Fauna Ledger · Series I

About the Ledger

Fauna Ledger is a digital trading-card series about the living world, built in the nostalgic mold of the 1990s nature cards a lot of us grew up sorting into binders. One species per card. A real photograph on the front, a decorative frame, and the facts on the back. That is the whole idea.

One a day, drawn at random

A new card is revealed every day, picked at random from the set like a pack pull rather than marched through in order. The fun is watching the binder fill in: numbered slots you have not opened yet, and the cards you have. There are one hundred cards in Series I.

Real photographs, always

Every animal photograph is a real photograph, never AI-generated. The collector-card community actively polices undisclosed AI art, and that trust matters more here than a convenient render ever could. Photos are sourced from Wikimedia Commons and iNaturalist under Creative Commons licenses, and every card credits its photographer, license, and source.

Rarity is real

A card's rarity is not flavor. It is mapped directly to the species' status on the IUCN Red List, from Least Concern up through Critically Endangered and Extinct. The rarest cards in the set are the animals most at risk in the world. That is the point.

Design goals

• Teach, the way those old nature cards did. The point of a card is to leave you knowing an animal a little better than before, so the facts are researched and checked. We would rather be accurate and scientific than sensational, and we trust that the real animals are remarkable enough on their own.
• Look genuinely of its period, not generically retro: disciplined typography, an engraved brass frame, a color band keyed to each animal's taxonomic class.
• Read clearly on a phone. The facts on the back sit in a fixed ledger layout so every card in the set aligns as a series.
• Stay honest. Real photos, real Red List status, full attribution, and copy written plainly.

Say hello

Follow along on Instagram at @faunaledger, or reach the project at contact@faunaledger.com.