EARTH · GLOBAL BIRD MAP
Where the World’s Birds Have Been Recorded
For centuries, naturalists, museums and everyday birdwatchers have written down what they saw and where. Pooled by GBIF, those notes become a map of the planet’s birdlife — more than 2.1 billion openly-licensed records, glowing brightest where the most have been logged. Pick all birds at once or a single species, from the Barn Swallow to the Andean Condor. One honest caveat runs through the whole thing: this shows where birds have been recorded, which follows people and collections as much as the birds themselves — it is not a range map, an abundance map, or a live view of migration.
2,105,855,138 occurrence records for class Aves, counted from GBIF using only CC0 and CC-BY (commercial-safe) data. Snapshot dated 20 Jul 2026. Below, 51 individual species — 23of them long-distance migrants — each with its own map and its real record count.
What it shows — and what it doesn’t
Every glowing cell is a count of records— an observation logged or a specimen collected, then shared openly through GBIF. More records make a brighter cell. That is a genuinely useful picture of where a bird has been found, but it is not the same as where it lives: the map also lights up wherever there are more observers— well-birded countries, nature reserves, university towns — so a dark patch can mean “few birds” or simply “few people looking.” We show records, not range or abundance, and never draw migration arrows or claim a bird is somewhere “right now.” There is deliberately no LIVE badge; the map carries the date its snapshot was taken.
Curious how a map of billions of sightings gets built — and why we’re so careful about what it can and can’t say?
Browse the birds
51species, grouped by where they’re most at home. Each opens its own map and its real GBIF record count — the widespread ones logged tens of millions of times, the rare ones only a few thousand.
WORLDWIDE
278K records
Barn SwallowHirundo rustica15M records · migratory
Common StarlingSturnus vulgaris26M records · migratory
Great EgretArdea alba11M records · migratory
House SparrowPasser domesticus23M records
MallardAnas platyrhynchos30M records · migratory
OspreyPandion haliaetus7.3M records · migratory
Peregrine FalconFalco peregrinus2.4M records · migratory
Rock PigeonColumba livia15M records
AFRICA
ASIA
EUROPE
227K records · migratory
Common BlackbirdTurdus merula10M records
Common ChaffinchFringilla coelebs7.7M records · migratory
Common CuckooCuculus canorus1.5M records · migratory
Common KingfisherAlcedo atthis1.8M records
Eurasian Blue TitCyanistes caeruleus8.5M records
European RobinErithacus rubecula8.0M records
Grey HeronArdea cinerea5.6M records
Mute SwanCygnus olor4.8M records
White StorkCiconia ciconia1.1M records · migratory
NORTH AMERICA
29M records · migratory
Bald EagleHaliaeetus leucocephalus7.5M records
Blue JayCyanocitta cristata24M records
Canada GooseBranta canadensis24M records · migratory
Great Blue HeronArdea herodias14M records
Northern CardinalCardinalis cardinalis26M records
Ruby-throated HummingbirdArchilochus colubris4.5M records · migratory
Sandhill CraneAntigone canadensis2.3M records · migratory
Swainson’s HawkButeo swainsoni799K records · migratory
Wood DuckAix sponsa6.3M records · migratory
OCEANIA
See it in context
Seabirds share the map with whales, sharks and turtles — the ocean’s side of the living world.
ATLAS · COUNTRIESAny country, top to bottomThe nations where a bird is most recorded, profiled in full — population, geography, and the live view overhead.
EARTH · LIVEThe planet, right now →About this data
Records come from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which aggregates bird observations and museum specimens shared by thousands of institutions worldwide. We count and map only records published under CC0 or CC BY 4.0 — the openly-reusable subset — so the totals are a floor, not the full GBIF holding. The density surface is drawn live from GBIF’s map tiles; the per-species figures are a snapshot dated 20 Jul 2026. GBIF data is observational and effort-biased: coverage follows observers, so this maps where birds have been recorded, not where they live, how many there are, or where they are migrating. It is not a live feed and is never badged as one.