The See the song cover: on peach paper, a flock of small birds forms a Eurasian Blue Tit next to the words “sound on”, “Often hangs upside down to find food.” and “Whose song is this?”

Behind Birdy

See the song: hear the bird first, then meet it

Albin Abrahamsson, AlbIT

· 3 min read

Learning birds by ear is hard. You hear something in a tree, and by the time you look up, the bird has gone quiet.

So we made a small listening exercise for every morning. It is a series of short videos, and it is called See the song.

Listen first. The name comes next.

How a video works

Each video is about 20 seconds long and made for your phone. It starts with the sound. The screen says Sound on and asks Whose song is this? While you listen, a ring of bars around a question mark moves with the sound. After a short pause, you see the bird’s photo and its name.

For birds that are not songbirds, such as the Common Crane and the Mallard, the question is Whose voice is this? instead.

Here is the first one. Turn the sound on and try to guess before the name appears.

Photo: Kathy Büscher, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped. Recording: Benoît Van Hecke, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, edited. The video: Birdy, CC BY-SA 4.0. Its cover and the picture at the top of this page: Birdy, with the blue tit's silhouette by Wouter Koch, CC0, via PhyloPic.

A new bird every morning

The series started on Friday 9 October. For the first 30 days, a new video goes up every morning at 08:00 Swedish time, on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube Shorts and TikTok.

Here is the first week:

The text with each post is in English, with the bird’s Swedish name in brackets. Each post has a link to that bird’s page here on birdy.community, where you can play the same recording again and read more about the bird.

Missed a morning? Every video that has gone out so far is on the clips page.

Open photos and recordings

The photos and recordings come from Wikimedia Commons, where people share their work under open licences: CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA. Every post names the photographer, the person who made the recording and the licence. When a video contains CC BY-SA material, the video itself is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

Follow Birdy

Follow along wherever you like to watch:

And when you hear a bird yourself, you can do the same in the Birdy app. Record the song and Birdy suggests the species. Sound ID is free for everyone, just like identification with the camera and from a photo. Premium is an optional extra. Birdy is on Android now, and the iPhone app is coming.

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