Bird life

Birds that live in your world instead of just flying around it. Thirteen species settle in the vanilla biomes that suit them, sing with calls cut from real field recordings, raise families, leave when it turns cold and come back when it warms up.

No new biomes, no new ores, no magic seeds. Everything they eat and use is already in Minecraft.

The species

House Sparrow, European Robin, Northern Cardinal, Blue Jay, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Toucan, Carrion Crow, Pigeon, Herring Gull, Long-eared Owl, Bald Eagle, Mallard, Snow Bunting.

Each one has its own climate, habitat, diet and temperament:

• Sparrows keep to farms in flocks, pigeons spend the day on the village square, gulls hang around shipwrecks, owls and crows haunt witch huts and mansions.
• Blue jays bury acorns and forget some, so oaks grow. Robins spread berry bushes. Toucans swallow fruit whole and plant jungle trees far away.
• Gulls snatch cod and salmon from the water. Owls hunt bats at night. Eagles take ducks, gulls and fish.
• Jays, crows and gulls gang up on owls and eagles. Cardinals pick fights with their own reflection in glass during the nesting season.
• Sparrows and cardinals sing along to a jukebox.

A whole life

Birds forage, bathe, preen, sunbathe, sing, flock, defend their ground and go to roost at dusk. In the nesting season they court, feed their mate, build a nest (a woven cup, a ground scrape, a platform of sticks or a hollow), sit on the eggs and feed the chicks until they fledge. Foxes raid nests. Ducks and snow buntings fake a broken wing to lead you away. Birds grow old, and wild ones eventually die of age.

Occasionally you will meet a rare pale or dark morph, about one bird in sixty.

Migration by the moon

The moon sets the year: a full moon brings the nesting season, a dark moon brings cold. Migratory species leave in flocks when the weather stops suiting them and return later; residents fluff up and sit it out. If you play with Serene Seasons (Fabric or Forge) or Fabric Seasons, the birds follow the season instead. Neither is required.

Trust, earned by hand

Every bird keeps a trust score from 0 to 100 for one person. You can see it in the Field Guide when you use the book on the bird.

• Wild (0-24) and Curious (25-59): it is still getting to know you.
• Trusting (60-99): it starts bringing you gifts (see below).
• Tamed (100): it is yours. It rides on your shoulder, answers the whistle, and sits or stands when told.

How to win a bird over

• Feed it by hand. Right-click it with food it eats. Its favourite food gives +8 trust, any other food it eats gives +5, and a chick gets double. It takes one bite every 5 seconds; offer more and it is simply full. About 13 favourite treats tame a bird.
• Keep a feeder. Every time a bird eats from a feeder you placed, while you are within 32 blocks, it gains +2.
• Throw it food. A bird that eats food you threw on the ground gains +2.
• Sit with it. Crouch quietly within 8 blocks of a bird that already knows you: +1 every 10 seconds.
• Golden apple. Tames a bird at once.
• Raise it yourself. A chick that hatches from an egg you placed in a nest is yours from the start. Ducklings with no mother around follow the first person they see.

Species with their own rules

• Crow: a gold nugget gives +20.
• Long-eared Owl: takes food from your hand only at night.
• Bald Eagle: accepts only raw rabbit, +15 each.
• Herring Gull: will trust you and bring gifts, but never becomes tame, not even with a golden apple.

How trust is lost

• Hit a bird and it loses 30 trust and remembers you.
• Take eggs from a nest and every bird of that species within 12 blocks loses 15.
• A bird bonds with one person. If someone else feeds it, they first have to wear that bond down.

Once tamed, each species helps in its own way while it rides on your shoulder:

• Robin: you dig faster. Cardinal: you hit harder. Hummingbird: you move faster.
• Blue Jay: raises the alarm and shows nearby monsters through walls.
• Owl: you see in the dark. Crow: brings luck.
• Toucan: slows your fall. Snow Bunting: you move faster in the cold.
• Sparrow: wild birds let you come closer.

The Bird Whistle calls your birds to you, or tells them all to sit or stand. A tame eagle brings back rabbits.

Gifts

A bird that trusts you, or is tamed, now and then leaves a small present at your feet: roughly every 5 to 12 minutes, as long as you are within 16 blocks and it is not a chick or told to sit. Every gift is an ordinary Minecraft item that the bird would really leave about.

A thriving bird has eaten its fill and had at least 3 different foods in the last day. It can also bring the rare gifts, and sometimes one item more.

Bird	Favourite food	Gifts	Rare gifts (thriving bird)
House Sparrow	wheat, wheat seeds	feathers, wheat seeds, string, bone meal	pumpkin seeds
European Robin	sweet berries, glow berries	feathers, moss carpet, sweet berries, bone meal	glow berries
Northern Cardinal	sunflower, melon, pumpkin and wheat seeds	feathers, sticks, vines, bone meal	sunflower
Blue Jay	pumpkin seeds, melon seeds, sunflower	feathers, oak saplings, sticks, bone meal	dark oak sapling
Hummingbird	any flower	string, bone meal	torchflower seeds, pitcher pod
Toucan	melon slice, apple, sweet and glow berries	cocoa beans, jungle saplings, melon seeds, feathers	bamboo
Carrion Crow	raw meat, rotten flesh, eggs	feathers, string, flint, iron nuggets	gold nugget, emerald
Pigeon	wheat, wheat seeds	bone meal, feathers, wheat seeds	gunpowder
Herring Gull	cod, salmon, tropical fish	kelp, bone meal, feathers	nautilus shell
Long-eared Owl	raw rabbit, raw chicken, raw pigeon	bones, rabbit hide, feathers	rabbit's foot
Bald Eagle	raw rabbit	bones, feathers, rabbit hide	rabbit's foot
Mallard	kelp, seagrass, lily pad, wheat, wheat seeds	feathers, seagrass, lily pads	clay ball
Snow Bunting	wheat, beetroot and torchflower seeds	feathers, wheat seeds, beetroot seeds	rabbit hide

Things to build

• Bird Feeder: fill it with ordinary food (seeds, wheat, berries, apples, meat, fish, flowers). What you put in decides who comes.
• Birdhouse: small birds shelter inside at night and in hard frost.
• Bird Nest: place eggs you found; a chick from your egg is yours from the start.
• Scarecrow: keeps crows off your crops. Shake it to scare birds away.

Bird watching

Hold a spyglass on a bird for a moment to add it to your life list. The Field Guide shows who lives where you stand, how the moon stands for them, where to look for their nests, and for any bird you use it on: its sex, age, trust and habits. Through the spyglass you also see what a bird is doing right now. Ten advancements, from your first bird to the whole book.

Food

Raw and roast duck, pigeon and gull, bird eggs and fried eggs, cooked in a furnace, smoker or on a campfire.

Game rules

• birdsStarve: birds starve without food.
• birdsDieOfAge: wild birds die of old age.
• birdsPerPlayer: how many birds are kept around each player.

Languages

English, Russian, Ukrainian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified).

Requirements

Minecraft 1.21.1 and Java 21, plus one of:

• Fabric: Fabric Loader and Fabric API. Use the birdlife-fabric-1.21.1-<version>.jar file.
• Forge: Forge 52 or newer. Use the birdlife-forge-1.21.1-<version>.jar file.

Install on both the client and the server.

Credits

Bird calls are cut from field recordings on xeno-canto and Wikimedia Commons, most under CC BY-SA. Every recording and its author is listed in CREDITS.md, which also ships inside the jar. The code and the rest of the mod are under the MIT license.