Most all of the Song Bird are of the order Passeriformes, birds having three toes pointing forward and one toe pointing rearward, which facilitates perching.

Sometimes known as perching birds or, less accurately, as songbirds, the passerines form one of the most diverse terrestrial vertebrate orders, with over 5,000 identified species.

The passerines contain several groups of brood parasites such as the viduas, cuckoo-finches, and the cowbirds. Most passerines are omnivorous, while the shrikes are carnivorous.

Many of the passerines typically flit from one perch to another. The easiest way to differentiate between the variety of passerines is by their most telling feature, their bills. Too, it is the bills which reveal their food preferences, which in turn influence their behavior.

Song birds with conical bills use these heavy bills to crack seeds and grain. Small breeding populations of parrots, mostly escapees, have developed in the southern parts of North America. The transformation of North American cities into tropical gardens with exotic fruits and showy blooms have helped the escapes to maintain the breeding populations. These populations have developed in California, Florida, and Texas.

The song birds with conical bills include: ani, bobolink, bramblings, budgerigar, buntings, cardinal, crossbills, dickcissels, finches goldfinches, grassquits, grosbeaks, junkos, longspurs, parakeet, parrot, pyrrhuloxia, redpolls, seedeaters, siskins, sparrows, towhees, and trogon.

A few of the perching songbirds have slender, curved bills for specialized probing of insects, spiders or other small creatures. The smaller wrens probe weedy tangles, low branches, bark and rock crevices. The larger thrashers use their bills like a hoe to dig in the ground or like a rake to sift through leaf litter for insect and small creatures. The largest of this family, the Cuckoos frequent wooklands and favor hairy caterpillars.

Most of these songbirds are furtively stealth in their movement, seldom leaving cover, in fact, almost always demanding cover and never flock.

Because these birds are so retiring, they are often identified by voice because they are frequently very vocal. Many are dedicated singers with big energetic voices. They typically scold intruders from the cover of their thick brush. However, wrens can often be coaxed from their hiding by simple bird calls.

The song birds with curved bills include: cookoos, thrashers, and wrens.

Unlike other songbirds, this perching bird with a fly catching bill usually sits still on an elevated perch between feeding forays. Their broad flat bill often has bristles although not often obvious when viewing from a distance or in profile.

Since fly catching is a solitary pursuit, these birds are normally seen alone, often at their favorite insect gathering location. These song bird hunt from a perch, darting out to capture a meal and returning to the same perch to repeat the tactic.

This type of song bird, those with flycatching bills include: becards, flycatchers, great kiskadees, kingbirds, pewees, phainopeplas, phoebes, strikes, waxwings, wood-pewees and several small birds in the genus Empidonax called Empids.

A straight, slender bill proves to be a very versatile feeding tool for these land birds. Some of the larger straight bills are omnivorous. Smaller birds with small, even tiny straight bills feed mostly on insects.

Perching land birds with straight bills include:, bananaquit, beardless-tyrannulet, blackbird, bluebird, bulbul, bushtit, catbird, chickadee, cowbird, chat, crow, gnatcatcher, grackle, jackdaw, jay, kinglet, lark, magpie, meadowlark, mockingbird, nutcracker, oriole, ovenbird, parula, pipits, raven, redstart, robin, scrub-jay, solitaire, starling, tanager, thrush, titmouse, veery, verdin, vireos, warblers, waterthrush, wrentit, and yellowthroat.