Bird games for kids: screen time that ends up outside

The best bird games for kids need no equipment: a sound scavenger hunt, a race to name the first singer at breakfast, charades with bird mnemonics, a rainbow color hunt, and counting the doves on a wire. Birds work as a first nature hobby because they are everywhere, awake when children are, and easier to hear than to see. When a screen is involved, Merlin Bird ID is a free identifier from the Cornell Lab, Warble turns each bird you hear into a card with one free catch a day, and Wingspan is a board game for kids who can sit through an hour.

Why birds make a good first nature hobby

Most wildlife is a rumor to a seven-year-old. Deer show up at dusk, frogs need a pond, and the fox is gone before anyone turns around. Birds are different. Audubon's advice for parents is that you do not need to go far: birds turn up on city streets as well as in yards and parks. The National Park Service calls birding a very low-cost hobby and suggests practicing it on the walk to school or from the kitchen window.

Birds also keep a child's hours. Many species sing most at dawn and dusk, the Park Service notes, when cool, still air carries the sound. And kids are collectors. Audubon suggests pointing that instinct at birds, and adds that a sparrow taking a dust bath can thrill a child as much as any rarity thrills an adult. That is lucky, because everyday birds are what you have.

Five games with no gear

1. The sound scavenger hunt

Stand still outside, everyone closes their eyes, and each person counts how many different bird sounds they can pick out in one minute. Then open your eyes and point to where each one came from. Audubon recommends exactly this close-your-eyes-and-point exercise, because it turns background noise into separate voices with directions. Set a goal a child can hit. Audubon's examples are five kinds of birds, or twenty birds total, in one outing.

2. Who sings first at breakfast

Open a window at breakfast and make a rule: the first person to correctly name a singer picks the cereal, the radio station, whatever currency your house runs on. In spring the answer is often a robin, a cardinal or a dove, and a child who has heard the same three birds every morning for a week knows them for life. Breakfast was happening anyway.

3. Mnemonic charades

Birders remember songs as phrases. Audubon teaches the robin's song as cheery up, cheerio; the chickadee whistles fee-bee; the Barred Owl asks who cooks for you. Audubon also suggests having kids imitate the calls they hear and invent their own translations. Combine the two: one child performs a phrase, the rest guess the bird, the winner picks the next. A bird you have shouted across the kitchen is a bird you recognize outside.

4. The color game

Find a bird of every color of the rainbow. Audubon suggests this ROYGBIV hunt, and it suits kids who cannot yet tell a sparrow from a finch: red is a cardinal or a House Finch, orange a robin's chest, yellow a goldfinch, blue a jay. Nobody finds a purple bird on the first try, which is the point.

5. Count the doves on the wire

For the youngest kids, counting is the whole game. Mourning Doves sit in rows on wires and rooftops, and a child who cannot name a species can still report eleven doves yesterday and fourteen today. Keep the counts on the fridge. By the end of a month you have a graph, and the child has a bird.

Apps and games that exist

Merlin Bird ID is the free app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, on iPhone and Android. It identifies birds from a photo, a sound recording, or a short set of questions, and covers about 3,000 species across the Americas, Western Europe and India. Its Sound ID names roughly 450 North American species while they sing, even with several going at once. For a child that is a superpower: hold up the phone, watch names appear.

Warble is a free iPhone game built on a different loop. It listens to a bird singing, works offline, and turns each species into a collectible card in an album of 100 birds for your state. You get one free catch a day; a paid Pro tier removes the limit. The daily limit is a feature for parents: the game is over in a minute and the next chance is tomorrow morning, preferably outside. It covers US birds only, and in traffic noise it will sometimes say it is not sure, an honest answer for a child to hear.

Wingspan, the board game by Elizabeth Hargrave from Stonemaier Games, has players attract birds to a wildlife preserve with cards built on real species data from the Cornell Lab, the IUCN and Audubon. It plays one to five people in 40 to 70 minutes and won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2019. That tells you who it is for: kids old enough to sit through an hour of strategy. The cards double as a handsome field guide for everyone else at the table.

Lower-tech and free: paper. Audubon's ideas for kids include cardboard binoculars to make at home, a bird log to fill in, and copying birds out of library books. A drawn robin counts as a robin.

Safety and etiquette, in three rules

• Nests are look, don't touch. The Park Service's guidance is to avoid approaching nesting birds, eggs or nests, and to leave young birds found out of the nest alone, because their parents are nearby. A nest is a house with someone home.
• Do not feed park birds, and leave the speaker off. Feeding wildlife is against the law in national parks, and using bird calls to draw birds in is typically illegal there too. Playing recordings at home to learn songs is fine; playing them at a bird is not the game.
• Be boring to look at. Quiet voices, slow movement. The Park Service points out that you see more birds standing still than walking a trail, which is the only argument that works on a child.

Keeping it going through a season

Interest comes in bursts, so plan for a season rather than a weekend. Audubon's suggestions include a bird log, a window feeder that sticks on with suction cups so the birds come to the child, library books, and the free kids' programs and bird walks at local Audubon centers. For a bigger stage, young birders' clubs take ages 8 to 19, and counts like Project FeederWatch in winter and the Great Backyard Bird Count in February give a child a reason to count carefully.

Let them steer. Audubon's advice is to pull up a map, let the child pick the green patch you visit, then let them pick the trail. If the whole thing fizzles in a month, let it fizzle. The birds will still be there next spring, and so will the breakfast game. If your child has an album going in Warble, the state's 100 birds work as a season-long checklist: the common ones fill in fast, and the rest are an excuse for a walk.

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Questions people ask

Warble is a game, not a field guide. Where this page states a fact about a bird, it comes from the sources above.