My first ever "e2e" ML project during early covid quarantine was a crude vision model to detect pigeons on my balcony (and pigeons only) and play a loud random sound. It almost worked sometimes.
ompogUe 7 hours ago [-]
Did a similar thing where I had a neighbor who raised dobermans and rottweilers - it's a bit difficult to code with 8 or 9 large dogs barking in the yard outside your window.
Set up an amp and speakers that would pump out ultrasonic noise when it heard the barking, sending them running to the other side of their house.
I've been meaning the same thing to stop deer from eating from my garden... would you do anything differently if you were to do it again?
sahn44 7 hours ago [-]
I've been pleasantly surprised how well it has worked and how robust it is. It's installed at my parent's house and I am many states away so I was paranoid about making it resilient since i'm usually not there and have to fly to get there. So, i really tried to think of everything I could. I thought it might overheat the first afternoon or have other problems, but it's been running for months now uninterupted. Sometimes the OpenRouter credits run out and it stops catching birds , but it still runs normally and after I re-up the credits, it continues working normally. No need to restart even.
boringg 5 hours ago [-]
whats the spend roughly on an ongoing basis?
sahn44 3 hours ago [-]
I had been using gemma-4-31B-it llm for cost/accuracy and it was super cheap, about $0.65/month. I had also downscaled the size and back tested on bird/no-bird images from my camera.
But, then I noticed that it was missing birds that were at the back of the pool and I needed to use higher resolution and better models and cost went up 10x. Now, it's to high for my liking and I need to do more model testing to get it down to a few dollars a month that seems reasonable. I can also reduce frequency, I'm doing every 2 mins during daylight hours.
lukan 11 hours ago [-]
I guess you can combine it? Identify what the bird was you sprayed away ..
peddling-brink 10 hours ago [-]
And measure reaction time, classify across species.
Deer would be easy and cheaper. You could run lower resolution and cheap model and not miss a deer.
artemis_aep 8 hours ago [-]
I am deeply moved by your anti-bird crusade xD
sahn44 7 hours ago [-]
I'm glad it's not just me.
ddmf 11 hours ago [-]
I've been wanting to do something like this to stop cats shitting on my grass for ages, will have a look at this, thanks.
jasontucker 5 hours ago [-]
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ben1040 1 days 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.
koryk 1 days ago [-]
I did something similar with my BirdNET + e-ink screen, it's pulling images from wikipedia, dithering and rendering a summary with PIL.
Love your eink example! You’ve just sent me on a parts shopping trip :)
I’ve been unhappy with my little lcd board I’ve been using for the same here https://github.com/simonjgreen/OpenObservatory as the contrast is bad. I was considering using one of my trmnl displays, but it isn’t quite the right operating model for the frequency of updates I want.
Its very popular with friends and family, especially with older people that dont enjoy traditional tech.
walrus01 13 hours ago [-]
> Unifi exposes an RTSP feed for each camera
Do you mean an RTSP audio only stream separate from the video+audio feed you might ingest to an NVR, or combined audio/video RTSP stream? Most manufacturers of security cameras with ordinary RTSP stream functions support provide both video and audio together. 'Frigate' for instance will auto detect audio stream on a reolink camera and it "just works" in the latest versions of Frigate.
mlrtime 13 hours ago [-]
Unifi provides local RTSP streams in different resolutions, birdnet will happily take a rtsp and strip it's audio out for processing (ffmpeg?)
walrus01 11 hours ago [-]
Have you had any difficulty with simultaneously retrieving >1 RTSP stream from the camera at a time, 24x7? Such as full resolution video/audio to a NVR for security purposes and then a second stream to birdnet?
mlrtime 2 hours ago [-]
Negative, you can always use go2rtc or scrypted to proxy them.
Ouman 17 hours ago [-]
The e-ink display with woodcut birds sounds like the perfect final form of this project
sciencesama 1 days ago [-]
just use trmnl it will make it super easy
twhitely 20 hours ago [-]
I like my money to not go towards transphobes
mrmlz 17 hours ago [-]
I like my TRMLN it has been very solid.
jasontucker 5 hours ago [-]
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a3w 8 hours ago [-]
I always thought "US now has millions of flock cameras" to mean birdwatching cameras, how nice. Then I learned a month ago about the Orwellian surveillance regime they have in place, WTF, land of the "free", and neither free to move around without that being televised and no free healthcare? Even continental China give you "free from want" instead of freedom of speech, that seems to be an acceptable path for humanity more and more to me.
Even in EU, we barely give freedom of speech to enemies of the state.
(See https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/eu-sanktionen-putin-prop... , no right to a trial before your rights of travel being revoked. Recently invoked in one case that made the legal civil liberty news.)
f_devd 7 hours ago [-]
> no right to a trial before your rights of travel being revoked
I'm not sure what exactly this refers to (because of the paywall), but revoking right of travel before trial is fairly common, it the US it would be classified as detained without bail. And happens when there is a reasonable concern for flight risk before trial as seen by the judge.
comboy 1 days 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.
The journey to a magical, free bird sound ID app involves some obvious steps (the NSF gave them money), but the amount of timeline offramps is really high. The NSF didn't think this app was educational ("it's just telling them the answer, they don't even have to work for it!"), the funding ran out so they were thinking of charging money, eBird happened to have five years of bird sound recordings they could use, a computer vision guy on the team happened to learn that spectrograms are basically the same as pictures...
