well, Dr. Dave, you've given us a real great insight into this amazing piece of technology. Congratulations. Thank you, sir. This is huge. You're very clever, and it's always a joy to put a microphone on you and have a chat. So thank you very much for your time, mate.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

Pleasure. And and it's uh I might be the Muppet in front of you, but it's on behalf of a big team. So it's it's not just me that's been doing this, it's a it's a it's a big team with with Vicky and Lance being the two postdocs who've done the lion's share of this work. So this couldn't have been done without them.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

They just put it in. It's fascinating to see how technology like the Bush Bird Classifier is opening a new window into the natural world and making bird identification more accessible for everyone. Dr. David Watson, we really appreciate you sharing your work and insight with us. Please follow us on social media and in the meantime, keep your hands dirty and your spirit life.