Historical bird plates

Every plate of five great nineteenth-century bird folios, identified to modern species. Each identification carries the IDs other tools join on: eBird, Wikidata, GBIF, Avibase and BirdNET. The plate images are cleaned and cut two ways.

Old plates name their birds the way their authors did, and many of those names now belong to other species. Gould's "Black-headed Gull" is today's Mediterranean Gull. This dataset matches each plate to the bird it actually shows, gives the reasoning, and is released CC0. 65 plates carry a printed name that eBird now gives to a different species.

Browse the plates: historical-bird-plates.wells.ee, every plate with its identification and reasoning, searchable by printed or modern name.

The plates also carry credit lines: the small engraved lines under the art that say who drew a plate, who put it on stone or engraved it, and who printed or coloured it. Where this copy shows them, they are read off the plate, given as engraved, and parsed into who they name and for what; 1,940 of the 2,027 Gould plates and all 435 Havell plates have at least one line read. By their credit lines, Gould's plates were drawn and put on stone by Elizabeth Gould (433 plates), Edward Lear (57), H. C. Richter (1,278), Joseph Wolf (78) and William Hart (153) as well as by Gould himself (1,768). Audubon's lines credit him with the drawing on 434 plates, and name as engravers Robert Havell Jr. (411), the firm R. Havell & Son (16) and W. H. Lizars (7); Robert Havell Sr. coloured 22 and printed 21.

The folios

Audubon, The Birds of America (Havell edition, 1827–38)

435 plates · 429 identified · browse all plates · tables · images

Credit lines: John James Audubon 434 · Robert Havell Jr. 415 · Robert Havell Sr. 22

Gould, The Birds of Europe (1832–37)

449 plates · 447 identified, 392 checked against the engraved caption · browse all plates · tables · images

Credit lines: John and Elizabeth Gould 356 · Edward Lear 56

Gould, The Birds of Australia and Supplement (1840–69)

681 plates · 676 identified, 660 checked · browse all plates · tables · images

Credit lines: John Gould 636 · H. C. Richter 560 · Elizabeth Gould 77

Gould, The Birds of Asia (1850–83)

530 plates · 530 identified, every caption read · browse all plates · tables · images

Credit lines: John Gould 488 · H. C. Richter 406 · William Hart 122

Gould, The Birds of Great Britain (1862–73)

367 plates · 367 identified, 366 checked against the engraved caption · browse all plates · tables · images

Credit lines: H. C. Richter 312 · John Gould 288 · Joseph Wolf 55

Get the data

• Tables: clone the repo, or read a CSV straight from GitHub, e.g. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wr/historical-bird-plates/main/gould-europe/species.csv. datapackage.json describes every column.

• Images: each folio has a release of cleaned full sheets and art crops, with a sha256 manifest. For example:

  gh release download gould-europe-v2 -R wr/historical-bird-plates -p 'crop-*'

• Cite: Riley, W. Historical bird plates: modern identifications. Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.22964828. See CITATION.cff.

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Reference

By the numbers

Folio	Plates	Plates identified	Caption-checked	Species	Rows: high / judged / medium / low / none	BirdNET-labelled	Wikidata-linked	Kansas disagreements
havell	435	429	–	445	489 / 8 / 0 / 0 / 6	472 / 497	497 / 497	–
gould-europe	449	447	392	447	446 / 14 / 3 / 0 / 2	431 / 463	463 / 463	54
gould-australia	681	676	660	587	668 / 7 / 3 / 4 / 0	496 / 677	676 / 677	107
gould-asia	530	530	530	464	521 / 12 / 0 / 0 / 0	383 / 533	533 / 533	208
gould-britain	367	367	366	338	365 / 4 / 0 / 0 / 0	358 / 369	369 / 369	74

The 18 open rows (medium, low and none) are the questions the sources haven't settled. Each one's reason asks what would decide it: the candidates, and what on the plate or in the text would tell them apart.

Names that now mean another bird

These plates are printed with an English name that eBird/Clements 2025 now gives to a different species. Look one up by its printed name and you get the wrong bird. python3 tools/misnamed.py regenerates the list.

