Bird Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ birds — with size, habitat, diet, voice, behavior, and the field marks that tell them apart.
Horned Puffin
A black-and-white North Pacific puffin with a bright orange-and-yellow bill and a small dark 'horn' of skin above each eye.
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Macaroni Penguin
A crested penguin with flamboyant golden-yellow plumes sweeping back from the forehead, once among the most abundant penguins on Earth.
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Little Black Cormorant
An entirely glossy black cormorant of Australasia, often seen fishing cooperatively in large flocks.
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Laysan Albatross
A gull-like white albatross of the North Pacific, best known for its enormous breeding colonies on Midway Atoll and other low-lying Hawaiian islands.
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Least Tern
The smallest tern in North America, a fast, energetic flier that nests in open sand and gravel and is especially vulnerable to disturbance and habitat loss.
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Gull-billed Tern
A stocky, gull-billed tern with a stout black bill, pale plumage, and an unusual habit of hawking insects over dry land far from water.
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Magellanic Penguin
A medium-sized South American banded penguin, marked by a single black band across the chest, that nests in burrows along the coasts of Argentina, Chile, and the Falklands.
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Manx Shearwater
A small, sharply black-and-white shearwater of the North Atlantic that skims low over waves with stiff wingbeats, nesting in burrows on grassy offshore islands.
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Little Penguin
The world's smallest penguin species, with slate-blue upperparts and white underparts, that comes ashore only after dark to avoid predators.
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Little Blue Penguin
The world's smallest penguin, with slate-blue upperparts, found nesting in burrows along the coasts of southern Australia and New Zealand.
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Little Tern
A tiny, fast-flying tern with a black-tipped yellow bill and white forehead patch that hovers before plunge-diving for small fish along sandy coastlines.
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Humboldt Penguin
A banded penguin of the cold Humboldt Current off Peru and Chile, recognized by a single black chest band and a patch of bare pink skin at the base of its bill.
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Great Shearwater
A trans-equatorial migrant shearwater with a sharply defined dark cap and white collar, breeding on remote South Atlantic islands and wintering across the North Atlantic.
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Little Gull
The smallest gull in the world, a dainty, tern-like bird best known for its distinctive blackish underwings, unique among gulls.
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Great Cormorant
A large, widespread cormorant with glossy black-and-bronze plumage, a white throat patch, and a white breeding-season thigh patch, found across much of the Old World.
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Lesser Black-backed Gull
A medium-large European gull with a dark slate mantle and yellow legs, increasingly common as a wintering visitor to North America in recent decades.
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Laughing Gull
A common, noisy coastal gull of the eastern and Gulf coasts, named for its raucous, laugh-like call.
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Herring Gull
A large, familiar gray-backed gull with pink legs and a yellow bill marked by a red spot, widespread and adaptable across coasts, lakes, and cities.
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Guanay Cormorant
A black-and-white cormorant of the Humboldt Current whose massive colonies historically produced the guano that gave the bird its name.
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Lesser Frigatebird
The smallest frigatebird, black overall with distinctive white patches on the flanks, found across the tropical Indo-Pacific.
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Great White Pelican
A massive white pelican of Old World wetlands with a wingspan among the largest of any bird, tinged pink in breeding season and prone to spectacular coordinated group fishing.
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King Penguin
The second-largest penguin species, sporting bold, sharply defined orange ear patches and a slender, elegant build.
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Leach's Storm-Petrel
A small, dark, forked-tailed storm-petrel with an erratic, bat-like flight, spending nearly its entire life far out at sea and visiting nesting burrows only at night.
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Little Pied Cormorant
A small black-and-white Australasian cormorant with a short stubby yellow bill, common on both fresh and salt water.
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Magnificent Frigatebird
A huge black seabird with an enormous wingspan and deeply forked tail, best known for the male's inflatable scarlet throat pouch.
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Double-crested Cormorant
A widespread North American waterbird often seen perched with wings held out to dry, identified by its dark plumage, hooked bill, and orange throat pouch.
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Kelp Gull
A widespread Southern Hemisphere gull with a black back and white head, ecologically similar to the Great Black-backed Gull of the north, and a rare vagrant to the Gulf Coast of North America.
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Marbled Murrelet
A small North Pacific seabird unique among auks for nesting solitarily high in the mossy branches of old-growth conifers, far from the coast.
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Flightless Cormorant
A uniquely flightless Galapagos cormorant with tiny, useless wings, adapted entirely for swimming and diving.
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Forster's Tern
A medium-sized tern that breeds almost entirely within North America, distinguished from the similar Common Tern by its pale, silvery wingtips and orange legs.
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Elegant Tern
A slender crested tern with a long, drooping orange bill, concentrated in enormous colonies on just a handful of islands in the Gulf of California.
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European Shag
A sleek, dark green-black diving seabird of European rocky coasts, sporting a jaunty forward-curling crest in the breeding season.
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Glaucous Gull
A huge, pale Arctic gull with wingtips lacking black, a formidable predator and scavenger of the far north.
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Dovekie
The smallest North Atlantic auk, a plump black-and-white seabird that breeds in huge Arctic cliff colonies and winters at sea, often near pack ice.
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Gentoo Penguin
The fastest-swimming penguin species, recognized by its bright orange-red bill and a white patch stretching above each eye.
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Fiordland Penguin
A rare crested penguin, known as tawaki, that breeds uniquely among rainforest and rocky coastline of remote Fiordland, distinguished by its broad yellow eyebrow-stripe crest.
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Galapagos Penguin
The smallest banded penguin and the only penguin species found north of the equator, confined entirely to the volcanic shores of the Galapagos Islands.
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Glaucous-winged Gull
A large, pale gull of the Pacific Northwest coast whose wingtips blend almost seamlessly with its gray mantle, and which frequently hybridizes with the darker Western Gull.
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Dalmatian Pelican
The largest of the world's pelican species, a greyish-white giant with shaggy curled nape feathers and a striking orange-red pouch, once seriously threatened but now slowly recovering.
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Emperor Penguin
The tallest and heaviest of all penguin species, famous for breeding through the brutal Antarctic winter on open sea ice.
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Franklin's Gull
A small, dapper prairie-nesting gull, sometimes called the 'prairie dove,' that undertakes one of the longest migrations of any gull, wintering along the Pacific coast of South America.
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Black-footed Albatross
A dark, sooty-brown albatross of the North Pacific that often nests alongside the Laysan Albatross and follows fishing vessels far from land.
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Australian Pelican
A large black-and-white pelican with the longest bill of any bird in the world, wandering widely across Australia's inland waterways in response to rainfall and flooding.
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Bridled Tern
A pelagic tropical tern, browner and paler than its close relative the Sooty Tern, with a thin white 'bridle' line extending behind the eye.
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Cape Gannet
A large white seabird with black flight feathers and a golden crown that breeds in dense colonies on islands off southern Africa.
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Black-headed Gull
An abundant Eurasian gull, despite its name actually sporting a chocolate-brown (not black) hood, and a rare but regular visitor to eastern North America.
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Brown Booby
A widespread tropical seabird with dark chocolate-brown upperparts sharply set off from a clean white belly and underwings.
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Arctic Tern
A slender, graceful tern famous for undertaking the longest migration of any animal, traveling from Arctic breeding grounds to Antarctic waters and back each year.
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