A quiet Cardinal alights upon a branch on Slate, and the branch dips as the bird takes off again. Meanwhile, on TogetherGreen, a rare Whooping Crane pokes along the bottom of the screen. And at Woolrich, one of the fastest living creatures in the world, the Peregrine Falcon, soars on an updraft. This is Birding the Net, an innovative social media project launched by Audubon to encourage people to learn more about birds and view them differently when outside. Not only is Birding the Net technically and creatively adventurous, but it is also beautiful. (original artwork for Birding the Net, provided by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners)

Birding the Net is the brainchild of Jeff Goodby, co-founder of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. It was his idea to let birds loose all over the Internet and challenge people to go find them. Executing this vision well required a great deal of technical expertise – coding, social media, public relations, etc. But it would also require picking the right birds, and getting them right once picked. Audubon President David Yarnold made it clear from the beginning that it was vital for the project to be accurate with its facts and its representations.

The first trick was to come up with a good list of birds to work with. Picking 34 birds out of the 900 or so birds of North America was no easy task. We set out to come up with a list that included both rare and common birds, popular and unknown, countrywide and regional. That’s why we have something as rare as the Whooping Crane alongside the Western Gull. Essential in this selection process were Audubon Chief Scientist Gary Langham and Director of Bird Conservation Greg Butcher.

Then came the real challenge: bringing them to life. For that, the talented animators at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, as well as a cadre of animators at partners Hook, 14Four and The Mill. Matt Hoover, who does animation for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, said he started with photos and video before digitally modeling each bird in three dimensions. The big challenge came in making the birds move.

“I'd simply think about my own body physically moving like the bird I was animating (almost like getting into character for acting purposes),” Hoover says, “because when they walk they are essential bipedal, it's easy to mimic the movements, moving your legs and swinging your arms as if they were wings or that you had clumsy webbed feet.

“After refining initial animations, I'd then watch the rendered videos that I had created and compare against real video footage of the bird species in action. From there I simply tweaked the animations so that my digital proxy looked and acted as the real bird does, within reason! I only had about a week for each bird that I worked on from development to final animation in Flash. Some of the birds, like the Eagle and Seagull, were available as unrigged, stock models that needed a bit of TLC. My favorite personally built models, textures and animations are probably the Blue Footed Booby, the Peregrine Falcon, and the Atlantic Puffin. Usually teams of people model and animate things, but I took on this large task on my own. It was a very busy 12 weeks; however, it was a lot of fun and I have a lot of renewed interest in our feathered friends. They are amazing creatures with incredible diversity.”

As the animators were finishing birds, the Audubon folks were checking them for accuracy. “In the final push to get some of these out, there was some back and forth about what changes to prioritize,” said Langham. “At the end of the day, the animators did a great job of continuing to work on the animations and release the best ones first.”

Of course, the experts at Audubon understood that these animations were, in many senses, caricatures that didn't need to be completely accurate, but had to capture the essence of each species in shorthand. So, special attention was made to distinguishing features and movements.

At the same time, we were creating profiles on the Audubon website for each bird, so that people who wanted to know more about each species, so that people who wanted to learn more could access it quickly. We’ve been pleasantly surprised at the number of people going to these profiles and learning about the birds.

None of this would have been possible without the incredible work of the folks at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, who not only created the birds, but the entire Birding the Net space on Facebook and beyond. Truly amazing work.