Because of the daunting scale of the task, however, to test feasibility, a pilot atlas was carried out on the southern coast of New South Wales from March 1973 to September 1974 with 168 volunteers covering an area of 13,600 square kilometres.
[2] In August 1974, the 16th International Ornithological Congress was held in Canberra, providing an opportunity for discussions with other ornithologists involved in atlas schemes outside Australia, leading to a decision to proceed.
In February 1976 the RAOU received a grant from the Australian Government enabling the appointment of a full-time staff member whose first task was to search existing ornithological literature for records suitable for a complementary Historical Atlas.
Methodology was kept simple: atlassers used maps to determine or locate a one degree grid square and then recorded all species of birds seen within it.
[5] Data were received from every single one-degree block of the Australian continent, Tasmania and adjacent islands, with 3000 atlassers completing 90,000 survey sheets producing 2.7 million records (sightings) of 716 bird species.
[8] Fieldwork began in August 1998 and has continued since, though after about four years there was a funding cut-off as well as a deadline for book publication purposes late in 2002.