Credits and Licenses

Where our pictures come from

Every species in a Birdfolio gets a real picture. No AI-generated birds.

  1. Paintings in the public domain. Most birds appear in plates by the great bird painters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including John James Audubon, John Gould, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, J. G. Keulemans and Archibald Thorburn. We use only works published in 1930 or earlier, which are in the public domain in the United States.
  2. Openly licensed photographs. Where no suitable painting exists, we use a photograph its author has shared under CC0 or CC BY, which allow commercial printing. Each one is credited by name in the book.
  3. Your own photos, if you choose to add them. You keep the copyright.
  4. Photos shared by other birders. A Birdfolio customer may choose to share a photo they took, for other people's books. We use it with their permission, only after we've checked it, and credit it "Photo:" with the name they gave us.
  5. Commissioned paintings, in the rare case nothing else exists, credited to the artist.
  6. Simple outlines, only if you choose them. When we have no picture of a bird yet, you can choose a simple outline of its bird family instead of waiting for us to find one. The outlines are silhouettes drawn by people and shared on PhyloPic (phylopic.org) under CC0, the Public Domain Mark or CC BY 3.0/4.0. They are marked "Outline" in the book and credited by name.

Every picture in your book is listed in its Picture Credits pages at the back, with its page number.

How photographs are credited

Each credit line gives the page, the bird, the photographer, the license, where the photo came from, and whether we changed it:

p. 212 · Carolina Wren · © A. Photographer · CC BY 4.0 · inaturalist.org/photos/000000000 · cropped

  • CC BY 4.0 = creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
  • CC0 1.0 = creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (no credit is legally required; we give one anyway)
  • Photographs are reproduced under their licenses. They may be cropped, resized and color-balanced for print. Licensed material is provided as-is (see each license). No endorsement by the photographers is implied.

How outlines are credited

Each outline you chose is listed under Outlines in the Picture Credits, with the birds that use it, its page on PhyloPic and its page numbers:

Outline: Ferran Sayol, PhyloPic, CC0 1.0. Common Potoo. phylopic.org/images/… p. 88.

  • The only change we make is the color (recolored to the book's ink, metadata removed); one line in the credits says so for all outlines.
  • CC BY 3.0 = creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ · Public Domain Mark 1.0 = creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/ (CC0 and PDM need no credit; we give one anyway). Attribution to PhyloPic itself isn't required but is appreciated, so every line names it.

How paintings are credited

Paintings are credited by the book they come from, with the scan's source, for example:

John James Audubon, The Birds of America (Havell edition, 1827–38). pp. 14, 22, 31.

Paintings are cropped and their paper tone evened for print.

Bird names and order

Species names and order follow AviList:

AviList Core Team. 2026. AviList: The Global Avian Checklist, v2026. https://doi.org/10.2173/avilist.v2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

The worldwide changes in our free splits-and-lumps checker (which birds were split, lumped, added or renamed in each year's update since 2021) come from the IOC World Bird List's comparisons with the Clements Checklist:

Gill, F., D. Donsker and P. Rasmussen (Eds). IOC World Bird List, versions 11.2 to 15.2, comparisons with other world lists. worldbirdnames.org. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). We compared the versions year by year and wrote our own short summaries.

Maps

Maps are drawn from Natural Earth data, which is in the public domain. Made with Natural Earth.

Bird counts on our state pages

The 25 most common birds in summer on each state's page come from the USGS North American Breeding Bird Survey, counted along roadside routes by thousands of volunteer observers, and published by the U.S. Geological Survey with no rights reserved (CC0 1.0):

Hostetler, Sauer, Hines, Ziolkowski, Lutmerding and Skalos. 2026. North American Breeding Bird Survey, Analysis Results 1966–2025. U.S. Geological Survey data release. https://doi.org/10.5066/P1OSNSFC

Ziolkowski et al. 2026. North American Breeding Bird Survey Dataset 1966–2025. U.S. Geological Survey data release. https://doi.org/10.5066/P144YU3S

We averaged each species' yearly index for 2021–2025 in each state and counted the share of routes from the route data ourselves. Birdfolio is independent of the USGS.

Typefaces

Our page designs. The layouts of our books and pages, and pictures of them on this website, are © Birdfolio. To use one, email hello@mybirdfolio.com.

Books and this website are set in EB Garamond and Inter, both released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (openfontlicense.org). License texts: EB Garamond, Inter.

Website software

This site uses open-source software, including Papa Parse (MIT License) and StPageFlip (MIT License).

eBird and other services

Birdfolio is independent. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by eBird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology or iNaturalist, or by any other service whose files we can read. We mention eBird and iNaturalist only to say that we can read the files they let you download. We don't use eBird's maps, charts, data services or Macaulay Library media.

Spotted a mistake in a credit?

If you're a photographer or rights holder and a credit is wrong or missing, or you'd rather we didn't use your image, email hello@mybirdfolio.com. Within 7 days we'll correct the credit or replace the image for all future printings and update our records.