Bird ID
Learn the Birds Around You
Turn recent eBird sightings into flashcards of the birds actually near you — and learn to identify them by sight and by song, before you reach for an app.
Photos from Cornell's Macaulay Library · songs and calls from xeno-canto · 10,908 species worldwide
How it works
Each bird becomes a flashcard — like this female Red-winged Blackbird, a bird forever mistaken for a sparrow. You try to name it, then check.
Front
Back
Red-winged Blackbird
Agelaius phoeniceus
Females are streaked brown and often confused with sparrows. Look for the long, sharply pointed bill.
Icteridae · Least concern
How well did you know it?
Your grade sets the schedule: miss a bird and it returns within minutes; know it and it waits days, then weeks, then months. Your time lands on the birds you keep getting wrong. And every bird gets two cards — a photo card to know it by sight, and a song & call card to know it by ear.
Photo above is mine; cards use Macaulay Library and xeno-canto media.
New to Anki? It's a free flashcard app, and reviewing takes a few minutes a day. Get Anki for desktop and Android (free) or iPhone (a paid one-off). Photos and sounds stream from the web, so you'll need a connection while you review.
Used the previous version of this tool? It's been rebuilt — see what changed before you switch.
The old version gave you a search string to copy into Anki, where you'd filter the full Ultimate Birds deck and unsuspend the matching cards. It's been rebuilt to be simpler and easier to use: now it builds flashcards for just your birds — no search string, no suspending thousands of cards, no editing templates to pick a language.
One important thing before you switch: these are brand-new cards, and Anki doesn't know they're the same birds. A sparrow you've been reviewing for months in the full deck starts from scratch here — your review history doesn't carry over. If you've built up progress you want to keep, stick with the original filter tool — it works on the deck you already have.
Pick your spots
Click the map to drop a pin wherever you bird, set how far around it to look, and save it. Add as many spots as you like — each gets its own set of flashcards, so your local patch and a trip stay separate.
Adjust the search
Save this spot
Get your flashcards
Save a spot above to continue.
Study in Anki
Open the downloaded .apkg
file and Anki imports it — no other setup. (Don't have Anki yet?
Get it here.)
Your flashcards arrive organized under Birds — one group per
spot (Anki calls these decks), each split in two:
- Photos — name the bird from a picture.
- Sounds — name it from a song or call.
Click the deck you want to study: Sounds to learn only by ear, Photos to learn only by sight, or the spot itself to review both together. A bird seen at more than one of your spots gets cards in each spot's deck.
Come back for new birds
Birds move with the seasons — spring warblers, fall shorebirds. Come back any time to add the new arrivals to your flashcards; everything you've already studied keeps its progress.
- Rename a spot and future downloads use the new deck name — but Anki won't move cards you've already imported, so rename the deck in Anki too.
- Keep your spots rather than deleting them — deleting and re-adding one starts a brand-new deck instead of continuing the old one. Rename or move the existing spot instead.
Credits
Cards are built from the Ultimate Birds — Images and sounds deck by Bjoe, which draws its photos from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and its recordings from xeno-canto. Which birds are near you comes from eBird.
Already study using the full Ultimate Birds deck?
The original filter tool is still here — it gives you an Anki search that narrows the full deck down to the birds near you, instead of building a separate one.