21:14

More than 54,000 votes were cast in the first round of voting, but the second round attracted just 32,000 votes. This is pretty typical of runoff elections. Some voters are fatigued by the need to come back to vote again, and others are discouraged by the absence of their favourite.

Yet despite the drop in turnout, five of the birds in the final round managed to improve on their first-round total.



The black-throated finch improved from 13.2% to 34.5%, with more than 11,000 votes. That means more than one in three votes in the final round were cast for the finch, a walloping victory in a 10-horse (10-bird?) race.



The tawny frogmouth came a clear second with 3,351 votes – this was just over 10% of votes in the second round, compared with 4.4% in the first round. We can’t really say if the frogmouth benefited from voters switching from birds that had been knocked out, or a bandwagon effect as it became the obvious non-finch option in second place.



The superb fairy-wren also did well, jumping from sixth to third with 8.9% of the vote.



I had a theory in 2017 that the magpie and ibis partly did well because they are divisive choices: those who really like them concentrated their votes while those who don’t were scattered, and that a runoff system would disadvantage those birds. This wasn’t wrong, with the magpie dropping from second to fourth and the ibis dropping from fifth to a distant 10th.



The final round was also a good result for the wedge-tailed eagle, who jumped from 10th to sixth with about 700 more votes than in the first round. It appears that the eagle peaked just at the right time.