Friday, 31 January 2025
From the long-legged, water-walking Comb-crested Jacana to living dinosaurs like the mighty Southern Cassowary, celebrate the weird, the wacky and the wonderful with our 2025 BirdLife Australia calendar.
2025 has well and truly begun, but it’s not too late to turn a new page with a 2025 BirdLife Australia calendar – now 20% off!
A celebration of the weird, the wacky and the wonderful, our 2025 calendar will help keep you organised for the rest of the year – while bringing some colour to your home or office space.
Featuring stunning photographs of some of Australia’s most unusual, unique and fascinating bird species, proceeds from our 2025 calendar help support our urgent conservation work around the country helping protect threatened Australian birds and their habitats. It’s for a good cause, too!
Now on sale for 20% off, limited calendar stock remains – so order your copy today before they sell out.
Read on to meet some of the remarkable bird species featured in our 2025 calendar.
Thanks to their long legs and outrageously large feet, the Comb-crested Jacana can walk across the lilypads and floating vegetation of freshwater wetlands with ease – earning them their nickname Jesus bird.
These fancy-footed shorebirds feed mostly on insects and other invertebrates, foraging with a characteristic bob of the head and flick of the tail. When threatened, the male scoops up his chicks and carries them away to safety under his wings, with only their legs visible, dangling from beneath his feathers.
Waterfowl don’t get much weirder than the Musk Duck. Named after the strong odour emitted by males during breeding season, these deep-diving, carnivorous ducks are best known for their bizarre courtship display.
To impress a potential mate, the male fans his tail feathers and inflates his leathery throat sac. Sitting low in the water like a half-submerged submarine, he kicks and splashes water behind him to shoot jets of water, all while making an extraordinary whistling call.
Few people have ever heard of the Critically Endangered Plains-wanderer, let alone seen one.
Found only in sparse grasslands in south-eastern Australia, this small and secretive bird might look and behave like a quail, but it is actually related to shorebirds. In fact, it’s the only species in its entire family, and one of the most genetically distinct threatened birds in the world.
But the Plains-wanderer is as rare as it is remarkable. Since colonisation, most of its habitat has been cleared for crops and pasture or destroyed by overgrazing, weeds and drought, and there are fewer than 1,000 birds left in the wild today.
Endemic to the Wet Tropic region of North Queensland, Victoria’s Riflebirds are the black holes of the bird world.
The male’s velvety, ultra-black feathers are so dark they absorb virtually every ray of light that strikes them. In a clever optical illusion, his patches of colour appear to glow in the gloomy rainforest, helping catch the eye of a potential mate.
To impress her, he performs an elaborate dance atop an exposed perch. In an almost mechanical motion, he curves his rounded wings above his body and shimmies from side to side, bobbing and hissing as he encircles the female and flashes his bright yellow gape and iridescent blue-green throat feathers.
With its eerie wailing and cryptic plumage, the large-eyed, long-legged Bush Stone-curlew is more often heard than it is seen. Often compared to that of a screaming woman or baby, its loud “weeloo” call is a familiar night-time sound of the Australian bush.
These large-eyed, long-legged birds are nocturnal and ground-dwelling. During the day, they hide in plain sight and freeze if disturbed, squatting with their head outstretched among the leaf litter to evade detection.
Among Australia’s most famous vocalists, the Superb Lyrebird is a master of mimicry. They’re capable of imitating even the most complex sounds with astonishing accuracy – including chainsaws, mobile phones and other bird calls.
To attract a mate, male Superb Lyrebirds sing and dance on mounds of dirt, fanning and shimmering their ornate tail feathers over their body. They’re also one of nature’s best ecosystem engineers – a single bird using its powerful claws to rake for food can move as much as 11 dump trucks’ worth of soil and leaf-litter in a year!
Southern Cassowaries can stand as tall and weigh as much as an adult human. They have huge dagger-like claws, can jump as high as a professional basketball player and make one of the lowest-frequency calls of the bird world.
Found in dense tropical rainforest in northern Queensland, New Guinea and eastern Indonesia, these flightless and prehistoric birds are rainforest gardeners. Southern Cassowaries feed mostly on fallen fruit and spread their seeds great distances in their nutrient-rich dung. Our rainforests would look very different without them.
Once crowned the world’s most Instagrammable bird, the Tawny Frogmouth is best-known for its expressive face and mastery of disguise. To camouflage itself during the day, the Tawny Frogmouth strikes a pose – stiffening and stretching its body and head upwards to mimic a broken tree branch.
While they’re nocturnal and often mistaken for owls, Tawny Frogmouths are actually more closely related to nightjars and hummingbirds. They are found throughout Australia, including in suburban parks and gardens, and their varied diet includes insects, rodents, reptiles and frogs.
When it comes to nesting, the Malleefowl is anything but ordinary.
With his large and powerful feet, the male rakes sand, leaves, sticks and bark into a huge nesting mound that can measure up to five metres across and a metre tall. Instead of incubating the eggs with his body heat, the male digs a chamber for the female to lay her eggs, burying them in the sand.
Using his temperature-sensitive beak like a thermometer, the male closely monitors the heat generated by the composting vegetation, constantly adjusting the soil cover to maintain the temperature of the mound.
When the chicks finally hatch, they’re on their own – and must dig their way out and fend for themselves.
Palm Cockatoos are the rockstars of the bird world.
Using their massive bills, males fashion branches into drumsticks or use seed pods to bang rhythmically on their nest hollows as a territorial or courtship display.
Remarkably, these rocky cockies all perform to their own rhythms: each male has his own distinct drumming pattern and style, making this the only bird known to use a tool musically. Palm Cockatoos are one of the largest and heaviest species of cockatoo and are found in rainforests and woodlands of New Guinea and Cape York Peninsula.
Subscribe for the latest conservation news, upcoming events, opportunities, and special offers.
