Vote for your favourite birds!

Official provider of verified votes

Now in its 20th year, Forest & Bird’s annual Bird of the Year competition has become a highlight for Kiwis and bird lovers worldwide. What started as a grassroots idea has grown into a national, and sometimes global phenomenon, with more than 52,500 votes cast in 2024. This year, Dragonfly Data Science is officially joining the flock as the competition’s provider of verified vote counts.

Over the years, Bird of the Year has seen its fair share of colourful controversies. From spirited social media campaign wars and enthusiastic multiple-email voters, to foreign interference and the infamous year a mammal species took the crown, the competition has seen it all. All this means that counting the votes can get complicated.

A passion for birds

For Dragonfly data scientist Yvan Richard, the competition has been a passion project since 2015, when he first began tracking votes. In 2017, he alerted Forest & Bird to cheating for the white-faced heron, and became the unofficial scrutineer—a role he is pleased to see formalised into an official project with Dragonfly as the competition’s provider of verified vote counts this year.

“Bird of the Year has created a really effective model for engaging communities with conservation,” Yvan says. “It shows what’s possible for other species too—whether it’s zooming into our endangered species, or even looking into plants, insects, or fungi. The goal is to spark curiosity and care for the natural world in ways that are accessible, fun, and informative.”

Fighting fraud

Tallying the votes fairly is no small feat with local enthusiasm, international attention, celebrity endorsements, and passionate advocates rallying for different birds. With thousands of votes discarded every year due to cheating, typos, or missing confirmations, a robust, transparent system for verifying votes was essential. To manage the scale and complexity of the votes, Yvan developed an interactive dashboard that visualises every vote, flags anomalies, and ensures transparency in the results.

“In the past, validating votes was a tedious, manual process. Now, with the dashboard, we can filter duplicates, check confirmations, and spot unusual voting patterns quickly. It makes the process smooth, accurate, and fun—which is exactly what this competition should be.”

We have been delighted to work with the Bird of the Year web development partner Xequals to get the dashboard integrated into the Bird of the Year systems.

Read more

• Yvan uncovered hacks into the Bird of the Year website in 2017
• Yvan’s data preparation for Bird of the Year in 2019

South Island robin photograph CC BY Sylvain Cleymans