Like many other folks, I love playing online games.
Especially games that don’t require me to create an account or log in. Games I only need to take a few minutes to play.
When the games are focused on one of my hobbies, like birding, that’s even better!
I discovered two birding games this past month I’ve enjoyed playing.
Blird Game
Created by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Blird Game encourages you to identify a mystery bird by revealing tiles of the blurred bird image. You have five guesses.
After revealing a tile, you’re given the opportunity to guess the bird from a list of species. Select a species and submit your guess.
After your submission, a light green colored bar displays behind your guess. The length of the colored bar indicates how close your guess is to the mystery blurred bird.
When you make your next guess, another tile of the blurred images is revealed. It’s like doing a puzzle.
Depending on what part of the bird is shown—bill, wings, tail, head—you may be able to correctly guess the bird before you use up all your guesses.
I haven’t had much luck so far in identifying the blurred bird image, but I’m working at it!
Note: the game is limited to birds found in the United States and Canada.
birdiegame
Another fun challenge for bird identification, birdiegame displays a small portion of a bird image and also provides audio for you to make your guess.
You get six guesses. Again, a list of birds is displayed for you to make your guess.
If your first guess is incorrect, another portion of the bird image is displayed. And you can make another guess.
But the images displayed are not like a puzzle you put together.
You see a different image portion of the bird after each guess. You don’t get to see the images together after each guess, as you do in Blird.
For example, the first image displayed may be the top of a bird’s head. The next image may be the feet.
If you’re someone who birds by ear, having audio can make it easier to submit the correct answer. But I found their audio recordings to be pretty short.
Though my birding by ear has improved a lot this past year (since I set a goal to identify birds by sound), I’ve had better luck in birdiegame identifying birds by image, not by sound.
Two bonuses I like about birdiegame:
- I can go back in time in the vault and play games from the past
- No advertisements in the game
