Welcome to Avibase

Avibase is an extensive database information system about all birds of the world, containing over 4.5 million records about 10,000 species and 22,000 subspecies of birds, including distribution information, taxonomy, synonyms in several languages and more. This site is managed by Denis Lepage and hosted by Bird Studies Canada, the Canadian copartner of Birdlife International. Avibase has been a work in progress since 1992 and I am now pleased to offer it as a service to the bird-watching and scientific community.

© Denis Lepage 2010

Enter a bird name (or partial bird name) in any language or select a bird family below to find a taxon. You can use % as a wildcard in the middle of the name to replace any characters (eg, colo%red will return coloured and colored).

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Number of records currently in Avibase: 5,020,104 - Last update: 2010-02-03

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2010-02-03: I have just finished doing an update of the database today, and noticed that Avibase now exceeds 5 million records in total! This includes over half a million names and 1,1 million distributional records.

2010-02-03: I would like to thank Patrick Kerboul for very generously sending me a copy of the Howard and Moore checklist, 1st edition. I expect it will take me some time to complete this task, but it will help me mapping the older taxonomic concepts. Thanks again!

2010-02-03: I just fixed a problem that prevented the Avibase web service from displaying checklists properly.

2010-01-18: The Clements checklist was recently updated to version 6.4. The list of updates is fairly substantive, and have been summarized here. I will change shortly the standard Clements taxonomy in the regional list to reflect those changes.

2010-01-16: Birdlife has just announced that the breeding site of one of the world's least known bird, the Large-billed Reed-warbler Acrocephalus orinus, has been discovered in Afghanistan. The full article is available here. The bird was only recently "rediscovered" in 2007 in India and Thailand, after more than 139 years (article here).

2010-01-16: Thanks (again) to Jo Warnier for his help with the Handbook of the Birds of the World. I have now made several taxonomic changes following the publication of volume 14.

2010-01-16: Thank you to Petr Blahník for translating Avibase in Czech! This site is now now available in 17 languages. Please contact me if you would like to translate Avibase in another language.

2010-01-08: I'm happy to say that I have added a new tool this week to Avibase. You can now vote for your favorite Flickr photos, identify those that you think are inappropriate, and more easily display another replacement photo while staying on the same page. Have a look at the photo version of the Costa Rica page for instance, and try the buttons now visible under any photo. Any photos reported as inappropriate (eg, no bird in photo or mis-identifications) will be reviewed and removed if necessary. If there are volunteers, I would appreciate some help in the review process, particularly from someone with a good knowledge of world bird identification.

2009-12-28: Michel Montoya sent me a revised checklist of the birds of Cocos Island (Costa Rica).

2009-12-28: Merci to Jean P Vande weghe for providing several corrections to the checklist of the birds of Rwanda.

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