65 plates

Audubon, The Birds of America

• 23: "Yellow-breasted Warbler" → Common Yellowthroat
• 50: "Swainson's Warbler" → Magnolia Warbler
• 199: "Little Owl" → Northern Saw-whet Owl
• 223: "Pied oyster-catcher" → American Oystercatcher
• 256: "Purple Heron" → Reddish Egret
• 314: "Black-headed Gull" → Laughing Gull
• 372: "Common Buzzard" → Swainson's Hawk
• 394: "Black-headed Siskin" → Hooded Siskin
• 399: "Mourning Warbler" → MacGillivray's Warbler

Gould, The Birds of Europe

• 20: "Lanner Falcon" → Saker Falcon
• 67: "Great Grey Shrike" → Iberian Gray Shrike
• 79: "Naumann's Thrush" → Dusky Thrush
• 173: "Yellow Bunting" → Yellowhammer
• 179: "Meadow Bunting" → Rock Bunting
• 217: "Azure-winged Magpie" → Iberian Magpie
• 311: "Semipalmated Sandpiper" → Willet
• 342: "Common Gallinule" → Eurasian Moorhen
• 378: "Black Scoter" → Common Scoter
• 409: "Little Cormorant" → Pygmy Cormorant
• 425: "Laughing Gull" → Black-headed Gull
• 427: "Black-headed Gull" → Mediterranean Gull
• 447: "Fork-tailed Storm Petrel" → Leach's Storm-Petrel

Gould, The Birds of Australia

• I.33: "Spotted Owl" → Tasmanian Boobook
• II.91: "Shining Flycatcher" → Satin Flycatcher
• III.21: "Banded Wren" → Splendid Fairywren
• IV.4: "Spotted Ground-Thrush" → Spotted Quail-thrush
• IV.7: "Mountain Thrush" → Bassian Thrush
• IV.24: "Long-billed Honey-eater" → New Holland Honeyeater
• IV.32: "Yellow-eared Honey-eater" → Lewin's Honeyeater
• IV.39: "Graceful Honey-eater" → Yellow-plumed Honeyeater
• IV.51: "White-throated Honey-eater" → Rufous-banded Honeyeater
• IV.67: "Obscure Honey-eater" → Dusky Myzomela
• IV.71: "Black-throated Honey-eater" → Black-chinned Honeyeater
• IV.92: "Pheasant Cuckoo" → Pheasant Coucal
• V.33: "Crimson-bellied Parrakeet" → Greater Bluebonnet
• V.62: "Little Green Pigeon" → Pacific Emerald Dove
• VI.46: "White Ibis" → Australian Ibis
• VII.51: "Cook's Petrel" → Gould's Petrel
• VII.70: "Pied Cormorant" → Little Pied Cormorant
• Supp.18: "White-tailed Robin" → Mangrove Robin
• Supp.56: "Little Cuckoo" → Little Bronze-Cuckoo

Gould, The Birds of Asia

• I.1: "Black Vulture" → Red-headed Vulture
• I.13: "Indian Scops Owl" → Oriental Scops-Owl
• I.46: "Blue-and-white Kingfisher" → White-rumped Kingfisher
• I.71: "Mountain Trogon" → Orange-breasted Trogon
• II.45: "Chestnut-bellied Nuthatch" → Indian Nuthatch
• II.48: "White-naped Tit" → Yellow-bellied Tit
• II.52: "Yellow-cheeked Tit" → Himalayan Black-lored Tit
• II.58: "Grey Tit" → Gray-crested Tit
• II.59: "Rufous-bellied Tit" → Rufous-vented Tit
• II.65: "Elegant Tit" → Black-throated Tit
• II.72: "Philippine Oriole" → Black-naped Oriole
• III.60: "Long-billed Wren" → Long-billed Wren-Babbler
• III.64: "White-naped Yuhina" → White-collared Yuhina
• IV.27: "White-tailed Stone-Chat" → Variable Wheatear
• IV.52: "Spotted Wren" → Spotted Elachura
• V.9: "Painted Bunting" → Chestnut-eared Bunting
• V.20: "Black-and-Yellow Grosbeak" → Spot-winged Grosbeak
• V.55: "White-winged Magpie" → Eurasian Magpie
• VI.2: "Blossom-headed Parrakeet" → Plum-headed Parakeet
• VI.4: "Bonaparte's Parrakeet" → Long-tailed Parakeet
• VI.5: "Grey-headed Parrakeet" → Nicobar Parakeet
• VI.6: "Nicobar Parrakeet" → Long-tailed Parakeet
• VI.40: "Rufous Piculet" → White-browed Piculet

Gould, The Birds of Great Britain

• II.71: "Melodious Warbler" → Icterine Warbler

Tables

Every folio folder has plates.csv, species.csv and credits.csv, and the root has artists.csv. Some folders also have ku-disagreements.csv and a sources/ folder holding the working record. datapackage.json (Frictionless Data) is the schema.

