BirdLingo: A birdsong learning game | Hacker News Reader

BirdLingo: A birdsong learning game

jessicalieb.itch.io

161 pointsselfserve31 comments

Neat! Others have mentioned language localization, but I think the main missing piece here is species localization. Of the first set of birds presented to me, exactly none are native to my area.

Learning bird calls is like an outdoor superpower but I think it'd be a little better if you could focus the user on songs they are going to hear in their area.

Birds have accents, or at least their calls and songs vary by region. They're generally recognisable as being similar but sometimes it can be confusing. Throw in species like starlings or bluethroats (Luscinia svecica) which are accomplished mimics and life gets complicated.

Still, it's a great idea. Just listening to a blackbird (Turdus merula) or song thrush (Turdus philomelos) singing on a nice Spring evening is life-affirming all by itself.

The background of the game looks like northwestern France to me (what I would refer to as Brittany but I learned that from video games so idk if there's a more correct name). I'm assuming it's limited to birds there? I agree though if you are showing birds you should be super clear on the area since most people are most interested in learning birds they might see.

There's a reason the eBird quizzes let you specify a time and location (and a few other parameters). All that being said it's a super cool game and makes me want to take another birding trip!

Edit: just as an FYI for Americans using this: it doesn't look like it's using the names I'm familiar with always as an American (which I think are the ABA names). Americans will refer to these birds differently sometimes, the example I found was it mentioned a "common starling" but in the US I always see that bird called "European starling"

This post made me finally want to create an account and stop lurking HN :D

Cool project! I've been working on a similar project myself. We've started with South African birds (as we have a connection with a local charity there) but plan to expand to different countries around the world to support different habitats and more localised species.

If anyone is interested to check it out, I'd love some feedback: https://birdle.co.za (it's both web and an app)

Great idea! :)

Thanks!

That was fun. I like birds but I'm no twitcher, spent a good 10min going through getting better at recognising the sounds.

It would be fun if you could pick a country the birds are from. Australian birds sound silly.

eBird offers a good sound or image quiz. You can choose the location, time of year, and rarity of the birds it presents you in the game. https://ebird.org/quiz/

I have a question about bird songs in general. Why is a chorus of birds sound so pleasant and not cacophonous? Have they evolved songs that sound pleasant together? Have we evolved to think it sounds good? Is it just random chance?

Australia does bird cacophony. Cockatoos look great but there’s nothing pleasant about their sound IMO. And that’s before they start dropping gum nuts on metal roofs

Wonderful. Can also recommend Anki decks, there’s good ones with calls and they’re localized. I only studied the European one. Also to supplement, nothing beats birdNET. Walk around a forest with the app on and match the bird names to the actual songs you’re hearing.

I like Merlin better, it is the 'live match' version. With birdnet you have to record and submit. Both are from the Cornell Lab for ornithology.

I’m not familiar, will check it out thanks.

Absolutely lovely! I got invested without even realizing. Like some other people have said, showing the scientific names of the birds and also the option to switch to other languages would be great features.

Nice game! I would like to see the scientific names of the birds, too.

While we’re at it, if you like birds I can highly recommend people to get the Merlin Bird ID app for their phones. It has a function where you can put it on your table and it will highlight all the birds whose songs it can hear. Its not perfect (for instance it struggles with the european milvus) but its mostly accurate and especially useful if there is a bird you don’t recognize.

Love all the effort put into this.

I don't know if I'm the typical user, but I came into it with eagerness but left feeling like I was pressed into studying. I'm the type of person who likes to learn one a day and feel like that's a good job (e.g. wordle). Most of the birdcalls I'm learning are fun/incidentally through the IOS port of wingspan, which I enjoy immensely.

We get a lot of birds in our garden, but I'm not great at connecting the bird calls with the birds. Hopefully this will help, thanks!

Wonderful game!

Feature request: please localize... I hardly know the bird names in my language. Learning the English names is not helping.

Very cool, i will try it out. I was actually kind of looking for something like that. Looks very well made.

Super OT: I just think the lastname "lieb" seems unfortunate as the ending for a subdomain of a site named itch.io...

Super fun! Some feedback on stability:

Crashed on iPhone XS Max, iOS 17.4 Firefox and safari

We were able to play the Garden round through to the end on an android tablet (Firefox), but when we selected woodland, it froze after the first bird.

Fantastic! Well done. As someone that is not a twitcher but is interested in knowing what I hear around me on a walk this was easy to use with a low effort entry point.

Very charming, and also quite nice to learn the various sounds!

This is excellent.

I have been using the amazing Merlin up to ID bird song, I’d like to recognise bird song without needing an app, but I still have a long way to go.

Was anyone able to load this on mobile? I tried Firefox Focus and Safari. Both got to the game, but then it failed load. :-(

Works for me but it loads very slowly, it is a nicely done app, but the runtime is to heavy.

Wonderful effort, but it would be indeed magnificent to show the texts in local language - for them children to understand around the world. Bird names are definitely not alike across translations...

Somehow i feel that Birdolingo would be a better name :)

I love it, thanks :)

great game, thanks.

Forced full-screen sucks on a 49" ultra-wide monitor, lol.

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