About Us
Avifauna is an independent birding project with a simple mission: to build a living field guide to the world鈥檚 birds, one sound at a time.
Why this site exists
Birds are often heard before they are seen. A distant phrase, a repeated call from thick cover, or the opening notes of the dawn chorus can tell us which species are nearby鈥攊f we know how to listen. Avifauna was created to make that skill approachable outside a classroom or a specialized field course.
We organize birds by country and connect each profile with real field recordings, photographs, plain-language descriptions and beginner guides. The aim is not just to collect sounds, but to help people understand what makes each voice recognizable.
What we care about
- Useful identification: every guide should help a listener notice rhythm, pitch, tone and habitat rather than simply memorize a name.
- Real sources: recordings and photographs are used with their original credit and licence information.
- Careful growth: countries and species are added as recordings are verified and pages become genuinely useful.
- Independent judgment: we are birding enthusiasts, not a wildlife agency, university or official partner of the platforms we cite.
Sound pictures: the spectrogram view
Every recording on Avifauna can be seen as well as heard. Alongside each player there is a Spectrogram switch. Leave it alone and nothing extra is loaded鈥攚orth knowing on a phone or a slow connection. Turn it on and the sound picture opens directly above the player.
A spectrogram plots frequency against time: seconds run from left to right, pitch climbs from bottom to top (labelled in kHz), and brighter marks are louder. It is drawn in your browser from the recording itself, so whatever you see always belongs to the audio you are hearing rather than a stock illustration.
With the picture open you can:
- see how a song is built鈥攕eparate phrases, repeated motifs, pauses and the gaps between one delivery and the next;
- tell a steady whistle from a trill or a buzz at a glance, instead of holding it in memory;
- compare two recordings of the same species and notice how much individual birds vary;
- click or tap anywhere on the picture to jump straight to the phrase you want to hear again.
Only one picture is prepared at a time, and it is released when you close it, so browsing stays responsive. The switch also notes your choice in the address bar: a link such as /species/turdus-merula.html#spectrogram-2 opens that page with the second recording's picture already showing, which helps when sharing a comparison with another listener. The same feature appears on our blog guides, where the recordings illustrate what the text is describing.
How we work
We build on publicly available Creative Commons material, especially recordings from xeno-canto and media from Wikimedia projects. We favour species profiles with playable recordings and transparent attribution. If a photographer, recordist or visitor believes something should be corrected, our contact page and DMCA policy provide a direct route to report it.