Feeder Watch Game

Kim's game is a classic memory drill: look at a tray of objects, then say what was there. Here the objects come and go by themselves. Birds land at a feeder in the snow for a moment and fly off, and once the feeder is empty you say which kinds came and how many of each. It echoes Project FeederWatch, the winter count that people send in from their own windows.

How to play

1. Watch the feeder. Birds land for a moment and fly off.
2. When the feeder is empty, say which kinds came and how many of each. Tap a bird to add one, and tap its minus to take one away.
3. Press CHECK. A miss shows the true count.
4. Rounds grow from three birds of two kinds to twelve birds of six, and the visits get shorter. A game is 8 rounds.

There are two ways to count, picked on the start screen, each with its own high scores. EVERY LANDING counts each bird that lands, and no bird comes back, so every landing is a new bird. FEEDERWATCH counts as Project FeederWatch does: for each kind, the most seen at one time, and a bird may come back. Two chickadees together, then one alone, then three together is a count of three. On a keyboard, press 1 to 8 to add a bird, Shift with the number to take one away, and Enter to check. Escape or Space pauses.

Scoring

• Each kind that came and was counted scores 50 points.
• An exact count of that kind scores 50 more.
• A kind counted that never came costs 50.
• A round never scores less than nothing.

Your five best scores in each mode are saved in this browser. In practice, the rounds go on past the eighth until you end the game from the pause screen, and practice games are not saved.

The birds

Eight North American birds visit the feeder. Each lands where it usually feeds: the junco and the dove on the snow below the feeder, the nuthatch head down on the pole, and the woodpecker on the tree's trunk.

• Black-capped Chickadee
• Northern Cardinal
• Dark-eyed Junco
• White-breasted Nuthatch
• Blue Jay
• House Finch
• Downy Woodpecker
• Mourning Dove

To remember more than you can hold at a glance, link each bird to its place as it lands, or tell a short story as they come, a habit the method of loci builds.

Try Vault Heist, another Kim's game, or our other free memory games.