The quest to find Australia’s favourite animal sound is building to a crescendo!
After more than 90,000 votes in the first round, we can reveal the final 10 contenders in the race for the nation’s hearts and ears, as the ABC celebrates National Science Week with a festival of sound and noise.
From the starting pack of 28 animals carefully selected by our panel of experts (with a bit of help from social media), 18 have now been eliminated. Their melodies and trills, squawks, bellows, growls and howls are gone from this competition forever.
The 10 that remain are all animals with iconic and unique calls. In alphabetical order, they are: the banjo frog, black cockatoo, boobook, butcherbird, cicada, fairywren, kookaburra, lyrebird, magpie and whipbird.
And what makes voting even harder in this final round is that you can only choose one favourite!
I love the sound of a whipbird
Probably the magpie from that list. I love that I can hear them anywhere, as opposed to some of the others where I only know the sound from bushwalks and camping trips.
Agree. Such an iconic sound of the Australian suburbs.
A vote for the lyrebird is a vote for any and all Australian sounds.
But has the Lyrebird heard me sing? I think not, otherwise there would be calls for a mass culling.
No Gang Gang cockatoo? Not happy Jan!
Luckily though my backup option of the Black Cockatoo is still in the running.
