Identify the Bird Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

This tall bird of prey of the African grasslands hunts on foot, striding across the savannah on long, crane-like legs and stamping snakes and lizards to death. It has a grey body, black feathering on the thighs like trousers, a bare orange-red face, and a spray of long black quills behind the head.

Question 2

This small, noisy Australian parrot is a riot of colour: a deep blue head, green wings and back, and a red-orange chest, with a bright orange beak. Its brush-tipped tongue is built for lapping nectar and pollen from flowering trees, and it moves in shrieking, fast-flying flocks.

Question 3

This is the second-tallest bird alive, reaching about 1.9 metres, a flightless Australian runner with shaggy grey-brown plumage, a long bare bluish neck, and big three-toed feet. It can jog for long distances at 50 km/h. The male alone sits on the dark green eggs and raises the striped chicks.

Question 4

This small, chunky brown-and-grey bird lives close to people almost everywhere humans have settled. The male has a grey cap and a black bib; the female is a plain buff-brown. Noisy and sociable, it nests in roof spaces, wall holes and thick hedges, and it hops rather than walks.

Question 5

This chicken-sized, flightless, night-active bird from New Zealand has loose, shaggy brown feathers that look like fur, no usable wings and no visible tail, tiny eyes, whiskers around the face, and a very long thin beak with the nostrils right at its tip.

Question 6

This big black-and-white wading bird has long red legs, a long straight red beak, and black wing tips. It feeds in fields and marshes on frogs, insects and small mammals, soars on broad wings, and builds a massive stick platform, often on a chimney, pole or rooftop, adding to it year after year.

Question 7

This crow-sized bird of open country across the Indian subcontinent and into South-East Asia looks a dull pinkish-brown at rest, but flashes dazzling bands of two shades of blue across the wings in flight. It perches on wires watching for insects and lizards, and the male performs a tumbling, diving courtship flight that gives the bird its name.

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About Identify the Bird

Can you name the bird? Each question shows a photograph of a bird and gives three short, easy sentences about it: what it looks like, where it lives, and how it feeds or behaves, without ever saying its name. You then pick it from four choices, and the answer tells you more.

The birds are drawn from all over the world and from every main group. There are birds of prey and owls; huge flightless runners and swimmers like the ostrich and the penguin; water birds such as swans, ducks, flamingos and pelicans; tiny hoverers and singers; tropical show-offs like toucans and macaws; and the everyday birds of streets and gardens, from pigeons and sparrows to robins and crows.

Part of the fun is learning to read a bird from a few features. How big is it, roughly? What shape is the beak -- a hook for tearing, a chisel for hammering, a spear for fishing, a fine tube for nectar, a broad sieve for filtering? What are the legs and feet like, and where does it live: open sea, reed bed, rainforest, city ledge? A handful of clues like these will usually get you close.

Many of these birds carry a bigger story. Some are national symbols. Some were nearly wiped out by hunting or pesticides and have since recovered, while a few common ones are now quietly disappearing. Some have startling abilities: a bird that smells its food underground, one that can fly backwards, one that plans ahead and solves puzzles, one that survives the Antarctic winter standing still on the ice.

The clues never name the bird or use a word that would give it away at once, so getting the answer means recognising the shape and the description rather than reading a caption. Every photograph is a freely licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, chosen from public-domain or Creative Commons sources so there is no copyright question, and every fact has been checked. The wording is kept simple, so the quiz plays the same for a keen birdwatcher and for someone who has never owned a pair of binoculars.