MetaAves 🐦

Bird taxonomy guessing game — a Metazooa-inspired game for exploring the diversity of birds.

Play MetaAves on GitHub Pages · View the source repository

MetaAves is a bird-only taxonomy guessing game inspired by Metazooa.

Guess the mystery bird from its English common name, then use the interactive taxonomy tree to work your way closer to the answer.

Why MetaAves?

MetaAves turns bird identification into a taxonomy exploration game. Instead of only asking for the mystery species, it reveals how each guess connects through orders, families, genera, and phylogenetic clades.

Features

• 🌍 World Birds — a global bird species pool, including extinct and possibly extinct species in the source data.
• 🇹🇭 Thailand Birds — a Thailand-focused bird pool with Thai names in the study experience.
• 🌳 Interactive taxonomy tree — explore shared clades and taxonomic relationships between guesses.
• 📋 Tree / Table views — switch between the visual taxonomy tree and a compact table.
• 🔎 Smart English-name search — ranked autocomplete with typo tolerance and duplicate-guess protection.
• 📚 Bird study cards — descriptions, taxonomy, habitat and distribution, diet, behavior, breeding, conservation, photos, and Wikipedia links when available.
• 🇹🇭↔️🇬🇧 Thai ↔ English Bird Name Helper — a separate lookup tool that does not change the English-only gameplay rules.
• 💡 Identification hints — clues adapt to the mystery bird and the taxonomy already discovered.

Data

MetaAves combines generated bird/taxonomy data with online reference information. Taxonomy is based primarily on AviList, while study-card information and media can be retrieved from Wikipedia and other public biodiversity services.

Online information can change independently of the game, so the study card treats missing information explicitly rather than inventing it.

Run locally

MetaAves is a static web application.

1. Clone the repository.
2. Serve the project directory with a local web server.
3. Open the server URL in a modern browser.

Example:

python -m http.server 8080

Then open http://localhost:8080.

Project structure

• index.html — page structure and dialogs
• style.css — visual design and responsive layout
• script.js — game logic, taxonomy rendering, search, study cards, and online lookups
• data/ — generated bird, taxonomy, clade, and reference data
• .github/workflows/ — GitHub Pages deployment and automated test workflows

Search / discovery

The repository is public and the project includes search-friendly metadata, a sitemap, and a robots file for the GitHub Pages site. Search engines may take time to crawl and index a newly published site.

Status

MetaAves is in release preparation. The automated game-system audit covers database integrity, taxonomy relationships, gameplay state transitions, rendered tree integrity, study-card taxonomy, and browser errors.