# What Bird Is This?

> Free bird identification from a photo. Returns the five most likely species with the model's confidence, plus a species card (scientific name, family, order, IUCN status and links to songs, photos and range). Runs entirely in the browser: the photo is never uploaded. No account and no API key.

URL: https://what-bird-is-this.skillsafe.ai/

## What it does

- Input: one photo (file, drag and drop, paste, or phone camera). Optionally a box drawn around the bird; a tight crop gives a sharper answer.
- Output: top-5 species with probabilities, a plain verdict (confident / likely / unsure), and a card per species. Copy as text or download as CSV.
- Coverage: 525 bird species from around the world (the classes of a public CC0 bird photo dataset). A bird outside that list still gets its closest-looking match, usually with low confidence.
- Free example path: seven bundled CC0 photos with results computed in advance; nothing is downloaded until you run a photo on your device.

## How it works

- Model: EfficientNet-B2 image classifier fine-tuned on 525 bird species (chriamue/bird-species-classifier, MIT; base model google/efficientnet-b2, Apache-2.0), exported to ONNX, 34 MB.
- Input pipeline: nearest-neighbour resize to 260x260, per-channel normalisation, softmax over 525 logits.
- Runtime: onnxruntime-web (MIT) with WebGPU when available, WebAssembly otherwise. Weights are served by SkillSafe's model host, verified by SHA-256 and cached in the browser.
- If the species model is unavailable, the app falls back to a general ImageNet ResNet-50 limited to its 59 bird classes and says so on screen.
- Species facts: Wikidata (CC0).

## Limits

- Confidence is the model's own probability, not a guarantee. Females, juveniles, distant and partly hidden birds are harder than close-up adult males.
- It identifies photos only, not sounds.
- A photo with no bird in it (a person, a face, a blank frame) usually lands on the training set's catch-all class; the app then says it may not be a bird instead of naming a species.