About Linnut

Linnut helps you put a name to the birds you hear in Britain and Ireland. Every species page pairs a recording with photos and a short guide to what sets that voice apart from the ones it is most often mixed up with.

Getting started

If a bird is singing and you cannot see it, begin with where you are standing. The home page sorts species into gardens, woodland, farmland, fresh water, wetlands, the coast and the uplands, with a separate group for birds of prey and owls. There are also pages for families such as tits, finches, crows and thrushes.

Every row in a list has its own play button, so you can run through three or four candidates in a minute before opening a full page. On the species page you will find a month-by-month calendar, a set of photos and the look-alikes, each with the one feature that settles the question.

Where the facts come from

We write every text ourselves. The facts come from the English Wikipedia article on each species, which we check claim by claim; any figure or statement the article does not support is left out. Which species appear on the site, and whether they count as regular or rare here, follows the national bird lists for Britain and for Ireland.

Inside each group the order reflects how often people search for a bird in English, so the familiar species sit at the top. A page only goes live once its text has been checked and at least one photo is available.

Photos and recordings

Images and sound files come from Wikimedia Commons and from material we already held. Wherever a file comes from Commons, the species page names the author and the licence and links to the original.

Spotted a mistake?

Before anything is published, a script compares each page with its sources and with the rest of the site, so that no wording is copied. Errors can still slip through: a recording attached to the wrong bird, a month marked wrongly in a calendar, a name spelled in an unusual way. When we find one, we correct the page.