Birds in Japanese: Names, Kanji, and Sounds

Bird in Japanese is tori [鳥]. The word looks simple until you open a zoo sign or a manga page and the same animal is sitting in katakana, as if it had just flown in from somewhere else.

Although bird names can be written with kanji, it is more common to write them in katakana, or sometimes hiragana. That habit shows up a lot with animal names in general.

If you already know the broader animal vocabulary in Japanese, this page is the bird shelf: English, Japanese writing, and romaji. The Shinkansen even borrowed a line from a kingfisher — that is how far a bird word can travel.

List of Birds in Japanese

To make searching easier, use Ctrl + F in the browser. Some English labels are everyday words; others name a specific species. Trust the Japanese column when the two do not line up one-to-one.

When a name is built on tori, the reading often becomes -dori, as in hiyodori. The Chinese-derived reading -chō shows up in words like hakuchō (swan). Wild bird as a category is yachō [野鳥]. And when you count them, Japanese uses 羽 [wa], the same character as feather: three birds is san-wa no tori.

Bird Sounds in Japanese

Birds do not bark. In Japanese they naku [鳴く]: they cry, call, or sing. The shapes below are the ones that show up in comics and kids’ books. For a wider map of sound words, there is a separate list of Japanese onomatopoeia.

• clucking — kokkotto naku [コッコッと鳴く]
• cock-a-doodle-doo — kokekokkō [コケコッコー]
• singing, warbling — saezuru [さえずる]
• cawing — kākā to naku [カーカーと鳴く]
• quacking — gāgā naku [ガーガー鳴く]
• to cry, to call — naku [鳴く]
• cheeping — pīpī naku [ピーピー鳴く]
• small-bird chirp — chunchun [チュンチュン]

A sparrow on a wire is suzume. A huge city crow is karasu. Once those two sit in your ear, the rest of the list stops looking like decoration.