A bird identification method for the transient characteristics of birdsong signal based on adaptive optimal kernel(AOK) time frequency distribution identification is proposed. The collected birdsong signal is preprocessed and the spectrum is obtained through the AOK time frequency analysis method, Different energy distribution of birds sound signal at different time and different frequency are also analyzed. Then diagram spectrum is turned into gray image, the gray level co-occurrence matrix is calculated, image features is extracted as the eigenvalues of birds identification based on gray co-occurrence matrix parameters at different angles. Finally, the image texture of the known species is selected to generate training template and the image texture characteristic parameters of the species for identifying is used to generate the test template, Template matching is achieved using dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. The matching value are compared to find the minimum matching value corresponding templates, therefore the recognition of birds are realized. Finally, 40 kinds of common birds experiments demonstrate that the overall recognition rate reaches 96%.