This year me and my partner Thomas were working in Global Goals together, and we decided to help our environment. We wanted to help our endangered animals, one of the easiest to teach people to help are birds, we initially chose the black cockatoo but when we found out they only settle in the wheat belt we decided to make bird boxes for another endangered species that nest in the metro area, the ring necked parrot aka the “28 parrot”. We sought out help from someone already dedicated to helping these birds, Simon Cherriman, He sent us a document detailing how to make and put together bird boxes below are some images of me and Thomas making this box:

Over the next couple of terms we will, with Simon, host bird box building tutorials and workshops, to help these endangered birds live on, and hopefully this will catch on and help this earth be as biodiverse as ever. another opportunity would be to pass this to the sustainability club or to make the workshop ourselves.

we went through the design thinking process, we began to look into the global goals (or the SDG’s) focusing on environmental issues, we began by looking into the biggest climate problems, finding that life on land is a lot more local and achievable, we then used the empathise and define parts of the process to focus that down to biodiversity, we then used ideate and one of our ideas was to make bird boxes for the red-tailed black cockatoo but that was denied by the council due to the fact that they both didnt breed in the metro area and they would also cause damage in this area, but then we stumbled across Simon Cherriman, and we used his document to make these boxes and we plan to put up these boxes in a few weeks on June 9th. we made a prototype out of cardboard, to make sure we had the proper measurements, we then made the boxes and then we didnt really test them before we put them in the trees, but hopefully they go up well (a small note from after they have gone up, they went up very well and they are well made and Simon did a really good job putting them in the trees, you can see the complete boxes below)

Biodiversity is declining rapidly due to land use change, climate change, invasive species, overexploitation, and pollution. These result from demographic, economic, sociopolitical, cultural, technological, and other indirect drivers, in a local sense, we are in a school so most of the wildlife here is either magpies or crows, so my group decided to try to increase biodiversity in our area, as previously mentioned we wanted to do the black cockatoo but upon finding out that that wasn’t possible we chose the Australian Ring neck, so another bird shows up to increase our school’s biodiversity. I believe we did well and at the time of writing this we have not actually placed them in the tree and i believe they will go up nicely, but we will monitor how they work and more importantly if they work

Now that the boxes have gone up and we have done a presentation to the teacher, the other students our parents, which you can watch above, I am confident to say that this was a success. We achieved our goal and all we have to do now is monitor them to see if the 28’s actually nest in these boxes, and the one task we have to still do over the next week is shoot any nesting rainbow lorikeets with a high pressure hose and remove their eggs to incorporate negative reinforcement, and give the birds a bad experience at these boxes so they dont come back and allow the 28’s to nest in these boxes, and help the boxes achieve their purpose.