File	One row per	Key columns
plates.csv	plate	plate in the folio's own numbering (plus volume where a folio numbers per volume: Australia, Great Britain, Asia); printed title and Latin; BHL bhl_item, leaf, bhl_page; scan_url (the unaltered JPEG 2000); sheet_asset, crop_asset; imprint (the plate's credit lines, as engraved)
species.csv	plate × modern species	scientific, common, ebird_code, taxonomy (eBird/Clements 2025); wikidata, gbif, avibase; birdnet_label (BirdNET GLOBAL 6K V2.4, verbatim); form; figure; confidence; caption_checked; reason; sources
credits.csv	plate × name × role	plate (plus volume where the folio numbers per volume), name, role (drew, lithographed, engraved, retouched, printed, coloured), as_printed; generated from imprint by tools/credits.py
artists.csv (root)	person or firm on a credit line	name, kind, wikidata, note
ku-disagreements.csv	plate where the University of Kansas catalogue differs	KU's record and name, ours, and the kind of disagreement (error, crossed, typo, old name, pre-split, composite, …)

• confidence: high is certain; judged is a considered call, argued in reason; medium and low are open; none is not identified.
• caption_checked: yes only where someone read the engraved caption on the scan and checked the identification against it.
• form: what the plate's printed name stands for, measured against the row's species.
  • Blank: the species itself: its own name, its nominate race, or a synonym of either. Also blank when the author used the name for the whole species (his range or synonymy takes in the nominate's population), even if it is a race name today.
  • subspecies: the printed name is now a race other than the nominate, under its own name or as a synonym, or the author says his figured bird is such a race. Gould's Falco aesalon is F. columbarius aesalon.
  • variant: a colour morph, sex, age or seasonal plumage that the author named or figured as a species of its own, or an aberrant bird: Audubon's young warblers, the Gyrfalcon's white and dark morphs, Sabine's Snipe.
  • pre-split: the plate stands for a parent species since split, and nothing decides which daughter it shows: Audubon's Traill's Flycatcher (Havell 45), whose two rows give both daughters.
  • Races follow eBird/Clements 2025's groups, and otherwise the IOC World Bird List.
• Unresolved plates keep their rows, with an empty species and the reason, so the open questions are in the data.
• Taxonomy: names and codes follow eBird/Clements 2025. Where BirdNET's older taxonomy differs, birdnet_label keeps BirdNET's name. A species split since then is resolved by where the bird came from: Audubon's Barn Owl is the American Barn Owl; Gould's is the Western in Europe and Great Britain, and the Eastern in Australia (I.31) and Asia (I.17).

Credit lines

imprint gives a plate's credit lines as engraved: the left corner, then the centre, then the right corner, each top to bottom, joined with " | ". tools/credits.py reads them into credits.csv, one row per plate, name and role, with every name in artists.csv. A joint credit gives every name every role, because that is all the plate says: "J. Gould & H. C. Richter, del. et lith." credits both men with drawing and lithographing. Each folio's README says what the sources add.

