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ben1040 3 hours ago [-]
I did exactly this with BirdNet-Go and my Unifi doorbell cam. Unifi exposes an RTSP feed for each camera so it was easy for the tool to just "listen" to the doorbell and start classifying.
I have a spare e-ink display and my next weekend project to follow onto this is to wire it up so it shows some faux "woodcut" images of birds detected, or something like that.
sciencesama 3 hours ago [-]
just use trmnl it will make it super easy
comboy 3 hours ago [-]
Btw, Merlin Bird ID app by Cornell University is so good that I got some people interested that weren't into that topic at all.
phainopepla2 2 hours ago [-]
But a warning for novice birders: Merlin's sound ID feature produces a lot of false positives.
pfdietz 6 minutes ago [-]
You can usually tell, though. Rare birds in the wrong place or time that come up only once are problematic, but if the bird is detected repeatedly there's a better chance. You should also be on the lookout for birds that mimic other birds (like the northern mockingbird and the gray catbird.)
sq_ 1 hours ago [-]
Merlin got me into birding, and I've found this to be true, at least in some regions, especially if there's lots of background noise.
Unless a species has a really, really unique call or song, I've made it my personal rule to get eyes on it and, if I'm still not convinced, to take a picture and cross reference with iNaturalist and what folks on there think of it.
I've learned to curse the species that differ from others by the sheen of the backs of the males' necks or the angle of a wingbar. Also, gulls that only differ by things like the color of their feet or beaks.
drcongo 2 hours ago [-]
I've not seen this personally, but maybe it's region specific.
bakibab 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed. I use Merlin Bird ID all the time. I found it good across many countries.
drcongo 2 hours ago [-]
I call it Pokemon Go for grown ups. How many do you have in your life list? I finally managed to snag a Tawny Owl last week.
nbaugh1 2 hours ago [-]
I've got 33. I don't know how that stacks up against other but a large percentage of them came just from my backyard. Just got added a Baltimore Oriole that showed up this week.
drcongo 2 hours ago [-]
I'm up to 71 thanks to the joys of taking it on holiday to other countries (less joy for my family), and occasionally going places just because I know there'll be new birds there.
Personal best for a single session is 23 birds in my back garden over the course of a couple of coffees. I have though spent a fair bit of time making the garden as attractive to different types of bird as possible - mainly through having a variety of different shaped feeders with different feed in. I can recommend the NatureSpy camera feeder too [0] - though I have had to modify it a little to make the food hole smaller otherwise magpies empty the thing in a single day just chucking all the seed on the floor. Dickheads.
Inspired by AvianVisitors [1] I made a similar project [2] with an android app for bird detection using Perch, and then displays the birds detected during the last 24 hours with nice art on a samsung frame tv in "art mode".
If you dont want to repurpose an old android device, my app also supports bird detections from birdnet-go and birdweather. It should be plug and play with this project.
Nice! I never thought about using my security cameras but ended up building a regular Birdnet-Pi with a microphone. I took it one step further to make it portable so that I can use it when we hike or travel to new places. Added a little e-ink display to the front and it allows me to see Top 3 for the day, last detected, and total number for the day.
I just turned my PTZ security camera into a VAR booth for my kid. Lawn (soccer) / Driveway (Floorball) / End. Live view, step back 10s, slowmo, frame step, scrubbing.
GLM 5.3 helped to root my camera so I could get proper endpoints for PTZ and stream. Claude built the api and frontend, hosted on Home Assistant.
IneffablePigeon 18 minutes ago [-]
Wild that I could read this article, give DeepSeek about 4 sentences of prompts and have it running on my own homelab and unifi cameras in about 10 minutes.
The future mostly sucks but some parts are pretty cool.
inventor7777 2 hours ago [-]
I run BirdNET-Go as an app on my Home Assistant i7 M710q. I use the GPU-enabled BirdNET model and Perch V2, and it works swimmingly.
Input is three RTSP streams from various Reolink PoE cameras around our house, and it is pretty cool to be able to find and listen to the birds/frogs that come.
detourdog 2 hours ago [-]
I have a situation with a couple of hundred chimney swifts. I want to set-up cameras to differentiate between individual swifts.
