Are you noticing the birds outside your window more than you used to? No matter where you live, there’s probably some chirpy thing hanging around. If you’d like to test your knowledge—or just open your ears to the world around you—try this simple quiz.
The webpage will ask where you’re located (or which location you’d like to be quizzed on) and then it will play you three audio clips from birds that are common where you are, according to birdwatching data site eBird. (I had to put on my noise-canceling headphones to play because I was also hearing real chirps from outside my window.)
You get to keep guessing until you get each bird right, so a perfect score would be 3 correct and 0 wrong. I did this on a few occasions, but I also bombed a few rounds.
I’ve always enjoyed watching birds, but it wasn’t until I started paying attention to their calls that I realized how many birds I could hear but not see. The song sparrow, for example, was practically invisible to me. They’re small and brown, and easy to mistake for a female house sparrow or house finch. But when I looked up their songs a year or two ago—and, yes, song sparrows are in this quiz too—I realized that I’d been hearing them all the dang time. They sing a pretty little tune that you can’t miss, except, well, I had been doing just that.
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So give this game a try. And if it piques your curiosity, you can look up birds’ calls on Cornell’s All About Birds site, or study them flashcard style with an app like Chirp (iOS).
