Abstract: It is very significant to detect avian in a real time and identify them exactly. A novel approach of avian detection, imaging and identification was proposed in this paper with inverse synthetic aperture lidar(ISAIL) based on compressed sensing. The proposed approach can be stated as follows. Firstly, the optical heterodyne method and compressed sensing sampling were employed orderly to diminish sampling rate of the avian ISAIL echoes in the range. Secondly, the time-frequency analysis technique was engaged to discriminate the different moving statuses of the bird. What's more, the compressed sensing reconstruction algorithm was utilized to obtain the high resolution two-dimensional image of the bird and the fitting algorithm was used to extract the micro-Doppler feature of the bird. The avian identification and recognition can be executed based on the reconstructed high resolution two-dimensional image and the extracted micro-Doppler feature of the bird. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated by the simulation results.