The LifeCLEF bird identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluation of 501 bird species identification. The main originality of this data is that it was specifically built through a citizen science initiative conducted by Xeno-Canto, an international social net-work of amateur and expert ornithologists. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application than previous, similar ini-tiatives. This overview presents the resources and the assessments of the task, summarizes the retrieval approaches employed by the participating groups, and provides an analysis of the main evaluation results. With a total of ten groups from seven countries and with a total of twenty-nine runs submitted, involving distinct and original methods, this first year task confirms the interest of the audio retrieval community for biodiver-sity and ornithology, and highlights further challenging studies in bird identification.