About Us
BirdSound is an independent birding project with a simple mission: to build a living field guide to the world’s birds, one sound at a time.
Two names, one site. This project is BirdSound — the name behind our address, birdsound.org. It was first published as Avifauna, which older links and the Organization markup still use. If you arrived here looking for “bird sound”, “birdsound” or a bird sound library, you are in the right place: the same field guide, the same recordings, the same editors.
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—if we know how to listen. BirdSound 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 BirdSound can be seen as well as heard. Alongside each player there is a Spectrogram switch. Leave it alone and nothing extra is loaded—worth 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—separate 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.
Licences and modifications
Every recording on BirdSound was made by a recordist and published under a Creative Commons licence. The credit line under each player names the recordist who made the recording, states its licence and links back to the original file. We claim no ownership of any recording, photograph or range map, and we add no digital locks or extra restrictions to them.
What we do change is the format. The original uploads are large and not efficient to stream, so each recording is mirrored from its source file and transcoded to a 96 kbps mono MP3 for playback, and the spectrograms are computed in your browser from that streamed copy. Transcoding counts as a modification under Creative Commons terms, so we say so in the credit area of the pages that carry recordings.
Two details are worth spelling out:
- CC BY-SA recordings. ShareAlike does not prevent commercial use, and it does not apply to this website as a whole — only to the material itself. Our transcoded copy of a CC BY-SA recording is therefore offered under the same CC BY-SA licence, and anyone reusing it should keep the attribution and the licence with the file.
- Spectrograms. Each sound picture is drawn on the fly in the visitor's browser and is not published as a file, so nothing derived from a recording is distributed from here beyond the streaming audio. A screenshot or a saved copy of a spectrogram is a new copy: keep the species page and the licence credit with it.
If you want the untouched original — for research, for a project of your own, or at full resolution — follow the xeno-canto link in the credit. The recordist's licence there is the authoritative one, and it is what we rely on.
The Relax mixer mixes two kinds of material: beds generated live in your browser (no audio files at all), and public-domain field recordings from the NPS Yellowstone Sound Library. Those recordings are US Government works, so no licence conditions attach to them; we credit the National Park Service as the library asks, and the source of each one is written into its ID3 tags as well.
The licence, the source link and this modification note are also written into the ID3 tags of each streaming file, so a recording carries its own attribution even when the file is played or saved outside this site. Recordist names come from the original xeno-canto uploads, where the recordist supplied them.