How to take part

We hope that you are keen to take part but if you’re not yet convinced then you can take a look at some of the scans first, or read the Viewer and Landmarking Guides. If you like what you see and want to get involved then you’ll need to register. It only takes a minute. You will then need to login each time you use the site. We ask that you login so that we won’t give you the same specimen to landmark more than once. It also means that you’ll be able to track the species you have landmarked and see where you are on the leaderboard – not that it’s a competition of course! Please don’t share your login details with anybody else, because we also need to keep track of how different users mark the birds.

Once you are logged in and ready start you can head over to Get Started. You will be shown a 3D image of a bird bill ready for landmarking. The Viewer Guide shows you how to move the bill around, zoom in and out and place landmarks. The Landmarking Guide describes the landmarking process. The website is designed so that landmarking is step by step with descriptions and examples to help you out as you go - just click on the ? next to the species name for help. If you are assigned a particularly tricky bill and you are not confident that you can place all of the landmarks, that’s OK, you can choose to reject it. If you do that you can leave a message to describe why it is tricky and we will take a closer look.

Each species has a link to an external website called OneZoom. If you follow the link you will zoom in on a family tree (or phylogeny) of the world’s birds. You can see where the species you are landmarking sits on the bird Tree of Life and from there follow links to other great resources to find out more about species. We just hope you’ll come back to Mark My Bird!

Keeping track of your bills

After you have landmarked a bill you can go back and admire your work at any time. You just need to make sure you’re logged in and go to the Get Started page. There you will see a list of all the species that you have completed. Click on any one of them and you’ll see the 3D model and navigate through each of the landmarking steps.

Landmarks for landmarking

(Nearly) everyone loves a league table! You can see how you are doing compared to other citizen scientists on the leaderboard. The leaderboards for weekly and lifetime landmarking are updated live as you go. There are a few ‘landmarks’ (excuse the pun) to aim for as you complete bills.

What you need to do

  1. Register as a Mark My Bird landmarker.
  2. Make sure you are using a web browser that can display the 3D scans. You can read more on how to check here.
  3. Read the Viewer Guide and the Landmarking Guide.
  4. That’s it you are ready to Start Landmarking.