Bird Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ birds — with size, habitat, diet, voice, behavior, and the field marks that tell them apart.
Black-throated Green Warbler
A bright yellow-faced warbler with an olive-green back and a black throat and bib on breeding males, common in northern conifer and hemlock forests.
songbird
Black-bellied Plover
A large, robust plover known as the Grey Plover in the Old World, striking in breeding plumage with a black face and belly and diagnostic black "wingpits" in flight.
shorebird
Black-throated Gray Warbler
A crisply patterned gray, black, and white warbler of dry western woodlands, with a small yellow spot in front of the eye as its only splash of color.
songbird
Common Raven
A massive, highly intelligent black corvid with a wedge-shaped tail and deep croaking voice, found across a vast range of wild habitats.
songbird
Common Chiffchaff
A small, drab leaf warbler that announces itself with its own name: a simple, repetitive 'chiff-chaff' song that is one of the earliest signs of spring.
songbird
Clark's Nutcracker
A pale gray high-mountain corvid famous for caching tens of thousands of pine seeds each year and for its remarkable spatial memory.
songbird
Black-billed Cuckoo
A slim, elusive, all-dark-billed cuckoo of eastern thickets, distinguished from its yellow-billed relative by a red eye-ring and lack of rufous in the wing.
other
Black Swan
A large, entirely black-plumaged swan native to Australia, with a bright red bill and curly white wing feathers revealed in flight.
waterfowl
Common Buzzard
A broad-winged, soaring hawk of Europe and Asia with highly variable plumage, commonly seen circling over farmland and woodland edges.
raptor
Blue-footed Booby
An unmistakable brown-and-white booby famous for its bright blue feet, used in an elaborate courtship dance on Pacific coasts and islands.
seabird
Saltmarsh Sparrow
A tidal marsh specialist with a bright orange face and crisp streaked breast, among the most threatened songbirds in North America due to sea level rise.
songbird
Blackburnian Warbler
A dazzling warbler with a blazing orange throat and face on breeding males, often glimpsed high in conifer treetops and nicknamed the 'firethroat.'
songbird
Willet
A plain gray-brown sandpiper that transforms in flight, flashing a bold black-and-white wing pattern unlike any other North American shorebird.
shorebird
Common Gull
A gentle, medium-sized gull widespread across northern Eurasia, closely related to but geographically separate from the North American Mew (Short-billed) Gull.
seabird
Willow Flycatcher
A plain, greenish-brown Empidonax flycatcher best identified by its sneezy 'fitz-bew' song, breeding in dense willow thickets across North America.
songbird
Whiskered Screech-Owl
A small, gray, ear-tufted owl of southwestern oak canyons, best distinguished from the similar Western Screech-Owl by its distinctive irregular-rhythm song.
owl
White-tailed Ptarmigan
The smallest North American ptarmigan and the only one found in the contiguous United States, an alpine specialist with an all-white tail in every season.
gamebird
Swallow-winged Puffbird
A distinctive puffbird with long, pointed swallow-like wings and a chestnut rump, often seen perched on riverside snags sallying for insects like a swallow.
other
Rainbow Lorikeet
A brilliantly multicolored Australian parrot with a deep blue head, green wings, and an orange breast band, common in gardens and flowering trees.
parrot
Plumbeous Vireo
The grayest member of the former 'Solitary Vireo' complex, an interior western species of pine-oak forest with white spectacles and no olive or yellow tones.
songbird
Sooty Tern
A truly pelagic tern with sooty black-brown upperparts and crisp white underparts that spends most of its life on the wing far out over tropical seas.
seabird
Red-tailed Black Cockatoo
A glossy black cockatoo widespread across mainland Australia, with males showing bold red tail panels and females a spotted, orange-barred pattern.
parrot
Semipalmated Sandpiper
A small, gray-brown sandpiper with a short, straight bill and partially webbed toes, famous for forming massive migratory flocks at coastal staging sites.
shorebird
Northern Parula
A small, compact, blue-gray and yellow warbler with a distinctive bicolored bill, closely tied to hanging Spanish moss or Usnea lichen for nesting.
songbird