Bird Connections: the daily bird grouping puzzle

How to play

1. Press Play today's Connections. You see 16 bird names.
2. Tap four names you think share a theme. Tap a name again to drop it, or press Clear to start the selection over.
3. Press Submit. A correct group locks in at the top and shows its theme.
4. A wrong group costs one mistake. If three of your four were right, the game tells you that you are one away.
5. Find all four groups to win. Four mistakes ends the game.

What the colours mean

Each group has a colour that marks its difficulty: 🟨 yellow is the easiest, then 🟩 green, then 🟦 blue. 🟪 Purple is the hardest and often turns on a name, a sound or wordplay, not on what the bird looks like.

Scoring

A clean solve earns 15 bonus points. With one mistake it is 12, with two it is 10 and with three it is 8. Bonus points count towards the leaderboard once you are signed in. The Share button copies your grid of coloured squares to the clipboard, so you can post a result without giving away the answers.

Example puzzle

The four themes:

• 🟨 Garden visitors: Robin, Blackbird, Blue Tit, House Sparrow
• 🟩 UK owls: Tawny, Barn, Little, Long-eared
• 🟦 Cliff-nesting seabirds: Puffin, Gannet, Razorbill, Kittiwake
• 🟪 Birds named after their call: Cuckoo, Chiffchaff, Curlew, Hoopoe

In the real game the tiles are shuffled, so the groups are not lined up in columns like this.

Tips for solving Bird Connections

• Find the bird that fits two groups. A Curlew is a wader, a moorland breeder and a bird named after its call. Decide where it goes last.
• Do not submit the first four you see. If five names fit a theme, one belongs elsewhere. Work out which before you spend a mistake.
• Think beyond families. Themes in the bank include habitat (reedbed, heather moor, pine plantation), season (winter visitors, passage migrants), plumage (barred, streaked, spotted) and voice.
• Know your eponyms. Several puzzles use birds named after people or places: Cetti's Warbler, Montagu's Harrier, Dartford Warbler, Sandwich Tern.
• Check eye and bill colour. A Great Crested Grebe has red eyes. An Oystercatcher has a red bill. Details like these turn up as themes.
• Use "one away". It means three of your four are right. Swap a single tile, not the whole set.

When does the puzzle reset?

A new puzzle appears at midnight. For players in Britain that is midnight UK time: the game goes by the date on your device. Everyone gets the same puzzle on the same date. There is no archive, so a missed day is gone.