The birds that make Australia sound like home.
From the kookaburra's dawn laugh to the lorikeet's screech and the bin chicken's swagger — meet the wild characters of the Australian bush, the flyway migrants that cross the planet to reach us, and the backyard blow-ins from overseas. Tap any bird to hear its call, see where it lives, and tick off the ones you've spotted.
Who lives where?
Tap a state or territory to meet the birds you'll find there. Many range right across the continent; others belong to one corner of it.
A continent of extraordinary birds.
Australia's long isolation made it a workshop of evolution. The world's songbirds almost certainly originated here, and so did the parrots — which is why the bush rings with such an astonishing range of voices, from the lyrebird's flawless mimicry to the currawong's bell-like call. Roughly half the bird species found here live nowhere else on Earth.
This field guide gathers more than 700 of the most iconic and beloved among them: the backyard regulars, the outback wanderers, the rainforest jewels and the wetland giants — alongside the shorebirds that fly in from the Arctic each summer, the seabirds of the open ocean, the birds of prey and the night-callers, a few poignant rarities such as the orange-bellied parrot and the long-extinct paradise parrot, and even the introduced blow-ins now sharing our suburbs. Each one is drawn as a colour plate built from its real plumage, mapped to the regions it calls home, and paired with its call so you can learn the bird by ear as much as by eye.
How to use it
- Explore & filterBrowse the gallery and narrow by family, colour, size, region, conservation status, native vs introduced, or season — or just search a name.
- Open a birdTap any card for the full account: facts, range map, look-alike links, and a play button that fetches its real call.
- Keep a life listTick the corner of any card, or use “Mark as seen”, to build your personal life list — it's saved in your browser and the running tally shows in the header.
- Search by regionUse the map to see exactly which birds share your patch of the country.
- Test yourselfThe quiz hides the name and asks you to identify the bird by sight, by call, or by a single clue.
The Australian White Ibis gets a bad rap, but it's a native bird that was pushed into our cities by inland drought — and it was sacred to the ancient Egyptians' related ibis. Give it some respect. (Go on, tap me.)
How the media works: every bird here is illustrated by a generated colour plate, so the guide is fully usable offline. When you're online, photos are fetched live from Wikipedia and calls play inline from the Wikimedia Commons sound archive — resolved to an MP3 so they work on as many browsers as possible, including iPhone and iPad. If a recording can't play on your device, or a species has none on Commons yet, a one-tap link to the Xeno-canto bird-sound archive is always offered so you can still hear it. Range, size and status reflect widely published field-guide data and are simplified for clarity. Built for the love of Australian birds.
Compare two birds
Put any two species side by side — true-to-scale size, range overlap, voice and vital stats. Pick from the menus, or hit shuffle for a random match-up.