No map here. The map couldn’t be drawn in this browser.
Everything else works. Enter a start and an end, and the song plays, shares and downloads as usual.
To see the map, reload the page, or try another browser or device.
Pick a start and an end to write a song.
Listening…
This is an experimental build and is undergoing review.
Read the disclaimer (a draft, to be reviewed and updated).
what3birdsongs gives every place in Aotearoa New Zealand an address made of three birds, and plays a trip between two places as a song of the birds along the way.
There is also a version for North America (the US, Canada and Mexico); the project will eventually cover the entire world.
It grew out of what3chords, a satire of what3words that gives every square metre of the Earth three guitar chords from one table, whatever is there. Here the vocabulary is drawn from the place instead: the three birds are picked from those expected in the surrounding area, according to iNaturalist’s range maps, and each sings in a recording someone made and shared on xeno-canto.
That doesn’t make the birds the place’s own. The range maps are a model’s prediction from citizen-science sightings, the names are one taxonomy’s, and the grid is still laid over everything from outside. Which three birds a spot gets is as arbitrary as three chords or three words.
Preview: this text was written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, while building the page. It has not yet been reviewed.
The land is divided into large hexagons of about 1,770 km² on the H3 grid (the map doesn’t draw these), and each has a list of the birds that iNaturalist’s range maps expect there: from a few dozen to a few hundred. Within its hexagon, each spot gets three different birds from that list, picked by shuffling the finer part of its H3 address, as what3chords does with chords. Spots a few metres apart usually share their first bird, while the third changes with almost every step. Click anywhere on the map to hear a spot.
Each bird is heard in one recording from xeno-canto: a few seconds where it sings loudest, or where the recordist marked it. Select a bird in the player to see who recorded it and took its photo, and on what terms.
You choose before anything plays, and the choice changes every address.
Which birds count as introduced follows iNaturalist’s New Zealand lists. Birds that arrived by themselves, such as tauhou (silvereye) and warou (welcome swallow), count as native there, so they are withheld from the settlement set.
Many native birds are taonga. They are included in “All recorded birds” as species only: their names, where the range model expects them, and recordings their recordists chose to share. Nothing here draws on mātauranga Māori, the knowledge and stories held about these birds, which is not ours to tell.
Birds are named in te reo Māori first, where iNaturalist has a Māori name for them, with the English name after. Names vary between iwi and regions; these follow iNaturalist and may not be the ones used where you are.
Enter a start and an end. The route between them is a chain of smaller hexagons, sized so the trip has a sensible number of stops. Each stop plays the birds of one spot inside its hexagon, picked by the hexagon’s own ID, so a stop always sounds the same; clicking elsewhere in the same hexagon gives that other spot’s birds.
Stops beyond the islands, well out at sea, have no birds: each plays one turn of waves instead. Places with fewer than three birds of the chosen set take one quiet turn.
Each stop plays its three birds in turn, or all together. The pace sets how long each turn lasts. Press play (or the space bar), and select any stop in the chart to jump there.
The share button copies a link that opens this trip with this sound. The download button saves the song as a WAV file, with a text file of credits, when the recordings’ licences allow them to be mixed into one file.
On an iPhone, flip the ring/silent switch to ring if you hear nothing.
Go live follows your location instead of a planned route. The hexagon you are in plays its birds round and round until you cross into the next. Hexagons are about 50 m across on foot and larger when you travel faster, because a phone’s sense of where it is wanders by several metres.
The page keeps the screen awake while a session runs, because a web page cannot keep playing once the phone locks. When you end the session the route becomes an ordinary trip you can replay, and a recording of what you heard can be downloaded, licences permitting. None of it is kept once you close the page.
This page does not send your location anywhere, and a link to a travelled route is only made if you press share and agree. It does talk to other services: the map loads its tiles from LINZ Basemaps for wherever it is showing (including where you are, in a live session); place search sends what you type to Nominatim or Photon; “Follow roads” sends the start and end to the OSRM server; the page’s fonts and libraries come from Google Fonts and jsDelivr; and a bird’s sonogram is loaded from xeno-canto when you open its credits.
Draft, to be reviewed and updated. Written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, for the authors to revise.
Preview: the explanatory text on this page was written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, while building it. It has not yet been reviewed.
Bird recordings from xeno-canto, each under its recordist’s Creative Commons licence, cut and re-encoded here. Bird photos from iNaturalist, each under its photographer’s licence. Range maps from iNaturalist’s open range map dataset (geomodel, CC BY 4.0). Waves for stops out at sea: “Ocean Waves on a Tropical Beach” by Jarrod Stanley, CC0, from Wikimedia Commons; a generic recording, not made on these coasts. Names in te reo Māori and English follow iNaturalist.
Grown out of what3chords songs, a recreation of the original what3chords by David O’Sullivan, Luke Bergmann, Jim Thatcher and Nick Lally.
The map is drawn in NZTM2000, New Zealand’s own map projection, from LINZ Basemaps. The Chatham Islands sit about 800 km east of the mainland, so they are shown in a box in the corner; select it to go there. Because the projection is centred on the mainland, the Chathams appear turned a little. Their label gives the English name with the Moriori name, Rēkohu, and the Māori name, Wharekauri; this is not an official dual name.
Place search by Nominatim and Photon (map data © OpenStreetMap contributors). Basemap © Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand, CC BY 4.0. Built with OpenLayers, ol-mapbox-style, proj4js, h3-js and Tone.js.