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Learn to Identify Birds

Want to be able to identify the birds in your area by sight or sound? This tool will help you do that!

This tool builds on the excellent "Ultimate Birds - Images and sounds" Anki flashcard deck, which includes birds from around the world. However, even with the deck's built-in filtering, it can be challenging to focus on just the birds in your specific area.

That's why I created this tool! It uses recent bird sighting data from eBird to identify birds present in your chosen location. You can then generate a custom filter string to use with the Anki deck, allowing you to study the birds you are most likely to see.

days and kilometers.

First Time Using the Tool?

There are a few easy steps you have to to get started.

  1. Install Anki, if you don't already have it. You can download Anki here, they have mobile and desktop apps.
  2. Once Anki is installed download the Ultimate Birds deck and follow it's instructions to add it to your Anki.
  3. Click the "Browse" option. This will open a window with a "Search cards/notes" field.
  4. Paste "deck:Ultimate Birds" into the search fields and hit enter (it needs to have the quotes around it when you paste it).
  5. The search will bring up all the cards in the deck. Select all the cards (ctrl+a or command+a) and then right click on one of the selected cards and click the "Toggle Suspend" option. This will suspend all the cards, so that we can then only enable the ones recently seen in your area.

Get Nearby Birds

  1. Select your desired location on the map.
  2. Adjust the "sightings in the last days" and "within distance" parameters to control the range of bird sightings you want (the more days and the larger the range the more bird species).
  3. Click the "Get Nearby Birds" button and copy the generated search string.
  4. Open Anki and select the "Ultimate Birds" deck.
  5. Click the "Browse" option. This will open a window with a "Search cards/notes" field. Paste the copied string into the search field and hit enter to run the search.
  6. This will bring up all the matching cards in the deck. Select all the cards (ctrl+a or command+a) and then right click on one of the selected cards and click the "Toggle Suspend" option to unsuspend the matching cards.
  7. Now you can study the cards as usual in Anki.

Get Updates to the Birds

You may want to come back here periodically to get an updated list of bird sightings in your area. To do so, just follow the "Get Nearby Birds" steps again. The process will only add more birds to study it will not remove or suspend any birds you have already been studying.

That might seem like a lot of steps, but they are very easy to do and once you've done it once or twice it will only take a few seconds to update your deck with the new birds.