Bird of the Year
annual election in New Zealand
Bird of the Year (Māori: Te Manu Rongonui o te Tau) is an annual election-based competition run by the New Zealand conservation organisation Forest & Bird to elect a New Zealand native "Bird of the Year". The competition is intended to raise awareness of the conservation threats to many endangered native birds.
It draws support from celebrities including politicians, artists, actors, and television personalities. The election is a significant social media and public event in New Zealand; there are regular attempts at voter fraud, some winners (such as the short-tailed bat) have been controversial. In 2023, a TV campaign by British-American comedian John Oliver for the pūteketeke drew international attention to the contest, leading it to win with more than 290,000 votes.
History
Bird of the Year (BOTY) was first launched in October 2005 by Michael Szabo, editor of Forest & Bird at the time, initially as an online poll featured in Forest & Bird's first email newsletter; votes were collected by email and through the post. Szabo noticed the public outcry when RNZ considered dropping bird calls from its daily Morning Report, and decided to tap into this public interest with an annual poll. The first BOTY contest included 76 native bird species and received a total of 900 votes; the tūī was the winner. BOTY was later championed by Forest & Bird's communications manager Helen Bain, who saw it as a "light-hearted…way of raising the profile of native birds and the threats to them".
In 2014, the competition was temporarily retitled to Seabird of the Year and only seabirds were eligible.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Bird of the Year” is annual election in New Zealand. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Bird, Year and annual, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “annual election in New Zealand” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85747347. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2023, 2005 and 2014.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Bird of the Year”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Bird of the Year primary sources, Bird of the Year archive and Bird research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Bird of the Year”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Bird of the Year” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.