Any advice on how to go about this.
My current plan is to put multiple cameras at the mouth of the chimney opening which is about 42"x42"(1mx1m).
Does this sound realistic to anyone with experience?
bradly 2 hours ago [-]
Have you found a way to identify frogs? I also have a BirdNET (the older -PI, not -Go) setup, but haven't seen a way to get anything other than birds identified.
inventor7777 50 minutes ago [-]
The full Perch V2 model at https://huggingface.co/tphakala/Perch-v2 can do some frogs and cicadas and such, but it is not very good. It will certainly detect it, whether the species will be right is a whole other question.
oever 2 hours ago [-]
The many frogs around my house are identified as black-crowned night heron. I was very excited for a while since that bird is not common where I live.
jameshart 1 hours ago [-]
OHHHH! That explains it. Had not figured out why that false detection kept coming up.
oever 40 minutes ago [-]
The sound that a frog makes is 'kwak' in Dutch. And that is also the name of this bird which makes a similar sound. Onomatopoeia for the frog predator.
KyleWasTaken 3 hours ago [-]
Heads up. I noticed the screenshot of your markdown card has an ASCII block that goes below the baseline. `U+2588` (Full block) tends to do that depending on a lot of things.
I made a change to the markdown card sometime ago that uses only `U+2581` through `U+ 2587` instead to avoid that issue.
Incredible! I never realized these models are open, always used them via the app. Project is top also!
dewey 3 hours ago [-]
Nice! I've tried to build something similar with Unifi cameras (https://github.com/dewey/birdhomie) and it worked pretty well, the species detection wasn't that accurate but I'll continue on that project in the winter.
doodlebugging 2 hours ago [-]
I noticed the linked blog mentions birds and bats. I thought bat chirps required higher sample rates than the microphones normally use. I have an Audiomoth and to set it up for bats you need to use the highest sample rate for proper ID.
I like this project. I have been using security cams around my place to keep track of animals meandering across the property. It's the best use for an outdoor solar-powered webcam if you ask me. You can get a feel for which animal to expect based on time of day or other characteristics. You also recognize those who regularly visit. I have a one-eyed raccoon that has been showing up for almost two years now. It's a female and the last time she visited the monitored fountain she had 5 rambunctious raccoonlets.
Been working on a similar project for doing animal behavioral analysis on cameras setup in a barn. I got YOLO running in real-time on several streams on a RTX4070. Managing the training data and doing DINO->YOLO distillation has me writing my own data management suite that I plan on OSing soon.
Core use-case : push a message every time my dog is eating my shoes.
koinedad 1 hours ago [-]
Really cool! The fart detector was a hilarious bonus
KaiserPro 2 hours ago [-]
I have this too, I was looking to get more automated call recognition after we spotted a pheasant in my (suburban) back garden. I was going to buy a dedicated mike, but then realised that birdnet go works with any rtsp audio stream.
I do need to tune the false positives though.
enos_feedler 29 minutes ago [-]
just don't use it to catch a congressman being murdered over a privacy bill.
shevy-java 15 minutes ago [-]
Humans who hate being spied on by the government and FacebookSpyGlasses, now spy on birds. We begin to understand how Skynet won this war ...
cindyllm 12 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
order-matters 2 hours ago [-]
how confident is it in the identification? i imagine sometimes the angle is or resolution is bad and it may detect a bird but not have a lot to go off of to say what kind. does it narrow the list down or just make a guess?
tdb7893 2 hours ago [-]
It looks like they are using audio. Even with poor audio on my phone I find that it works very well. Once in a blue moon I'll get an ID I am doubtful of from BirdNet but it's rare in my experience.
order-matters 1 hours ago [-]
but the thing with AI is that it excels in creating things we would not doubt, regardless of the truth. in particular, i find it to be susceptible to avoiding doubt at the expense of truth.
though i would be hopeful for bird audio, as differentiating their calls is something the birds themselves excel at, so it could very well be a great usecase for ai
I'm also working on a little project that is a walnut frame with a waveshare eink display and esp32 that polls for latest detection and display the picture.
bix6 3 hours ago [-]
Wow kingfisher, lucky!
xattt 3 hours ago [-]
Has your observation record reached a steady state, or are you regularly seeing unusual species?
arm32 3 hours ago [-]
I’m at a very steady state now years into running a BirdNET-GO instance. Disclaimer: I’m a contributor to the project.
