Hello, World — Welcome to CootDB. I have lived in the United Kingdom for over thirteen years, yet until last December I could not have told you what a Great Crested Grebe is called in Polish. That is not as strange as it sounds. I grew up in Poland, where I never paid much attention to birds. It was only after joining my local RSPB group — a spontaneous late-year decision — that I began spending weekends at nature reserves, binoculars in hand, slowly learning to tell a Lapwing from a Redshank. My English bird vocabulary grew quickly. The Polish one remained almost empty. It bothered me in a small, nagging way. I would come home from a morning at the marsh, look up a species I had just seen, and find myself opening Wikipedia in one tab, a Polish ornithological catalogue in another, and a translation service in a third — only to find that they disagreed, or simply did not have the name at all. An unreasonable amount of effort for a one-line answer. So I built a tool. Just for myself, just to scratch the itch: a simple lookup that would show me a bird's name in English, Latin, and Polish side by side. It took a weekend. Then I discovered the IOC World Bird List — an authoritative, freely licensed dataset covering thousands of species across dozens of languages. Suddenly the project looked different. If I had this problem, surely others did too: Dutch birders in the UK, Spanish birders in France, anyone who straddles more than one language. The sensible thing was to make it public. And so here it is. CootDB is named after the Eurasian Coot — Fulica atra — one of the most common waterbirds in Europe and, frankly, an excellent bird. Unmistakable, widespread, and with a personality to match. There is nothing complicated here. Pick your languages, search for a bird, see the names side by side. No account required, no fuss. Happy birding. :–) –Mac