Birds in Farsi: 12 Names From Owl to Vulture

Short answer: Owl in Farsi is joghd, eagle is oqâb, and kargas is the vulture. The general word for bird is parande. Crow is kalâgh, sparrow is gonjeshk and pigeon is kabutar. The tables below give 12 birds, the wild ones and the ones people keep or cook, with script and finglish.

Bird names are a small word set, and a quick win. Twelve words and you can name most of what flies past you or ends up on the table.

I've split them in two: wild birds, and the ones people keep at home or put on the table. One of them, morgh, sits in both worlds.

Wild Birds in Farsi

Kargas here is the vulture itself; for its insult sense and the rest of the bird slang, see our slang survival kit.

Birds People Keep and Eat

For land animals, pets and farm animals, see Persian animal names.

Morgh: the bird on your plate and the bird in the poem

In modern everyday speech, morgh is chicken, the hen and the food. Morgh-e sorkh-karde is fried chicken. In older poetic Persian, the same word means any bird at all.

So a child can read Attar at school, meet morgh as a bird, and then eat morgh for dinner that night without thinking twice. Persian keeps both layers alive and trusts you to read the context.

Calling someone a bird

Not every bird word is an insult. Our animal names post notes that calling someone an eagle, oqâb, means they're sharp-eyed, and that the swan, ghu, is kept for someone graceful or beautiful, mostly in poetry.

Where Iran's birds come from

Iran sits on major migration routes between Europe, Africa and Central Asia, which is why its bird life is so varied. The Caspian wetlands, the Persian Gulf coast and the Lake Urmia basin, when it's full, draw huge numbers of migrating birds, and there's a bird sanctuary at Miankaleh on the Caspian coast.

Birdwatching is still a small hobby in Iranian cities, but it's growing.

Get it wrong and the worst that happens is a warm laugh and a story they’ll tell for years. Get it right — refuse the tea twice, accept on the third — and you’ll watch a face open up. You didn’t just speak Persian. You played the game.