That's pretty much up to you! Writing out arrays of words directly into your source file is the least difficult thing to do, but it's also not very flexible. Creating and then reading from .json files is only barely more difficult, at least in python.
If you have a file like birds_north_america.json, you could load its list of birds in python 2.7 with the following:
import json #assumes birds_north_america.json is in the same directory as your script bird_json = json.load(open("birds_north_america.json)) #this will print "Birds of North America, grouped by family" print(bird_json["description"]) #this gets the list of bird families families = bird_json["birds"] #this gets the first bird family from the list ducks = birds[0] #this prints the first member of the duck/geese/swam family #which is "Black-bellied Whistling-Duck". print(ducks["members"][0])