bird color matcher

about this site

this site uses birdcolorbase – a database of spectrophotometry measurements of bird plumages – to compare the similarity of a chosen bird's colors against those of other birds. using this database would ordinarily take some work and debugging just to get started, but ryan moulton's project "fairly ranking the most brilliant birds" (blog post, colab notebook) did this work, which made everything much easier. 2,414 species are included on this site, of around 11,000 total bird species worldwide. males (♂) and females (♀) are listed separately where both were included in the database, and you can toggle between them.

birds are compared by taking the earth mover's distance between their color palettes in CIELAB color space, with some adjustments to taste in how browns/grays and lightness are weighted. i cannot guarantee the accuracy of the database, which, while pretty good, is of course not perfect. the images for each bird were mostly gathered automatically and have nothing to do with the color data. i haven't checked all of them, so sorry if some display the wrong sex, have something weird going on, or don't show a bird at all. there are also many birds without images for both sexes and a few birds without any images at all – i'll work on this over time.

i am not a bird person, so expect some issues with this site that bird people would easily spot. i thank ryan moulton and the creators of birdcolorbase for making this website possible.