I’m a pretty unhinged sorta engineer, so I actually recently created a 24/7 weather TV channel that combines real-time bird alerts, weather radar, timelapses and a sky cam feed (just a UniFi camera mounted on my home’s roof PV).
Watchable from every TV in the house and shows the birds photo and name when it hears one. Whole thing is a single cursed FFMPEG command.
tolerance 3 hours ago [-]
I am imagining a Gary Larson strip about a flock of birds who are so not fond of this.
IncreasePosts 4 hours ago [-]
> No waiting. No manual recording.
> No cloud services. No API calls.
> No subscription fees. No terms of service changes. No company shutting down the service in two years.
dfxm12 23 minutes ago [-]
This would be more interesting with video rather than audio, no? I guess it depends where your security cameras are. Are there options for that as well?
jp191919 1 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure you can do this with Frigate as well.
(i have a few https://www.birdweather.com/ devices strewn across North America and Europe because I am time poor and preferred a turnkey solution for those gifted to, but love the DIY efforts! no affiliation!)
Aboutplants 3 hours ago [-]
How do you like the bird weather device? I’m interested in a more turnkey solution as well
toomuchtodo 3 hours ago [-]
I'm fairly satisfied with it and would recommend it to others who aren't interested in building their own solution. I like supporting the folks who are building it, although I'm unsure what the future looks like for the product. Could enshittify, could turn into Home Assistant Foundation [1] (which I also financially support). Time will tell. That's why I think its important to have open alternatives, similar to how one of the https://www.adsbexchange.com/ operators went rouge [2], sold to private equity, and others have filled the gap with new ADS-B network solutions.
flock for family tracking and block for bird tracking may be !
minimaltom 2 hours ago [-]
Hell yeah a birdie over thirty, with a splash of tech!
(you either go the path of a burner or a birdie, I don't make the rules)
contingencies 3 hours ago [-]
110 detections over 7 days? Here in Sydney I would expect >110 detections per day!
zucked 2 hours ago [-]
I've done essentially the same thing before (using my existing Go2RTC and Frigate setup) but the challenge I ran into is that the microphones on my cameras just aren't very good.
deepvibrations 2 hours ago [-]
You can adjust which detections are accepted based on confidence level, so it might be that the settings are very strict.
Jefmz 10 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
jayshah5696 6 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
7 minutes ago [-]
jasontucker 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nautilus12 3 hours ago [-]
I get jealous of people that have the luxury of time to do things like this
IncreasePosts 3 hours ago [-]
I just used AI(antigravity with gemini 3.6 flash, but i'm sure many others would work) to implement this and integrate it with my security cameras after reading the blog post 26 minutes ago. I suspect the author did the same thing. I also had it steal the idea from the AvianVisitors link in this thread and it displays a generated collage of the recently detected birds.
ck2 3 hours ago [-]
ha, now imagine some hacker changing all the Flock firmware nationwide to do bird identification too
would have been a great Mr. Robot episode
dylan604 3 hours ago [-]
My cat wants to know who/where does one ask to request to have a specific bird located?
dhosek 3 hours ago [-]
Sorry, no luck tracking down your ex-girlfriend, but we do have a line on an ivory-billed woodpecker.
dosman33 1 hours ago [-]
Lol, nice. Does an audio recording of an ivory-billed exist?
nephihaha 2 hours ago [-]
Flock would live up to its name.
LIMEVINCE 3 hours ago [-]
In the non-fucked up timeline where Hilary won in 2016, Flock cameras is a nationwide network of automatic bird identification cameras to track bird population and migration.
CamperBob2 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
LIMEVINCE 2 hours ago [-]
I don't love it either, but it's better than the alternative of Peace President(tm) -- famous for strokes of genius such as "can't we just shoot [the protestors] in the legs"; asking the military to "shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs; and the masterful decision to deny Iran nuclear weapons by withdrawing from the JCPOA and joining Israel in waging an illegitimate war.
Edit: Wow that's insane that your comment was flagged.
