what3birdsongs

Every place in the US, Canada and Mexico gets three birds from those mapped there. Pick two places and hear the trip between them.

1The trip

AStart

BEnd

A place name, an address, or lat, lng. You can also click the map to hear a spot and pin it, or drag the pins.

Route options

This is a recorded route, so it keeps the stops it was travelled with. Enter a start and an end to plan a trip instead.

Route

Hex walk Follow roads

Song length

Short Medium Long

Or listen where you are: the birds follow you as you move.

The screen is kept awake while this runs; if the phone locks anyway, the birds stop. This page doesn’t send your location anywhere, though the map loads the tiles for wherever you are.

2The sound

Each stop plays

Birds in turn All together

Pace

Quick Steady Slow

The birds come from a model of where each species may turn up, rarities and escaped cage birds included, in any season. Each sings in one recording made somewhere else.

Recordings from xeno-canto, photos and range maps from iNaturalist. Click a bird’s photo to see who recorded and photographed it. Grown out of what3chords songs.
For now, this covers North America (the US, Canada and Mexico); it will eventually cover the entire world. There is also a version for Aotearoa New Zealand.

No map here. This browser can’t draw it: the map needs graphics acceleration (WebGL), which is switched off or unavailable.

Everything else works. Enter a start and an end, and the song plays, shares and downloads as usual.

To see the map, turn on hardware acceleration in the browser’s settings, or try another browser or device.

Pick a start and an end to write a song.

Follow

Listening…

Experimental build

This is an experimental build and is undergoing review.

(a draft, to be reviewed and updated).

Sonogram of the whole recording, from xeno-canto. The clip played here is a few seconds of it.

Your song

What is this?

what3birdsongs gives every place in the US, Canada and Mexico an address made of three birds, and plays a trip between two places as a song of the birds along the way.

For now, this covers North America (the US, Canada and Mexico); it will eventually cover the entire world. There is also a version for Aotearoa New Zealand.

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.

Share this route?

How it works

Three birds for every place

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 in the far north to several hundred in the south. 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.

What the birds are, and aren’t

Mapped, not counted. The lists come from a model of where each species may be found, trained on people’s sightings. It is generous: rare visitors, birds passing through, and escaped or introduced birds (parrots, lovebirds, the odd swan) are on the lists alongside common residents, and any of them can be one of a spot’s three.
No seasons. A bird on a list sings there all year, even if it only passes through in May.
Recorded elsewhere. Each species has one recording, made wherever its recordist was, often in another state or country. It stands in for the species everywhere.
Picked, not ranked. Which three birds a spot gets is arithmetic on its address, not how common they are there. Many places will sound exotic.
Not every bird. 83 species are missing: their names differ between iNaturalist and xeno-canto, xeno-canto withholds recordings of them to protect them, or none of their recordings may be cut.

A trip is a song

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.

Hex walk is greedy local routing: at every hexagon, step to the neighbour nearest the destination. It runs entirely in your browser and cheerfully crosses water.
Follow roads asks the public OSRM demo server for a driving route and collects the hexagons along it. If the server is down, no road connects the two places, or a pin is far from any road, you get the walk instead.

Stops outside the US, Canada and Mexico, and well out at sea, have no birds: each plays one turn of waves instead (also, for now, over land beyond the borders).

Playing it

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.

Going live

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 CARTO 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.

Disclaimer

Draft, to be reviewed and updated. Written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, for the authors to revise.

An experiment, not a field guide. This is an experimental artwork. Don’t use it to identify birds, plan birding, or make any decision.
Birds come from a model. Which birds a place gets comes from a computer model of where species may be found (iNaturalist’s range maps), then picked by arithmetic on the place’s address. Neither says what actually lives there or how common it is. The model is generous, has no seasons, and is kept as published, pending review.
Recordings chosen by code. Each bird is heard in one recording, often made far away, chosen and cut automatically and not checked by ear. Species are matched between iNaturalist and xeno-canto by name, sometimes across different taxonomies, so a few birds may be mismatched.
Other people’s work. Recordings and photos belong to the people who made them and are used under their Creative Commons licences, as credited. Range maps are used under CC BY 4.0, as stated in their published listing. Sonograms are shown from xeno-canto, on xeno-canto’s terms.
Not yet reviewed. Much of the text and all of the code were written by Claude and are still being reviewed by the project’s authors.

Credits

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 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.

Place search by Nominatim and Photon, map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, basemap © CARTO. Built with MapLibre GL JS, h3-js and Tone.js.