Almost nothing in this catalogue was recorded on a bird. Licence registers exist for dogs, patchily for cats, and effectively not at all for parrots, cockatiels or budgerigars. A page ranking bird names from this data would be inventing the data. What the registers can honestly do is narrower and still useful: show which names have already proved they work on more than one kind of animal.
Why cross-species names are the right list here
4,669 names in this catalogue are recorded on both cats and dogs. A name two species already carry is a name that does not depend on the animal being large, or loud, or four-legged — and that is the closest this data gets to a name that will suit a bird.
Short matters more for a bird than for a dog
1,080 of this list is four letters or fewer and 926 is a single syllable. For a dog, brevity is about carrying across a field. For a bird that answers back it is about what can be reproduced: a short name with a hard consonant is a shape a parrot can actually return to you.
That last point is not something these registers measured, and this page will not dress it up as a finding. It is the reason the list is worth sorting the way it is sorted, and you should weigh it yourself.
Expect the gender column to be empty
1,647 of the list measure female and 1,964 male, but sex is frequently unknown in a bird and goes unrecorded in these registers regardless. Read the gender filter as a description of how a name has been used elsewhere, not as advice about your bird.
Are there real bird name statistics?
Not in open licence data, no. Councils register dogs and sometimes cats; birds are almost never in those files, which is why this page shows cross-species names instead of pretending to rank bird names by popularity.
What makes a good name for a talking bird?
Short, with a hard consonant in it — 1,080 of the list above is four letters or fewer. This is reasoning about sound rather than a measured result, and the registers cannot confirm it.
Can I use dog and cat names for a bird?
That is exactly what this list is: 4,669 names already recorded on both cats and dogs, which is the best available evidence that a name is not species-specific.
Every count on this site is a tally of real registrations: pet licences and shelter intakes published as open data by New York, Seattle, Austin, Montgomery County, Cambridge, Zurich, Basel and four Australian councils. Popularity here is the average share a name holds across those registers, so a name common in a small city is not buried by one common in a large one. Five of the eleven registers are North American and they supply 86% of the records, so read the ordering as naming in those places rather than worldwide. Browse the whole catalogue or read how the data is put together.