A World Cup of Birds.

The 48 species of "backyard birds" competing in the #WorldCupOfBirds

You may be aware that there is a soccer tournament happening right now. In my Brooklyn neighbourhood, it's downright unavoidable. There are roving bands of fans in matching jerseys, every restaurant is festooned with flags, and the borough's official "fan city" is only a few blocks away from my apartment. You may not know that there is another tournament underway, one to determine the world's best "ordinary" bird. This tournament is 25 matches in at the time of writing, and there are 79 more to go. It's the World Cup of Birds! I ran the World Cup Of Birds for the first time in 2022. For that iteration, I used the national birds for all of the countries competing in the soccer tournament. It was a lot of fun, and we crowned a deserved winner, but using national birds had a few problems. First, not all countries have an official national bird. So I had to pick one, which felt a little disingenuous. Second, a lot of countries picked a big photogenic raptor for as their national bird, and I got a little tired of matches that featured some relative of the Golden Eagle. This time around, I knew that I wanted to pick ordinary birds. I wanted the kind of species a novelist might mention when they were writing a story about a place, to give it texture. To do this I downloaded eBird abundance data for every competing country. I also downloaded global abundance data. Then I used a clever statistic called TF-IDF to find the "ordinary" birds for every country. These are the birds that you would very likely see if you visited, and they are the ones for which that country would be the best place to go and see them. England gets the Rook, the United States gets the Blue Jay, Colombia gets the Blue-gray Tanager. There are a lot of corvids and bulbuls on the list, because these are birds that are well adapted to living with humans.

I'll be following the same system as the "real" tournament. We'll play 72 round-robin matches and then go to six rounds of knock-outs. We'll end with a winner on July 19th, and we'll learn a lot about some pretty great and pretty ordinary birds along the way. You can follow along with #WorldCupOfBirds on this Bluesky feed and you can vote on all of the matches that are left to come!