• 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, your life list (Collection), and stats on how you’re going.

• Lesson — meet 4 birds (call + a memory hook), then a scored multiple-choice test. Pass 70% to clear it.
• Quick-fire drill — rapid-fire pairs jump between this unit’s lookalikes.
• Odd one out — three mystery sounds, no names shown: two are different recordings of the same bird, one is a lookalike stranger. Spot the stranger.
• Match the calls — pair each bird’s photo with its call.
• Fly-by — birds drift across the sky as one calls — tap the caller. The flock grows from 4 birds up to 8 as you progress further into the journey.
• Dawn chorus — the capstone: several birds call at once, like the real thing. Pick out every voice across 6 rounds. How many call together (2, then 3, then 4) rises as your journey goes deeper.

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 level 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 offers the bird up to graduate to Known.

The other journey games — drill, odd one out, match, fly-by, dawn chorus — are all warm-ups, not full tests. A correct answer in any of them can lift a bird to at most 2 of 5 pips and never pulls it down. The last three pips can only come from a proper lesson test, Multiple choice, or Flashcards — those games pit a bird against just a handful of others, which isn’t a strong enough proof that you truly know it.

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.