The Birds They Saw
A living collection connecting historical art of Australian birds, their names then and the names that describe those birds today.
The Birds They Saw began with a simple thought: the birds painted in historical books were living animals, watched by people who found them worth recording. In many cases, they are the same birds we can still walk outside and see today.
I wanted to bring those works together without turning them into a museum of old pictures. The result is a growing collection that connects each historical plate with its original identification, its current taxonomic placement and the evidence that carries the name from one to the other.
Names across time
The name printed beside a bird records how it was understood at a particular moment. Rather than replace that name with a modern answer, the collection keeps both and describes the relationship between them.
Some names have simply changed. Other birds have been split, combined, moved to subspecies rank or interpreted as colour forms or hybrids. Where a secure modern identification cannot be supported, the record remains unresolved. Each conclusion carries its evidence and confidence rather than presenting taxonomy as tidier than it really is.
The current bird is then connected to contemporary resources such as the Atlas of Living Australia, iNaturalist and BirdNET. A visitor can move from an illustration made centuries ago to its present distribution, recent observations and sound.
Unresolved identifications
The collection currently includes 208 plates without a sufficiently supported identification. They are listed publicly so visitors can inspect the artwork and primary source, record a proposed identification and provide the evidence supporting it.
Research entries are saved in the browser and can be exported for review. Nothing is added to the collection automatically; proposed identifications and their evidence are checked before the catalogue is updated.
Explore The Birds They Saw →Read the taxonomy method ↗See the research list ↗
Header artwork: Superb Lyrebird, from John Gould’s The Birds of Australia, 1840–1848. The plate’s source and rights information remain attached to its collection record.