January 2026
HANZAB online has been active for just over 2 years now, and we have clocked up over 20 000 users. Thank you to everyone who has visited our site. We are constantly making improvements. In this release we have aligned our taxonomy to the AviList taxonomy, a unified global checklist of the world’s birds. This means there should no longer be differences between the major ornithological organisations, making bird identification, research, and data analysis more streamlined. It will take some time to implement this completely, but we have done our best to make details notes on the changes we have made so far to the taxonomy.
A few species have had some minor revisions (see Diamond Firetail, Forty Spotted Pardalote), but we will be focusing on getting some high priority species updated this year.
We have also added a comments section to the end of each page, as a quicker and easier way to leave a comment or if you spot an error to let us know. We will aim to get back to these within 5 working days.
June 2025
Exciting news is that BirdLife Australia will adopt the new AviList Taxonomy in June. We will be updating the taxonomy on the HANZAB website over the next few months to align with this.
You can find out what changes have been made on the Release Notes page. You will notice the new list of revised entries and the new “Revised” field that will appear at the top left corner on a page that has been updated, so it is easier to track when updates have made on website. We are also busy improving accessibilty, including, amongst other things, converting the scanned tables from the HANZAB books to be more easily accessible for readers.
A FAQs tab has been added to the main menu, hopefully this will help you navigate through the website.
March 2025
We have added a new tab called “Multimedia” where you can find links to photos and audio of bird species, where available. We will keep adding these links to cover as many species as we can.
We are updating some species profiles at the moment, like Albert’s Lyrebird, which is very exciting. Keep an eye out for new releases throughout the year.
As always, we are constantly adding the original HANZAB images to each profile page. One day we will have all of them up, and we might just have some champagne to celebrate that milestone.
23 Nov 2023
BirdLife Australia’s biggest publishing milestone is now online!
We will be doing an official launch of HANZAB at the Australian Ornithological Conference in Brisbane on the 27-30 November 2023.
You can now view the original text from the HANZAB publications. While a login is required, access is free. The login will be the same as the one you use for other BirdLife platforms (e.g. Birdata).
While we are still in the process of adding all the colour images from the original publications, we have updated the taxonomy and conservation status. Updated distribution maps have also been added for some species. More information can be found in About HANZAB.