2 hours ago [-]
dhosek 3 hours ago [-]
Come on man, let us have a nice little alternate universe without peeing in our Cheerios.
I have a spare e-ink display and my next weekend project to follow onto this is to wire it up so it shows some faux "woodcut" images of birds detected, or something like that.
Unless a species has a really, really unique call or song, I've made it my personal rule to get eyes on it and, if I'm still not convinced, to take a picture and cross reference with iNaturalist and what folks on there think of it.
I've learned to curse the species that differ from others by the sheen of the backs of the males' necks or the angle of a wingbar. Also, gulls that only differ by things like the color of their feet or beaks.
Personal best for a single session is 23 birds in my back garden over the course of a couple of coffees. I have though spent a fair bit of time making the garden as attractive to different types of bird as possible - mainly through having a variety of different shaped feeders with different feed in. I can recommend the NatureSpy camera feeder too [0] - though I have had to modify it a little to make the food hole smaller otherwise magpies empty the thing in a single day just chucking all the seed on the floor. Dickheads.
[0] https://naturespy.org/collections/wifi-solar-bird-feeder-nes...
Inspired by AvianVisitors [1] I made a similar project [2] with an android app for bird detection using Perch, and then displays the birds detected during the last 24 hours with nice art on a samsung frame tv in "art mode".
If you dont want to repurpose an old android device, my app also supports bird detections from birdnet-go and birdweather. It should be plug and play with this project.
Have a look at [1] https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/ [2] https://github.com/simenf/birdframe
Case I used to make it portable and fit the display https://makerworld.com/en/models/1336154-portable-pi-sdr-cas...
GLM 5.3 helped to root my camera so I could get proper endpoints for PTZ and stream. Claude built the api and frontend, hosted on Home Assistant.
The future mostly sucks but some parts are pretty cool.
Input is three RTSP streams from various Reolink PoE cameras around our house, and it is pretty cool to be able to find and listen to the birds/frogs that come.
Any advice on how to go about this.
My current plan is to put multiple cameras at the mouth of the chimney opening which is about 42"x42"(1mx1m).
Does this sound realistic to anyone with experience?
I made a change to the markdown card sometime ago that uses only `U+2581` through `U+ 2587` instead to avoid that issue.
It's under a collapsed block here:
https://www.kyleniewiada.org/blog/2025/05/backyard-bird-trac...
I like this project. I have been using security cams around my place to keep track of animals meandering across the property. It's the best use for an outdoor solar-powered webcam if you ask me. You can get a feel for which animal to expect based on time of day or other characteristics. You also recognize those who regularly visit. I have a one-eyed raccoon that has been showing up for almost two years now. It's a female and the last time she visited the monitored fountain she had 5 rambunctious raccoonlets.
Core use-case : push a message every time my dog is eating my shoes.
I do need to tune the false positives though.
though i would be hopeful for bird audio, as differentiating their calls is something the birds themselves excel at, so it could very well be a great usecase for ai
I like the idea of doing something with the timestamp of the recording, or highlighting new (or recently unheard) visitors.
I really gotta set mine up!
https://alec.is/posts/building-a-solar-powered-bird-station/
I'm also working on a little project that is a walnut frame with a waveshare eink display and esp32 that polls for latest detection and display the picture.
I’m a pretty unhinged sorta engineer, so I actually recently created a 24/7 weather TV channel that combines real-time bird alerts, weather radar, timelapses and a sky cam feed (just a UniFi camera mounted on my home’s roof PV).
https://www.youtube.com/live/sAC3o6KW2N0
Watchable from every TV in the house and shows the birds photo and name when it hears one. Whole thing is a single cursed FFMPEG command.
> No cloud services. No API calls.
> No subscription fees. No terms of service changes. No company shutting down the service in two years.
(i have a few https://www.birdweather.com/ devices strewn across North America and Europe because I am time poor and preferred a turnkey solution for those gifted to, but love the DIY efforts! no affiliation!)
[1] https://www.openhomefoundation.org/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45582907 (citations)
(you either go the path of a burner or a birdie, I don't make the rules)
would have been a great Mr. Robot episode
Edit: Wow that's insane that your comment was flagged.