BIRD

For years, I kept this website rather anonymous. But then it occurred to me that maybe, you, the visitor, would actually enjoy knowing who and what is behind all this. I am Daan Vreugdenhil, have a PhD in conservation ecology, and dedicated my career of 4 decades to the conservation of nature, for which I visited some 80 countries and learned 6 foreign languages, my native language being Dutch. I have always felt that conservation is a passion, not a profession.

As a child, my father would take me on the back of his bicycle into the meadows in Holland, where he taught me to identify birds and plants. I caught frogs, butterflies and lizards as pets (yes, most of those poor critters died shortly after). As a teenager, I joined a youth club for nature study, riding my bike every weekend with my fellow club members to nature reserves in the Netherlands where I grew up. Little wonder, when time came I studied ecology and natural resources management.

I guess, I never got over my love for nature, wild places, forests, deserts and wild animals. I still love hitting the trail, kayaking down a river, the wind in my ears when skiing down a slope or riding my speed bike. Often people ask me if I don't get tired of traveling. But how can one ever get tired of the beauty of the bright colours of Indian Fall, the thrill of an eagle soaring the sky, the thunder of Iguaçu Falls, the fragrance of a spring flower, a Sky Lark announcing spring, a herd of elephants roaming the plains. My entire life has been dedicated to the conservation of nature.

This website is my gift to you, so you can follow me in my passion and carry on the flame of conservation, the result of more than a decade of work for which I never got paid or never received any subsidy. If this website in any way was useful to you, then I invite you to make a donation to the Adopt A Ranger Foundation. The Adopt A Ranger Foundation is my latest contribution in my quest to save 10% of our planet as a home for animals and plants.

How many bird species?

We have composed a list of bird species originally based on the bird list of Sibley and Monroe of 9702, 1993. Since then, some new species have been discovered and a larger number of subspecies have been given the species status. Some claim as many as 13 000 bird species and several numbers in between. Why is that? The answer is that there are several "species concepts" and those who adhere to one typically fight vigorously against those who adhere to another, and there is no real end in sight to the argument. In this issue there is no real right of wrong.

However, what matters to you, the birdwatcher is what you find in the field at the place where you are birding. Let's say you are birding in Kenya. Recently, the scientific community has decided to raise two bird subspecies to the bird species level, and gave each a different scientific name. However, your bird guide does not list those names, nor has the country's bird species committee yet listed those names. If we were to list the new bird names in stead of the old bird names, you would not be able to check it off on our bird checklist, simply because the old bird name is no longer listed. So we are rather conservative with listing new bird names, because being progressive would only confuse you, the real user. We only add a bird species when it appears on the list of a national bird species committee. That way, we gradually will expand the number of bird species, as they are actually being used by active birding communities. When that happens, we will also compose a new name in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and German. Currently our list has 10 031 bird species.

If you want to read a bit more about the species concept, you may find some conceptual discussions here:

After all, we're trying to fit millions of years of evolution into a series of nice, tidily organized list of bird species, and the world is not now nor has it ever been nice or tidy. So, if you find a longer or shorter list elsewhere, those lists are just slightly different from our bird list, but not better or worse.

There are some major international taxonomic platforms with powerful databases on species that collaborate on the "Catalogue of Life", which you may want to look at:

NON-ENGLISH BIRD NAMES

We are providing non-English bird names for 20 languages.

For lists that by far exceed national bird names, we offer lists in this section:

For your convenience and rapid page loading, they are cut up into ten pages each.

We have the following native language bird lists for the relevant language region only:

Bird list in Norwegian,

Bird list in Finish,

Bird list in Swedish,

Bird list in Danish,

Bird list in Icelandic,

Bird list in Estonian,

Bird list in Latvian,

Bird list in Polish,

Bird list in Hungarian,

Bird list in Serbian,

Bird list in Turkish,

Bird list in Japanese,

Bird list in Italian,

Bird list in Zuidafrikaans;

Bird list in Esperanto

Bird list in Russian.

Non-English bird names used to be available from a variety of European websites, but recent testing of links revealed that the majority has disappeared. Most bird names are either for the country or for palearctic birds.

Multilingual North European Bird Dictionary
This is the largest and most extensive bird names database that we are aware of:
http://www.megabytedata1.co.uk/MB064u/index.asp

Babel Birdy - Bird Name Translation (Western Palearctic and World)
Scientific, German, English, French, Spanish
http://www.bavarianbirds.de/birdy_e.html

Dutch - English - Scientific bird names
http://home.swipnet.se/~w-58871/birdies/birdies.html

Swedish - Dutch - English bird names
http://birding.veranoest.net/

BIRD SPECIES, BIRDING AND NATURE

How many bird species?