Bird Coloring Pages

These bird coloring pages are drawn as real species you could point at through a window, each one in the place it actually lives. A robin stands square on its thin legs with its round breast drawn in rows of soft feathers. A blue tit clings under a seed ball hung from a bare branch. A wren has built its nest inside a dented kettle on a shed shelf, a magpie carries a teaspoon up to a nest already studded with buttons, and a crow holds a walnut on a fence post above plowed fields. Two cardinals share a bird table in the snow, a blue jay lines up acorns along a fence rail, and a crowd of sparrows splashes in a stone bird bath.

Water brings the bigger birds. A kingfisher dives head first into a stream while another waits on a mooring chain by a canal. A swan arches its wings on the river and a second sits on a mound of reeds with her eggs showing. There is a heron with a frog at its feet, a pelican with a fish in its pouch on a harbor post, geese leading their goslings along a towpath, and flamingos, alone and in a whole wading flock.

Then the birds from further away: a barn owl gliding over a hay meadow and a tawny owl looking straight out of the page, a peacock with its tail hanging down a garden wall and a peahen walking her chicks past a bench, a scarlet macaw in profile, a cockatoo on a wicker chair, a hummingbird at trumpet flowers and two more at a porch feeder, an eagle braking onto a crag and another at its cliff nest, an ostrich with chicks at its heels, and a penguin colony guarding a fluffy chick.

A bird alone, or a bird in its habitat

The pages split two ways, and it is worth choosing on purpose. Some are portraits: the robin, the tawny owl, the macaw, a single bird large enough that the feathers themselves become the work. The rest are scenes, where the bird is one part of a place, and the place gives a child something to talk about while coloring: why the wren picked a kettle, what the magpie is collecting, where the swallow is taking its beakful of mud.

A single bird on open ground is a few large shapes and colors quickly, which the Quick to color button above the grid keeps. These open it:

• A flamingo bending down to sift the shallows
• A blue tit clinging to a seed ball in the garden
• A tawny owl portrait with wide round eyes

Lots of detail keeps the other end, where plants fill the page around the bird: leaves, reeds, vines and twigs are each a separate small shape.

• A hummingbird sipping from trumpet flowers
• A budgie on a ring swing in a domed cage
• Two macaws on a jungle vine

Why a blue jay is not really blue

Here is a fact that changes how you color. Blue jays have no blue pigment. Their feathers are brown inside, and the blue comes from the way tiny structures in the feather scatter light. Crush a blue jay feather or hold it with the light behind it, and it turns dull brown. The same trick makes the kingfisher's back and the peacock's tail shimmer. On paper, that means blue birds look best built up in two or three layers, a light blue first and a deeper one pressed only along the edges of each feather, with a line of bare paper left at the tip so the feather catches the light.

Flamingos, on the other hand, are pink because of what they eat. The color comes from pigments in the algae and tiny shrimp they sift out of the water with their heads upside down, which is exactly what the single flamingo is doing. Chicks hatch gray and turn pink over a couple of years, so a flock can honestly be colored in several shades from pale salmon to deep coral.

A few more that are easy to get right. A male cardinal is red all over with a black mask; the female is warm tan with red on her crest, wings and tail, so the pair at the bird table can be one of each. A goldfinch here is the European kind, with a red face, a black and white head and a bright yellow bar across each wing. A magpie is not plain black and white: in sunlight its black feathers flash blue green, and a touch of those colors along the wing and tail makes it look alive. And a European robin is orange from the breast up over the face, while the American robin is a larger thrush with a brick red breast and a dark head. The drawing works for either, so pick the robin from your own side of the ocean.

Feathers, a stroke at a time

The trick with any feather is to color in the direction it grows, from the body out toward the tip. On the owl pages that means strokes that fan out from the eyes across the face disc, and small curved strokes down the chest. On a swan the scalloped wing feathers take a pale gray or cream shadow along one edge of each scallop and nothing else, because a white bird colored white only disappears into the paper.

Owls are worth a word of their own. A barn owl's heart shaped face is a dish of stiff feathers that funnels sound toward its ears, so leave it pale and let the dark eyes do the work. A tawny owl is the opposite: brown and russet all over, barred and streaked, a good page for practicing several browns side by side.

Birds for the youngest

For a child of four or five, go for the round birds with little around them. The robin, the tawny owl looking straight out of the page, the flamingo bending to the water and the blue tit under its seed ball are all big friendly shapes, and the penguin chick between its parents' feet is a small step up. The duck coloring pages sit well next to them, and ducklings in a row are an easy first page for a small hand.

A garden bird checklist on the fridge

Colored pages make a good bird watching record. Print the garden birds, pin them near a window, and color each one only once someone in the house has actually seen it outside. The feeder birds come quickly in winter, the swallow in spring, and the rest become a reason to look up. Every February the Great Backyard Bird Count asks anyone, anywhere, to count the birds they see for a few days and report them, and a colored checklist is a gentle way into it for a child.

The flying birds also cut out cleanly. The barn owl, the eagle landing and the diving kingfisher, colored on both sides and hung on thread from a coat hanger, make a mobile that turns in the draft from a door. Add a few butterfly coloring pages to fill the gaps. Press Add to pack under each drawing you want and print the selection as one PDF; the pack stays in your browser while you move between collections, so the animal coloring pages or a spring set of flower coloring pages can join the same print.

The sheets are free printable PDFs at 300 dpi, with no watermark and no account. They are A4: print at actual size on A4, or choose "fit to page" on US Letter so nothing is cut off. The printing guide covers paper and settings.