• Journey — a guided path of steps, Duolingo-style. The best place to begin, and where the app takes you by default.
• Practice — the same underlying tools, à la carte: Quick lesson, Study, Multiple choice, Flashcards. Good for a free-form session outside the guided path.
• Progress — your streak, how many birds you know, the trend over time, and your full life list grouped by family.

• Meet 4 birds — listen to each new bird’s calls with a photo and a memory hook.
• Fly-by — straight after meeting them: the birds drift across the sky while one calls — tap the caller. Catch 6 of 8 first go to pass. As you get deeper into the journey, birds you already know join the flock as decoys (up to 8 in the sky).
• …then the second four: Meet 4 more and their own Fly-by.
• Match the calls — pair photo and sound across all 8 (plus any earlier birds you’ve been struggling with). No more than 3 mix-ups.
• Quick-fire drill — rapid pairs jump between the unit’s lookalikes. 7 of 10 to pass.
• Odd one out — three mystery sounds, no names shown: two are the same bird, one is a lookalike stranger. Spot 4 of 6 first go.
• Dawn chorus — the capstone: several birds call at once, like the real thing. Find every voice with only a few wrong guesses. How many call together (2, then 3, then 4) rises as your journey goes deeper.

Every 3 units: a Checkpoint. A gold exam block re-tests all 24 birds from the last three units — a 10-round fly-by, a big match, a drill built from the pairs you personally mix up most, and a grand chorus. The birds you’ve struggled with are guaranteed to appear, and any still-shaky bird from even earlier sneaks back in too. Pass bars are a notch higher (it’s an exam), and passing is what finally graduates birds to Known.

No bird gets left behind. If one of a unit’s 8 never quite sticks, it doesn’t vanish when you move on: the next units’ match, drill and chorus quietly fold in your weakest earlier birds, and every checkpoint hunts them down until they stick.

The difficulty arc is deliberate. Early units teach a handful of common, easily-told-apart birds; later units group birds by family so you’re contrasting real soundalikes; then the same arc repeats for less-common birds. Every step is a step up from the one before — you’re always at the edge of what you can do, not bored and not overwhelmed.

• New — not yet started.
• Learning — in your active set; shown often until it sticks.
• Known — mastered, reviewed on a slower schedule. It can quietly resurface as harder new soundalikes come online, so “known” stays honest.

The active set stays small. Instead of marching you through every bird at once, only a handful are Learning at any moment — 5 by default (change it under Settings → “New birds at once”). A fresh bird is introduced only once an earlier one starts to stick and frees a slot, so you always drill a focused few and meet more as you master them.

How answers move the meter

A journey lesson or Multiple choice — scored automatically:

• Correct — +1 pip.
• Wrong — −2 pips (never below zero); the bird comes back soon.

Flashcards — you grade yourself, so there are two extra options:

• No idea — −2 pips (never below zero); back almost straight away. Same as a wrong Multiple-choice answer.
• Tricky — no change, but you’ll see it again soon.
• Got it — +1 pip. Same as a correct Multiple-choice answer.
• Know it cold — jumps straight to Known and retires from review.

Reaching the 5th pip graduates the bird to Known (Multiple choice and Flashcards ask you to confirm; a checkpoint exam counts as the confirmation).

The journey games move the meter by how much they actually prove. A correct answer never pulls a bird down, and lifts it one pip up to a cap: fly-by, match and the unit drill reach 3 of 5 (you had photos or names to lean on), odd one out and dawn chorus reach 4 (pure ear work), and the checkpoint exams reach 5 — picking a bird out of a 24-bird exam is the real proof of Known. Multiple choice and Flashcards in the Practice tab can still take any bird all the way, any time.

If you keep mixing up the same two birds, a “you keep mixing up…” chip appears above Multiple choice offering a focused drill on just that pair, or a side-by-side in Study. Both bring you straight back to where you left off once you’re done.

• Press and hold a play button to flag a bad recording — it won’t play that clip again.
• Tap the ⓘ by a photo for the recording & image credits.