• How they were read. Readers transcribed every line by eye from crops of the plate's corners, working from the image, not from the OCR draft. Each reading was then compared with the OCR draft word by word, and every disagreement was looked at again, on the crop or on the full-resolution scan (for Havell, the release sheet). Faint, cut or missed lines were read on the scan. The marks (stops, commas, colons and semicolons) were then checked plate by plate on the lines enlarged 4× (Great Britain: at least 2×), and at 8× where a mark was in doubt.
• As engraved: the words and their spelling (Asia III.22's "Waller"), capitals, & or "and", commas after names, whether a mark follows an abbreviation, and the stop at a line's end. A stop or comma is recorded only where a separate mark can be seen, enlarged to 8× if need be. On Havell, whether a mark after a word is a stop or a comma follows one measured test, against the same line's round stops: it is a comma if it has a visible tail, or if its bottom sits 0.10 of a capital's height or more below theirs, or if it is at least 1.5 times their height and taller than wide; anything else is a stop.
• Written by one convention, because at the scans' resolution these can't be read consistently:
  • Spacing: one space after each stop, comma, colon and semicolon, and none before; one space each side of &, but "&c." is one word. The words of a known wording take a space where they run together ("Drawnfrom" is written "Drawn from"), and so do "by" and "and" run into a capital ("byJ.", "andH.").
  • Initials: written "X. ", whatever mark, if any, follows the letter on the plate: "H. C. Richter", "J. & E. Gould". So are the letters of an honour: "F. R. S.". A comma between two honours ("F. R. S., F. L. S.") is recorded where it can be seen, like a comma after a name. The last letter of a Havell line's honours has nothing after it, so it keeps its mark as engraved: "F. L. S" on 22 plates, "F. L. S," on 87, 296 and 301, and "F. L. S,." on 283.
  • The mark after an abbreviation (del, delt, lith, lithog, Imp, Impt, Edwd, Edinr, Junr, Senr, Sen) is written as a stop, where the plate has a stop, comma, colon or semicolon.
• Not read: a line cut off at the sheet's edge or in the binding is read only if every letter can still be told, and left out where only the tops of its letters show. A faint line is read if it is whole and every word can be read. A printer's line whose wording is cut off ("Hullmandel & Walton", with "Imp." lost in the binding) is left out too, with its legible text in notes. A plate with no credit line read has an empty imprint and a note saying why, and a plate missing one line has a note saying which.
• One folio's inferences: where a name form stands for someone only by its folio's pattern, it is listed in FOLIO_NAMES in tools/credits.py with its reason, and the folio's README names the plates. Great Britain III.61 reads "Gould &", its initial cut off; it is credited to John Gould, since the folio postdates Elizabeth Gould's death and every other line of it that names a Gould reads J. Gould. A name no pattern settles is credited to no one, like Asia IV.26's "H. Gould".
• What isn't certain:
  • The marks. A faint stop at the threshold of visibility may have been missed, or kept where there is none. A line whose foot is cut off at the sheet's edge was read from what shows above the cut, so its stops are unknown. There are 20 such plates. The record note of each, in its folio's sources/imprints.csv, says the foot is cut, and that the line was read from the upper part or upper half of its letters (18) or that its stops or punctuation can't be read (Great Britain IV.21 and V.6).
  • Havell's stops and commas. The test above was measured on 349 marks: the mark after Audubon on 314 plates, and 35 marks of the right line where an earlier call rested on a mark's position or size, or a review named the plate. The gaps between honours were measured too. The test did not reach everything: 7 marks after Audubon could not be isolated and are kept as read (100, 120, 216, 223, 227, 287, 374; their notes say so); the separate small lines naming the father on 6, 8–10, 13–15 and 18–20 were not measured; and 142 of the 349 marks were measured against fewer than three of the line's stops, with the line's baseline standing in for the rest (their notes say "vs baseline", "vs 1 stop" or "vs 2 stops"). The right line's other commas rest on tails seen in the checks. The measurement's noise is about 0.06 of a capital's height, so a mark near the threshold is uncertain; the closest 86 lie within 0.02 of a capital's height of it, or within 0.1 of 1.5 times the stops' height. 21 commas rest on a visible tail alone, below the position threshold, and their notes say "tail visible". The record notes give each mark's offset. On 41 plates a line's capitals are under 15 px tall on the sheet, too small to tell a stop from a comma, so the choice was not judged and the readers' marks stand; their record notes say "stop or comma not judged (Ruling 35a)": 41, 121, 172–175, 177–181, 183, 185, 187–197, 199, 200, 226, 230, 231, 236, 246, 278, 283, 295, 300, 311, 326, 341, 386, 390 and 396.
  • Faint lines. A few credits rest on a faint but whole line, read word by word, such as these on Europe: on 25 the printer's line is broken, the middle of "Hullmandel" showing only as traces; on 33 both lines are doubled and blurred; on 102 both are very faint, "& on Stone by" broken and the C of "C. Hullmandel" only traces; and on 119 the J of the artists' line shows only as traces, and the C of the printer's as a small mark. The record notes in each folio's sources/imprints.csv say which lines were faint and what shows of them.
  • Inferences. A FOLIO_NAMES reading is inferred from its folio, not read. Asia IV.26's Gould, credited to no one, may be John Gould, the H an engraving slip like III.22's "Waller". Havell's bare "R. Havell" (351 plates) or "Robt. Havell" (34), credited to Robert Havell Jr., rests for the 58 before plate 106 on the dissolution of his partnership with his father in 1828 alone (see its README).
  • Two readings. On the Gould folios the words rest on two independent readings, the reader's and the OCR draft's. On Havell the OCR draft, matched to the known wordings, drops the dates, places, "Junr." and "Senr.", so it was no check, and every crop was looked at again instead. The marks rest on the reader's reading and one check, and Havell's stops and commas on the test as well.

