The annual aerial eastern Australian waterbird survey has not identified an impact from bird flu.
Researchers flew 38,000 kilometres across a third of the continent, including more than 1,000 wetlands, for the count.
Ecologist Richard Kingsford says it's "a matter of time" before more bird mortalities are recorded.
Every year ecologist Richard Kingsford takes to the skies, and counts birds.
He describes it as something like a race call, spoken into a dictaphone.
"We count them in packages of tens, fifties, hundreds, sometimes even thousands and as you can imagine there's more than 50 different water bird species that we're identifying so it's pretty taxing, particularly where you've got a lot of birds on a wetland."
Researchers fly at low levels across wetlands and rivers conduct the race call count for the annual eastern waterbird survey, covering 38,000 kilometres across about a third of the continent.
The University of New South Wales study, supported by the Queensland, New South Wales, Victorian and South Australian governments, has been going for 44 years.
Professor Kingsford has been on board for almost all of the counts, and said over the decades he had seen a 60 to 70 per cent decline in bird populations.
"We've put that down to the major changes that happened in the Murray Darling, particularly the diversion of water…