Deep Dive: Bird of the Year

a collage of nz native bords

Aotearoa’s favourite election is back; it’s time for Forest & Bird’s Bird of the Year competition. This year the stakes have been raised, with Aotearoa being asked to determine our Bird of the Century! Visit their website to review the candidates and make your vote. Voting opens 9am today, Monday 30 October!

One amazing aspect of Bird of the Year is that it always garners mass online engagement. The New Zealand Journal of Psychology published a fascinating paper on this phenomenon, titled ‘lemme get uhhhhh froot’: Internet memes for consciousness-raising in Aotearoa’s Bird of the Year conservation campaign. Bird of the Year memes have become an annual pastime that truly seems to grip the nation. This paper explores how memes from past Bird of the Year campaigns are an example of combining humour and activism online. New Zealanders are encouraged to not just vote, but create campaigns for their bird of choice. As well as everyday New Zealanders, politicians and celebrities are also known to run campaigns for their favourite birds, with the especially passionate creating “dedicated social media accounts, sharing memes to support their candidate and oppose rivals.” In their research, they found that “memes mobilised humour and fear, cultural ideas about what it means to be a New Zealander, and information about how to conserve endangered species.”, while also critiquing themselves through self-referential humour that asks “questions about the potentials and pitfalls of online engagement.” This paper suggests that the “playful-serious nature of memes can provide a vehicle for speaking difficult truths in ironic ways.” The plight of our native birds certainly is a difficult truth, with “more than 80% of New Zealand’s native bird species are threatened or at risk and 23 species face an immediate high risk of extinction (Department of Conservation, n.d.a; Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, 2017).”

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