Images

Each Gould release has two cuts of every plate leaf. havell-v2 has audubon.org's plates as published (165 excepted), plus crops with the lettering removed.

• sheet-…: the full sheet, stood upright, with the paper evened and cleared to white and the caption kept.
• crop-…: the art alone, with the caption and pencilled number cut away and a white margin added. Australia and Asia ship their crops as crops.zip.
• manifest.json, SHA256SUMS: sha256, size and plate for every file.

Every plates.csv row also links the unaltered BHL scan (scan_url), for anyone who wants the paper as it is.

Licence and credit

• Tables: original work, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No permission or attribution is needed; a citation is appreciated.
• Plates: public-domain works of the 1820s–80s. The cleaned images carry no new copyright and are marked Public Domain Mark 1.0.
• Gould scans: from the Smithsonian Libraries' copies, via the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Credit "Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, via the Biodiversity Heritage Library".
• Havell scans: from audubon.org. Credit "Courtesy of the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, Montgomery County Audubon Collection, and Zebra Publishing" (see havell/README.md).
• Names: eBird codes, Wikidata, GBIF and Avibase IDs, and BirdNET's label strings are used only as names to join on. BirdNET's labels file is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so it isn't included; the validator downloads it.

Validation

python3 tools/validate.py            # downloads the eBird taxonomy and BirdNET labels once, into .cache/
python3 tools/validate.py --offline  # checks structure only

The validator runs on every push. It checks:

• every column against datapackage.json;
• every ebird_code against the eBird taxonomy the row names, including that the code's scientific name matches;
• every birdnet_label, verbatim, against BirdNET's labels;
• that every credits.csv is what tools/credits.py writes from imprint, and every name is in artists.csv;
• that a plate with an empty imprint has a note saying why;
• that every imprint is written by the conventions: tools/imprints.py's normalise would not change it;
• that every ID is well formed.

tools/quickstatements.py FOLIO writes a QuickStatements batch that creates one Wikidata item per plate: instance of; part of the work, with its plate number; creators and printer from the credit line, each referenced to the plate's BHL page (for Havell, its release sheet) and quoting the line; title; BHL page ID; and depicts, referenced to this dataset. A plate with no credit line read gets no creator, and a name with no Wikidata item gets no statement: the printers Walter, T. Walter and Walter & Cohn have none, so the plates they print (all of Great Britain's that name a printer, most of Asia's and 32 of the Australia Supplement's) get no printed by; nor has the firm R. Havell & Son, so the 16 Havell plates it engraved, printed and coloured get no statement for it. It skips plates Wikidata already has. --fix-creators writes a batch that corrects the plate items this dataset already made, those the maintainer's Wikidata account created: it adds each artist and the printer the credit line names, and removes an unreferenced creator: John Gould (or Audubon) that the line doesn't name. Items whose plate has no artist's line read are left as they are, and so are items someone else made. Each edit to an existing item counts on its own, so split this batch with --chunk 25.

The site

site/ is the Astro site at historical-bird-plates.wells.ee. GitHub Actions rebuilds and deploys it on every push to main that touches the tables or the site.

python3 tools/site_data.py               # the tables and the eBird taxonomy, joined into site/src/data/plates.json
python3 tools/site_images.py fetch       # the published WebP images, into site/public/img/
cd site && npm ci && npm run dev         # serve it at localhost:4321/historical-bird-plates/

python3 tools/site_images.py build remakes the images and site/src/data/images.json from the folio releases; it needs Pillow, which fetch doesn't. A new set is published as a new site-images-vN release.

