About

Every plate of five great nineteenth-century bird folios, matched to the bird it actually shows, in today's taxonomy, with the reasoning.

Old plates name their birds the way their authors did, and many of those names now belong to other species: Gould's “Black-headed Gull” is today's Mediterranean Gull. 65 plates carry a printed name that eBird now gives to a different bird. See them on the wall.

How the plates were identified

• Names and codes follow eBird/Clements 2025. Each identification also carries the IDs other tools join on: eBird, Wikidata, GBIF, Avibase and BirdNET.
• Gould's plates were checked against the engraved caption on the scan wherever it could be read, against Gould's own text and against the University of Kansas catalogue.
• Audubon's were mapped from Wikimedia Commons and the Havell titles, and the hard cases checked one by one against audubon.org, the University of Pittsburgh and the New-York Historical Society.
• Each identification is certain, judged (a considered call, argued in its reasoning) or open. The 18 open plates each say what would settle them.

Each folio's README has the full story, traps included:

• Audubon, The Birds of America
• Gould, The Birds of Europe
• Gould, The Birds of Australia
• Gould, The Birds of Asia
• Gould, The Birds of Great Britain

Who made the plates

The folios are Audubon's and Gould's, but the plates were drawn, put on stone or copper, printed and coloured by many hands. Each plate credits them in small engraved lines below the picture: Elizabeth Gould and Edward Lear in The Birds of Europe, H. C. Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Hart in the later Gould folios, W. H. Lizars and the Havells in Audubon's. Every credit line was read off the plate, and 2,375 of the 2,462 plates have one. See who they name.

A credit line says only so much. One naming two people, as “J. & E. Gould” does, credits both with every role it gives; who sketched and who finished such a plate, and who painted Audubon's backgrounds, is in each folio's README, from the literature.

Get the data

The tables are CSV files on GitHub, described by a Frictionless datapackage.json and archived on Zenodo: each folio's plates and species, its credits (one row per plate, name and role) and the people and firms they name. The cleaned images, full sheets and art crops, are in each folio's GitHub release.

Cite

Riley, W. Historical bird plates: modern identifications. Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.22964828.

Licence and credit

• The tables are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0.
• The plates are public-domain works of the 1820s–80s. The cleaned images are marked with the Public Domain Mark.
• Gould scans: Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
• Havell scans: courtesy of the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, Montgomery County Audubon Collection, and Zebra Publishing.
• Havell plate 165: University of Pittsburgh, via Wikimedia Commons.

Help

Think a plate is wrong, or can settle an open one? Open an issue or a pull request with the evidence. The best evidence is the plate itself: the caption, the figure, the bird.