Bird Call 🔊

The most important birding skill almost no-one trains

Around 80% of the birds you'll experience on a UK walk you'll hear before you ever see. Yet most birders never deliberately train their ear, which is why call ID is the skill that separates intermediate from expert birders. Daily bird call quizzes are the fastest known way to build that ear without spending hours with field recordings.

How to play

• Open today's puzzle and hit play. The bird call loops as long as you need it.
• Start typing a species name — autocomplete shows matching UK birds.
• Each wrong guess colour-codes by rarity and habitat similarity, so you get extra signal compared to silhouette.
• After 3 wrong: rarity tier hint. After 5 wrong: habitat hint.
• Same scoring as Silhouette — up to 15 bonus points for a first-try solve.

Where the audio comes from

Two sources, both free and properly attributed:

• Wikimedia Commons — recordings embedded in Wikipedia bird articles. Always credited to the original recordist, CC-licensed.
• xeno-canto — the bigger UK-specific archive. We've built the plug-in but you need an API key to enable it; until then, Wikimedia covers the most common species comfortably.

For each puzzle we prefer a "song" recording over a "call" recording when available, and prefer UK-recorded clips over global ones.

Tips for solving

• Listen to the structure — is it a single repeated note, a complex song, or a chatter?
• Pitch matters — small passerines are high-pitched, owls and corvids are low.
• Length — robins and thrushes have long phrased songs; tits and finches have short bursts.
• Habitat hint is gold — a "reedbed" hint immediately points you at warblers, bittern, bearded tit.