Contributing

• Fix a plate: open a pull request to that folio's species.csv, with the evidence in reason and sources. The best evidence is the plate itself: the caption, the figure, the bird.
• Fix a credit line: correct imprint in that folio's plates.csv, as engraved and by the conventions under Credit lines, and run python3 tools/credits.py. A new wording or name must be added to the tables in tools/credits.py first, and a new person or firm to artists.csv.
• Change identifications in bulk: write the decisions to a CSV (one row per figure: book, volume, plate, figure, scientific, form, confidence, caption_checked, reason, sources) and run python3 tools/identify.py DECISIONS.csv. It replaces those plates' rows and fills the names and IDs from scientific. A species already in the dataset takes its reviewed IDs; a new one gets them by the rule in the script. Every decision is logged to the folio's sources/decisions.csv. Add --dry-run to see the changes first. python3 tools/stats.py prints the numbers table above.
• Add a folio: add a new folder with the same tables and a README.md. The README covers the edition and the copy scanned, how the plates were found, how the names were checked, and the traps. Add its tables to datapackage.json, then run the validator.

Open questions

These 18 rows are what's left. Each is a mystery bird, a hybrid, or two candidates the sources haven't separated. If you can settle one, from the plate, Gould's or Audubon's text, a specimen or the literature, open an issue or a pull request with the evidence. The plate number links to the scan. python3 tools/gaps.py regenerates this table.

Book	Plate	Printed name	Leaning to	Status	What would settle it
Audubon, America	11	Bird of Washington	–	not identified	Audubon's eagle, which he took for a new species. Most authorities take it for a large immature Bald Eagle; no specimen survives to settle it.
Audubon, America	55	Cuvier's Kinglet	–	not identified	Known only from the one bird Audubon shot in Pennsylvania in 1812. An aberrant kinglet or a hybrid has been suggested; no specimen survives to settle it.
Audubon, America	60	Carbonated Warbler	–	not identified	Known only from the two birds Audubon shot in Kentucky in 1811, and no specimen survives. Immature or aberrant birds of a known warbler, or hybrids, have been suggested.
Audubon, America	164	Tawny Thrush	–	not identified	Traditionally the Veery, but Halley (2018) disputes it. Which Catharus thrush does the figure show?
Audubon, America	184	Mango Hummingbird	–	not identified	Audubon's Trochilus mango, a mango hummingbird of the Caribbean or Central America. Which species the figures show is disputed.
Audubon, America	338	Bemaculated Duck	–	not identified	A hybrid duck, not a species: Audubon's "Bemaculated Duck". Its parent species could still be named from the plate.
Gould, Europe	132	Yellow Willow Wren	Willow Warbler	leaning	Willow Warbler in yellow first-autumn dress, or a yellow Chiffchaff? It is a Phylloscopus, not a Hippolais: slender bill, long yellow supercilium. Pale legs and the long brow say Willow Warbler. Temminck's figures of a wing as short as the Chiffchaff's point the other way. Primary projection and leg colour on Temminck's specimen would decide. The plate is in the copy: leaf 344, engraved 'Yellow Willow Wren. Sylvia Icterina (Vieill.)', pencilled 133.
Gould, Europe	249	Hybrid Grouse	–	not identified	Tetrao hybridus is the Rackelhahn, a hybrid Western Capercaillie x Black Grouse, as Gould himself says. No single species to name.
Gould, Europe	348	Bean Goose	Tundra Bean-Goose	leaning	Tundra or Taiga Bean Goose? Bill shape decides. The figure's bill is short, deep and mostly black with a narrow pink band behind the nail, and Gould stresses the 'diminutive bill', which says Tundra (rossicus). A Taiga bird has a long slender bill with more orange. The pink band and pinkish-orange legs also need a Pink-footed Goose ruled out; it was not separated in Britain until 1839.
Gould, Europe	363	Bimaculated Teal	–	not identified	Gould's Bimaculated Teal is the Vigors pair taken in an English decoy in 1812, the British 'Bimaculated Duck', a hybrid (Teal x Mallard or Teal x Wigeon), not Pallas's Baikal Teal; Salvadori lists the plate among the Common Teal's hybrids. The male's green head with two brown blotches, black-spotted chestnut breast and grey vermiculated flanks have nothing of the Baikal Teal's face pattern. No single species to name.
