Bonus cards
You see two bonus cards at setup and keep one. That card is worth roughly 5 points ignored and 8 to 13 built toward, which at two players is often the whole margin.
Better framing than “which card is best”: strong players end the game holding about 2.2 bonus cards, scoring 10 to 12 points combined. Birds in the deck hand out more of them, and a card drawn in round 3 gets chosen against a board you can already see. That is the target, not 5 points from one blind pick.
Difficulty is not the differentiator
Section titled “Difficulty is not the differentiator”Take the percentage printed on each card, the share of the 170-card deck that qualifies, and combine it with how many birds the top tier needs. The resulting “how many cards must I see” index lands between 17 and 22 for almost every threshold card. Forester and Fishery Manager and Cartographer are about equally hard. So difficulty tells you nothing. Two other things do.
Ceiling. Every threshold card caps out at 6, 7 or 8 points:
| Top tier | Cards |
|---|---|
| 8 points | Fishery Manager (4 fish eaters), Prairie Manager (4 grassland-only), Forester (5 forest-only) |
| 7 points | Anatomist, Cartographer, Viticulturalist, Photographer, Wetland Scientist, the four nest builders, Bird Feeder, Visionary Leader |
| 6 points | Large Bird Specialist, Passerine Specialist, Backyard Birder, Oologist |
The uncapped “2 points per bird” family has no ceiling at all: Falconer (predator powers, 13% of the deck), Rodentologist (15%), Bird Counter (tucking powers, 15%), Omnivore Expert (wild in the cost, 17%), Historian (11%) and Food Web Expert (invertebrate-only costs, 9%). Six qualifying birds on any of those is 12 points, more than any threshold card can pay. The trade: build for them or they quietly pay 3 or 4.
Overlap. This is the whole game. Fish eaters are strong wetland birds you would play anyway, so Fishery Manager is close to free. Birds worth under 4 points are birds you would rather not play, so Backyard Birder charges you real points to collect it.
Pick the card whose birds you were already going to want. A card you build toward pays 8 to 13. The same card ignored pays 3 to 5.
Let it steer, do not let it drive
Section titled “Let it steer, do not let it drive”The bonus card is a tiebreaker with a very long memory. Read it before you decide which birds to keep at setup, then let it break every close call after that: two roughly equal birds in the tray, take the qualifying one.
What it should not do is choose your engine. A tableau built to satisfy a 7-point card while your rows stay shallow loses by more than 7.
- Commit by the end of round 2 or not at all. A threshold card needs 4 to 8 specific birds and you will only play about 10 all game.
- Stuck between two bad cards? Take the wider pool and price it at 3 points, not 8. A reliable 3 beats a 12-point ceiling you miss.
- Wingspan-measurement cards are riskiest (Passerine Specialist, Large Bird Specialist), because you cannot see a bird’s wingspan until you have drawn it.
- Bonus cards are the best catch-up mechanism in the game, because they score off the board you already own. A mid-game pivot can find 6 to 8 points without touching your engine.
- Redrawing is a real strategy. Twelve core birds draw two new bonus cards and keep one as a when-played power. California Condor does it for zero food.
The three named traps
Section titled “The three named traps”F Visionary Leader. Points for bird cards in your hand at game end: 4 points for 5 to 7 cards, 7 points for 8 or more. The average player finishes with 1.7 cards in hand. Holding eight means you drew heavily and played little, and hoarding cards is the losing pattern this guide keeps naming.
F Backyard Birder. 6 points for seven birds worth under 4 points each. Bird cards are about 45% of a typical final score, so deliberately filling your mat with low-value birds to collect 6 bonus points is usually a net loss of 10 or more.
D Bird Feeder. 44% of the deck eats seed, which looks like the most generous condition in the set. The top tier needs 8 seed eaters out of a board that will hold about 10 birds. The big pool disguises the most restrictive threshold on any card.
The easy keeps
Section titled “The easy keeps”If you are laying eggs anyway, Oologist pays 3 points for 7 or 8 birds carrying at least one egg and 6 for 9 or more, and nearly every bird can qualify. Ecologist pays 2 per bird in your emptiest habitat, uncapped, which is 4 to 6 points for not abandoning a row. Neither asks you to change your plan, which is exactly what makes them good.