鳥 Radical 196 — bird
niǎo (third tone, dipping)
bird
Radical 19611 strokes1 characters
Also written 鸟 — the same radical in a different position inside the character.
Where the shape comes from
A long-tailed bird seen from the side: the crest and eye at the top, the folded wing down the middle, and the four dots at the foot that began as the claws and the trailing tail. It files birds of every kind — 鸡 a chicken, 鸭 a duck, 鹅 a goose, 鸦 a crow — and is the companion of 隹, which draws the short-tailed birds. The simplified 鸟 keeps the outline in five strokes, contracting the four dots to a single sweep and marking the eye with the one remaining dot.