Gould, Europe	444	Dusky Shearwater	Barolo Shearwater	leaning	Which small black-and-white shearwater? The figure is small and grey-brown above, with white around the eye and white underparts. That fits Barolo Shearwater, the E Atlantic bird nearest Gould's 'Mediterranean and African' range. Salvin cites the plate under P. obscurus, which included Audubon's (now Sargasso). The undertail-covert colour decides: white in Barolo, dark in Sargasso.
Gould, Australia	V.13	Baudin’s Cockatoo	–	low	Baudin's or Carnaby's Black-Cockatoo? The length of the upper mandible decides: Baudin's is long, narrow and projects well past the lower, Carnaby's is short and broad. The figure's head is turned and the bill foreshortened. Gould's name is Lear's baudinii, but his Swan River birds 'mainly subsist' on Banksia, shown on the plate, which is Carnaby's food.
Gould, Australia	V.30	Fiery Parrakeet	–	low	Is ignitus an aberrant red Eastern Rosella or an Eastern x Crimson hybrid? Leadbeater's single Moreton Bay bird (ex-ZSL, now NHMUK) would decide. The figure has white cheeks (Eastern), but its red rump, wholly red underparts and white wing bands fit neither species.
Gould, Australia	VI.2	Kiwi-kiwi	–	low	North Island Brown Kiwi or Southern Brown Kiwi (tokoeka)? The two skins figured were given to the Zoological Society by the New Zealand Company, without locality. The plate's soft brown streaked birds could be either. Where the skins came from would decide: Wellington or New Plymouth means A. mantelli, Nelson or the south A. australis.
Gould, Australia	VI.59	Sombre Egret	Western Reef-Heron	leaning	Gould's single Sombre Egret is drawn as a dark Western Reef-Heron, not a Pacific Reef-Heron (long black tarsi with yellow toes, a slender yellow bill, long plumes), and in his Handbook (1865) he synonymises pannosus with Sykes's Ardea asha and gives its tarsus as about 4 1/2 inches, against under 3 1/2 in the reef heron. But the skin came 'from the neighbourhood of Port Stephens' with no note, far outside the Western Reef-Heron's range, and only the specimen, if it survives, would decide.
Gould, Australia	VII.21	Skua Gull	Brown Skua	leaning	Brown Skua or Great Skua? The figure is uniformly dark chocolate with a white primary flash and none of the Great Skua's rufous and pale streaking, and Gould wrote of Southern Ocean and Derwent birds, which he found darker. His name and synonymy are the Great Skua's and he names no specimen. The figured skin's origin would decide.
Gould, Australia	VII.42	Yellow-billed Albatros	Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross	leaning	Atlantic or Indian Yellow-nosed Albatross? The heads on the plate are washed blue-grey, which says Atlantic. Gould's text (head snow-white, grey only near the eye) and his Australian records say Indian. The base of the yellow culmen stripe would decide (broad and rounded in Atlantic, narrow and pointed in Indian), but it is foreshortened here. Gould first met the bird at 30°S 20°W and names no specimen.
Gould, Australia	VII.83	Crested Penguin	–	low	Eastern or Moseley's Rockhopper? Gunn's single bird washed up on the north coast of Tasmania. Crest length and the bare gape would decide: Moseley's has long, dense plumes, Eastern a narrower brow and conspicuous pink gape skin. The plate shows moderate plumes and no gape skin. Gould names Amsterdam, St Paul and Tristan (Moseley's), from Latham, not from his bird. Western Rockhopper (South America) is the unlikely one.

Acknowledgements

• A reader of the r/birding announcement: pointed out that many plates published under Gould's name were drawn by others, Elizabeth Gould first among them, and should be credited. The credit lines in plates.csv and credits.csv are the answer.
• Nathan Buchar's audubon-bird-plates: the Havell plate list (the titles and image links in havell/plates.csv) comes from it, and it's the other public mirror of Audubon's plates.
• The Biodiversity Heritage Library and Smithsonian Libraries and Archives: they scanned Gould's Birds of Europe, Australia, Great Britain and Asia and publish them openly.
• The University of Kansas Spencer Library: its Gould catalogue was the cross-check for the Gould identifications.
• Wikimedia Commons, the University of Pittsburgh's Darlington Library and the New-York Historical Society: their catalogues settled the hard Havell plates.

Provenance

This dataset was made for Featherframe, an e-paper frame that shows the birds a BirdNET station hears as plates from these folios. Featherframe's server/scripts/export_dataset.py first exported its folio files here. Since then this repo is where the identifications are kept and corrected, and Featherframe checks its pins against it. This repo is the public record of every plate; Featherframe uses only the plates it needs.