Polls opened at 9am on Friday for the only election this year in which every candidate has a left wing and a right wing. Voting in Bird of the Year 2026 runs until 5pm on Sunday 20 September, with the winner announced on Monday 21 September.
Forest & Bird has run the contest since 2005 and this is its 21st year. What is new in 2026 is that the birds have been sorted into political parties. There are six of them, the shore birds, the floor birds, the tree birds, the sea birds, the high birds and the shy birds, and every vote cast for an individual bird also counts towards its party’s total. So the country will find out not only which bird wins, but which flock finishes on top.
“It’s time to pick your party and back your bird,” said Rebecca Hatch, Forest & Bird’s Group Manager, Growing Support, in the organisation’s announcement that polls had opened. “Everyone gets up to five votes, which is four more than you get in that other election.”
Hatch said the organisation had leaned all the way into the theme. “As well as competing for Bird of the Year votes as individual candidates, the birds have grouped into parties. Naturally, those parties come complete with manu-festos – with lots of puns.” She added that “this year’s chaos comes complete with polls, swing voters, endorsements, and the odd bit of flocka-jumping if someone changes sides”.
Forest & Bird says more than 70 native birds are standing, each with a volunteer campaign manager. A count of the candidate list published on the Bird of the Year website on Saturday puts the field at 74. The parties are far from evenly matched. The shore birds are the largest bloc with 22 candidates, ahead of the tree birds on 17 and the sea birds on 15. The shy birds have nine, the high birds six, and the floor birds just five.
The conservation labels attached to each candidate tell a blunter story than the puns do. Of the 74 birds standing, 33 are described on the site as in serious trouble and another 23 as in some trouble. Only 18 are listed as doing OK. Put another way, more than three quarters of the ballot is made up of birds that need help.
The floor birds, the smallest party in the contest, are also the most fragile. All five of them, the kākāpō, the takahē, the little spotted kiwi, the New Zealand robin and the weka, carry a trouble label of some kind, and the first two are in the serious category. The tree birds are the healthiest party on the ballot, with 10 of their 17 candidates listed as doing OK, including the bellbird, the fantail, the grey warbler, the tūī and the kererū.
Forest & Bird’s acting chief executive Erika Toleman told RNZ’s Morning Report the party structure was not a mirror of the human version. “They’re not arranged along traditional human political lines in our election,” she said. “Every candidate has a left wing and a right wing and each party has a manufesto.”
She warned that the campaign would follow the usual script. “Like with any election there could be scandal along the way, we expect some ruffled feathers around the house.”
Schools have signed up in numbers. Nearly 400 have registered to run their own classroom votes, and those votes are counted at the end of the campaign in the same way special votes are counted in a general election. Toleman said that could decide the whole thing. “Unlike the other election this year, the kids are actually gonna have the ability to swing this election right at the last minute. So you’ll have to wait to the last minute to see what takes the perch.”
Her own pick for an outside chance was the Westland petrel, listed on the ballot with the sea birds and known as tāiko, a large seabird that breeds in the coastal ranges near Punakaiki on the West Coast and nowhere else. “It’s this gigantic bird, our largest burrowing petrel on the mainland which breeds in one place in the world,” she said.
The campaign has also been given a press gallery, staffed entirely by introduced predators. Forest & Bird says the Beaking News team includes Kim Hedgehill, voiced by broadcaster Kim Hill, and journalist Paddy Gower as Catty Gower, filing from the Beak-hive, with Studio Stoat, voiced by former RNZ broadcaster Simon Morton, anchoring the coverage.
Voting is free and open to anyone, in New Zealand or overseas. Voters have to click the verification link emailed to them, because an unverified vote does not count. Last year’s contest drew more than 75,000 voters from 123 countries, with 87 percent of votes cast inside New Zealand.
The defending champion is back on the ballot. The New Zealand falcon won in 2025 and is standing again this year with the high birds, alongside the kea, the rock wren, the pipit, the harrier and Hutton’s shearwater. Recent winners before it were the yellow-eyed penguin in 2024 and the Australasian crested grebe, or pūteketeke, in 2023, which was carried to a record win by the British comedian John Oliver. His campaign drew more than 350,000 votes from 195 countries and crashed the Forest & Bird website, and the grebe finished with 290,374 of them. Last year’s falcon won with 14,317. Toleman confirmed there are no bats in the field this year, five years after the long-tailed bat beat every actual bird in 2021.
Behind the jokes, Forest & Bird says more than 80 percent of New Zealand’s native birds are in some or serious trouble, which is close to what the candidate list itself shows. “Every vote puts a bird in the spotlight, and every bird in the spotlight is a bird more people will care about and fight for,” Hatch said. “That’s the whole point.”
For anyone who wants to vote in person, pop-up voting stands will be at Westfield malls in Auckland on 10 and 11 September and in Christchurch on 17 September. The winning bird gets a song written in its honour, as the falcon did last year in a track by Delaney Davidson and Troy Kingi. There is also a daily guessing game for bird nerds at Birdle.nz, which Forest & Bird says had been played more than 600,000 times by 61,000 people by early May.
Which bird has your vote this year, and does your party need a better manu-festo? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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