Bird Identification Quiz: 12 Questions With Answers

Each question tests one feature that experienced birders use, and every answer comes from Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds ID-skills articles or the USFWS guide Ducks at a Distance by Bob Hines. Cover the answer, decide, then check.

• Q1. A black-and-white woodpecker on your feeder has a bill about as long as its head. Downy or Hairy? Answer: Hairy. Cornell notes the Downy's bill is only about half the length of its head, while the Hairy's is about the same length as the head.
• Q2. A small hawk crosses overhead and its head barely sticks out in front of the wings. Sharp-shinned or Cooper's? Answer: Sharp-shinned. Cornell says the slightly larger Cooper's Hawk has a much more prominent head.
• Q3. A red-and-brown male finch has bold streaks down its flanks and red confined to the head and breast. House Finch or Purple Finch? Answer: House Finch. Male Purple Finches look washed all over in a paler raspberry red, even on the back, with diffuse streaks.
• Q4. A tiny bird with a large head, shiny black cap and throat, white cheeks and buffy sides, moving busily through trees with a mixed flock. Answer: Black-capped Chickadee.
• Q5. A sleek, silky gray-brown bird with a swept-back crest, yellow belly and red and yellow accents on wings and tail, in a flock eating berries. Answer: Cedar Waxwing.
• Q6. A long-legged bird with two dark bands across a white breast runs across a parking lot giving a shrill call. Answer: Killdeer.
• Q7. A small, flat-headed sparrow with a rufous cap, a black line through the eye and frosty gray-white underparts. Answer: Chipping Sparrow.
• Q8. A duck on a pond springs straight up into the air without running along the water. Dabbler or diver? Answer: probably a dabbling (puddle) duck. Ducks at a Distance notes most diving ducks patter along the water before becoming airborne. The exception to remember is the bufflehead, a diver that can fly straight up.
• Q9. Which puddle duck is the only one with a white speculum (wing patch)? Answer: Gadwall.
• Q10. A small diving duck swims with its tail cocked upright at an angle. Answer: Ruddy Duck, which Ducks at a Distance calls the only species to do this habitually.
• Q11. Which ducks earn the nickname "whistlers" from the sound their wings make in flight? Answer: goldeneyes.
• Q12. Two large white birds fly past. One has black only on the wingtips, the other has black along the whole trailing edge of the wing. Which is the Snow Goose? Answer: the one with black wingtips only. Cornell notes American White Pelicans have black trailing edges.

Scoring: 10 or more right means you already use shape and pattern the way field guides intend. Fewer than 6 usually means you are matching colors rather than shapes, which is the habit the four keys below correct.

• eBird Photo + Sound Quiz (Cornell Lab of Ornithology). Each custom quiz gives you 20 birds that occur at the date and location you choose, as photos or as sounds, drawn from the Macaulay Library. After each guess you rate the photo or recording, which helps curate the library. The Chicago Bird Alliance calls it a free tool and notes you find it at the bottom of eBird's Explore page. You sign in with a Cornell Lab account so your ratings are saved.
• BirdingQuiz.com. Photo-only, free, and drawn from over 200,000 images that include females, juveniles, and breeding and winter plumages. You pick a country, state or province and a bird list, then multiple choice or an advanced mode, and a photo fade time from none to 10 seconds. The images are random, so every quiz is different.
• BirdWise (Cornell Bird Academy). Photo and sound ID are quizzed separately, each with its own progress tracking, on 640+ species of the continental US and Canada. The free version covers 35 species; Bird Academy lists subscriptions at $5.99 a month or $59.88 a year (September 2026).
• Wingspan (board game). A strategy game rather than an ID drill, but its 170 illustrated bird cards are why many people search for "that bird game".

Which to start with: eBird if you want the birds of your own county this month, BirdingQuiz.com if you want fast photo repetition, and BirdWise if you want to learn songs as well as looks.

Cornell Lab's All About Birds teaches four keys to visual identification: size and shape, color pattern, behavior and habitat. Its advice is to start with these rather than with fine field marks such as an eyering or a wingbar, because field marks only help once you have narrowed the bird to a few similar species.

• Size and shape. Judge size against birds you know: smaller or larger than a sparrow, a robin or a crow. Cornell's example: a Cedar Waxwing is bigger than a sparrow but smaller than a robin; a Blue Jay is larger than a robin but smaller than a crow. Shape outlasts color: finches can be red, yellow, blue, brown or green, but they are always shaped like finches.
• Color pattern. Look at the overall pattern of light and dark first. Ring-necked Ducks and scaup are dark ducks with a pale side patch; Northern Shovelers are the reverse.
• Behavior. Posture, feeding style and flocking. The Chipping Sparrow feeds on open ground and sings from high in trees; the chickadee is busy and acrobatic.
• Habitat. A Killdeer in a parking lot, a waxwing in a fruiting tree.

The quiz above follows the same order: questions 1 to 3 use shape and proportion, 4 to 7 use pattern plus behavior and habitat, and 8 to 12 use the waterfowl clues from Ducks at a Distance.

If you mean the board game with bird cards, it is almost certainly Wingspan. Wikipedia records that it was designed by Elizabeth Hargrave, published by Stonemaier Games on 8 March 2019, and won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019. It has 170 individually illustrated bird cards, plays 1 to 5 people (up to 7 with expansions), and a digital version has been released since September 2020 on Steam and later on consoles, iOS and Android.

If you mean a phone or browser game that shows you a bird and asks its name, that is one of the quizzes compared above: the eBird Photo + Sound Quiz, BirdingQuiz.com or BirdWise.

Quizzes train your eye; a real sighting needs an answer now. The free Merlin Bird ID app from Cornell Lab identifies birds by photo, by sound, or by a few questions; its help center says Sound ID currently identifies 2000+ species, covering most birds of the US, Canada and Europe, and that the app will not ask for your credit card number. Google Lens, built into Google Photos, runs a general image search on a photo (Wikipedia).

NatureLens identifies birds and other wildlife from a photo, with free scans every day. Whatever tool you use, check its answer against the four keys: if the suggested bird is the wrong shape or the wrong habitat, keep looking. If you only have a description and no photo, our guide to bird identification by description shows how to search with what you remember.

Research and drafting for this page used AI assistance. Every number, date, price and claim was then checked against the sources listed below, which were opened and read on 2026-09-25. Where a source could not be opened directly, the fact was confirmed on another page from the same organization, and the organization is named in the text.