Allendale East Area School students have flocked to save coastal shorebirds through the Limestone Coast Landscape Board’s ‘The Flock’ project.

Mid last year the school’s Year 4-6 students were asked by the Limestone Coast Landscape Board to take part in the venture, with Allendale East Area School Year 5/6 teacher Nicole Biggins saying The Flock was a creative and fun community driven project spreading the word about the threats facing Australia’s migratory and resident shorebirds.

“Many shorebirds in the local areas are killed every year and numbers are drastically decreasing due to habitat loss, hunting and climate change,” she said.

“We want to build support for their protection.

“Our migratory shorebirds are amazing, but they need our help. The catchcry for The Flock project is ‘help us keep the shorebirds coming’.

“By increasing community awareness of migratory and resident shorebirds we hope to make local communities aware of how to ‘share the beach’ with our shorebirds to make sure they have a habitat and a future.”

In September, Amellia Formby visited the Year 3-6 classes to teach them about her journey travelling around Australia.

Ms Formby is a zoologist and artist from Victoria who is travelling 20,000km in 180 days across Australia, using a microlight airplane to teach primary schools about the conservation of migratory shorebirds in the region.

A documentary called ‘Wing Threads’ by Remember The Wild about Mrs Formby’s journey will air on the ABC in 2023.

Mrs Biggins said Ms Formby provided a presentation about shorebirds which migrate thousands of kilometres between the Arctic and Australia each year.

“Shorebirds have migrated from Alaska and Siberia on the flyaway, they do this every year and land in different beaches around Australia and Port MacDonnell is one of them,” she said.

“They feed up and rest before they migrate back to Siberia and Alaska to breed.

“She told us all about these migratory birds and how to protect them, we did an art session with her, she shared a book she had created and she taught us how to draw some migratory birds.

“We look forward to following her journey across Australia through her live stream on wingthreads.com and learning more about migratory birds.”

Mrs Biggins said in November the primary students painted wooden shorebirds and placed them at the front of the school to highlight to passers-by the shorebirds have migrated to beaches in the area.

“The Landscape Board added on ‘The Flock’ to coincide with Amellia’s visit,” she said.

“Schools could nominate to be part of the project and the Landscape Board sent birds to us that had already been cut out of wood and put on posts.

“The students in Years 4-6 were required to paint and display wooden birds at the front of our school to welcome and raise awareness of the migratory shorebirds to our region.

“It was to make people who are travelling to the beach aware these birds are around and to protect them. We put an article in our newsletter to make community people aware, we had a sign up so people could look at it.

“We put the birds up and there is also a website that goes with it called www.theoverwinteringproject.com.

“The birds have been taken down due to school holidays, but the Limestone Coast Landscape Board collected them, and they will be displayed throughout our region for years to come.”

Mrs Biggins said the students were definitely more engaged because they lived near Port MacDonnell and that was one of the reasons they decided to be part of the project.

“They loved painting the birds and learning more about Amellia, her flight, where she is going and how she flies the plane because she only learnt how to fly the plane just before she decided to take on this journey,” she said.

“This wonderful community engagement project was started by the Pukorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre in New Zealand to help spread the message about the threats facing shore birds.

“With their help, community groups are bringing The Flock to Australia to help create and spread awareness.”