About WingsNBeaks

What is it?

WingsNBeaks is a free quiz app that tests your ability to identify species from photographs. Every question is built around a real observation shared by the iNaturalist community — meaning you're looking at actual wildlife, not stock illustrations.

Questions come in three difficulty levels: Easy focuses on obvious visual features like colour and shape; Medium requires comparing multiple features or knowing habitat; Hard demands precise identification detail that separates similar-looking species.

Where does the data come from?

All observations are sourced from iNaturalist, a community platform where naturalists share and verify wildlife sightings around the world.

We only use observations that meet two criteria:

• Research Grade — the iNaturalist community has confirmed the identification.
• Creative Commons licensed — the photographer has granted permission for use.

Images are loaded directly from iNaturalist's servers and are never stored locally. Full credit belongs to the original observers and photographers.

How are questions generated?

When a new species is encountered, we pass its name and photo to Google Gemini AI, which is instructed to write questions that can be answered by looking at the photograph — not from textbook knowledge alone. The questions are reviewed structurally for correctness before being saved to the database.

Who made this?

WingsNBeaks is a side project built with FastAPI, SQLite, PocketBase, and vanilla JavaScript. It runs on a small home server and is exposed to the internet via Cloudflare Tunnel. No cloud bills, no tracking beyond anonymous analytics, no ads.

Found a bug or have a feature idea? Get in touch.