Bird Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ birds — with size, habitat, diet, voice, behavior, and the field marks that tell them apart.
Lesser Goldfinch
The smallest North American goldfinch, a bright yellow-and-black finch of western gardens, scrub, and open woods.
songbird
American Goldfinch
A small finch famous for the male's brilliant lemon-yellow breeding plumage and black cap, wings, and tail.
songbird
Lawrence's Goldfinch
A gray-and-yellow goldfinch with a black face, restricted to California and Baja California and famously unpredictable in its movements.
songbird
European Goldfinch
A strikingly colorful European finch with a bright red face, black-and-white head, and golden-yellow wing bars.
songbird
Lesser Yellowlegs
A slim, delicate sandpiper with bright yellow legs, essentially a smaller, daintier version of the Greater Yellowlegs with a shorter, straighter bill.
shorebird
Lesser Frigatebird
The smallest frigatebird, black overall with distinctive white patches on the flanks, found across the tropical Indo-Pacific.
seabird
Lesser Whitethroat
A neat, grey-toned warbler distinguished from its cousin the Common Whitethroat by a darker face mask and a distinctive, unmusical rattling song.
songbird
Lesser Scaup
North America's most abundant diving duck, closely resembling the Greater Scaup but with a peaked crown and a purplish (rather than greenish) head gloss.
waterfowl
Lesser Nighthawk
A desert-dwelling nighthawk, smaller and buffier than the Common Nighthawk, with a low, soft trilling call and lower flight.
other
Lesser Flamingo
The smallest and most numerous flamingo in the world, famous for the vast pink flocks that gather on East Africa's Rift Valley soda lakes.
wading-bird
Lesser Rhea
A large flightless bird of the southern South American steppe, smaller and paler than the Greater Rhea, with grayish-brown plumage flecked with white.
other
Lesser Prairie-Chicken
A small, pale prairie grouse of sandy southern-plains grassland, closely related to but smaller and paler than the Greater Prairie-Chicken, with reddish-orange display air sacs.
gamebird
Lesser Grey Shrike
A sleek grey-and-black shrike with a broad black mask extending across the forehead, favoring open farmland and steppe.
songbird
Lesser Spotted Woodpecker
A sparrow-sized woodpecker with a barred black-and-white back, elusive and easily overlooked high in the tree canopy.
woodpecker
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.
seabird
Black-faced Spoonbill
One of the rarest spoonbills in the world, a white East Asian wading bird with a black spatulate bill that breeds on a handful of small islands off the Korean Peninsula.
wading-bird
Greater Blue-eared Starling
A widespread African starling with glossy blue-green plumage and a violet-blue ear patch, often confused with the closely related Lesser Blue-eared Starling.
songbird
Greater Scaup
A rounded-headed diving duck of large open waters, the drake showing a glossy greenish-black head and pale gray back, closely resembling the smaller Lesser Scaup.
waterfowl
Boreal Chickadee
A brown-capped chickadee of the northern boreal forest, quieter and less familiar than its black-capped relative.
songbird
Rifleman
New Zealand's smallest bird, a tiny, tail-less-looking green-and-brown forest bird belonging to an ancient lineage found nowhere else on Earth.
songbird