And the result is tremendously useful! They get great signal on where birds are, and they're making people so much more interested in birds and nature and science. And I think charging $1 for the app or, shudder, some sort of subscription model might've ruined the whole thing.
utopiah 14 hours ago [-]
Funnily enough I was in the bathroom (that's where I do my most random thinking) just yesterday evening thinking how template matching in computer vision, e.g. https://docs.opencv.org/5.0/py_tutorials/py_imgproc/py_templ... is basically audio signal processing but instead of being temporal it is spatial. Different signals but same principle.
phainopepla2 1 days ago [-]
But a warning for novice birders: Merlin's sound ID feature produces a lot of false positives.
sq_ 1 days 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.
Sesse__ 17 hours ago [-]
For me, mostly a lot of false negatives. I have a Pixel 8, and I have no problems using the microphone normally, but somehow, Merlin requires the bird to be within a couple of meters of me and sing for quite a while before Merlin will even say “hearing a bird”. And of course, you have to be dead silent; if anyone talks or coughs, it will mess up the spectogram badly.
Given that it's colloquially “Shazam for birds” and Shazam is just amazingly resistant to noise, it's a bit disappointing :-)
lordgrenville 15 hours ago [-]
I think what makes Shazam magically "just work" is that they are searching for the exact embedding of the recorded version of the song - it doesn't work for a cover version, acapella, etc even if it is very similar. (Everyone would want an app that you can hum into and it will ID the song, but I guess it's a very tough problem.)
Merlin is solving the more general problem so makes sense that it's much more finicky and less accurate.
Sesse__ 5 hours ago [-]
Still, we're talking orders of magnitude here. I've fed Shazam with a stream of the cheapest lapel microphone you could get, mounted behind a rack filled with twelve very noisy servers, in a hall filled with 5000 people also all being noisy, and it would reliably recognize music from the other side of that hall before I could do so myself (I had to walk halfway there to hear “oh, yes, it's actually right”). And that's on a stream encoded with 9600bps GSM compression. With Merlin, I can hold out my phone on a silent day, hear the bird loud and clear and it will hardly register.
Shazam primarily identifies on the geometry of spectogram peaks, FWIW (I wrote my master's thesis on the DSP of music recognition back in the day; it's possible that they are doing something more fancy now, of course, but I'm not sure if they would want to). I don't know exactly what Merlin is doing.
ButlerianJihad 15 hours ago [-]
> an app that you can hum into and it will ID the song
YouTube Music and Google Search do OK with these types. Sometimes if I know a song well enough, I will open YT Music, activate the mic search, and sing a few bars, instead of typing the song title.
According to Gemini, SoundHound is also a good app for song-hummers to try.
fyhn 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why but this seems very phone dependent. I can stand next to another person, both running Merlin in silence, and mine will pick up much more than some people's phones. My phone is not particularly new (Zenfone 8).
deepvibrations 13 hours ago [-]
Indeed - background noise will tend to lead to a lot more false positives, but you should use it as a guide rather than inherently trusting results. Same goes for using BirdNET-go and other models, though these do allow you to be very strict with detections and reduce false positives more.
pfdietz 1 days 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.)
wlonkly 22 hours ago [-]
Occasionally I'll see a screenshot of Merlin with, I dunno, a dozen different birds, and in the middle of the list: a catbird. I never have the heart to tell people that they just heard one very creative bird.
sib 1 days ago [-]
Cornell / Merlin / eBird publishes a global species frequency DB indexed by location and date (so, how likely is a species to appear in a place, on a day of the year)... In a project that I was working on, this helped a lot when used to influence the "raw" identification based on appearance alone.
bluebarbet 24 hours ago [-]
For info, there's a FOSS bird-call app, available on F-Droid, that's pretty decent: WhoBird
drcongo 1 days ago [-]
I've not seen this personally, but maybe it's region specific.
Indeed. I use Merlin Bird ID all the time. I found it good across many countries.
drcongo 1 days 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.
justincormack 9 hours ago [-]
Tawny owls make so many different noises. The classic sound is two, one calls and one answers but they are very chatty with different sounds. They live all around, but never seen one.
nbaugh1 1 days 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.
astura 22 hours ago [-]
I've only been birdwatching since spring and I got 28 species already. Lots of seabirds because I spend a lot of the time at the beach.
drcongo 1 days 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.
Btw the btw Merlin ID and OP's Birdnet uses the same model
jnaina 8 hours ago [-]
Have been running BirdNet-Go on a Rpi3 with a Jabra Speak 510 device which has omni-directional mic array, along with rtsp audio from two outdoor security cameras, for the last 2 months. Excellent sound pickup quality. 76K detections and 112 species detected.
I live in the east coast of Singapore near changi airport, and also run FlightTracker on another Rpi3 with a cheap RTL-SDR dongle with a 1090 mhz antenna to receive real-time aircraft broadcasts/squawks.
So essentially tracking 2 different types of 'birds'.
maciejb 1 days ago [-]
I tried that with my Aqara camera. The mic there has no windshield, though; wind noise was terrible. Also I couldn’t get Aqara support to enable higher sampling rates in the firmware than 16kHz; BirdNET expects 48kHz audio samples.
Ended up installing a better microphone attached to a RPi3A+ and using a RaspberyPi 4 which I already owned for hosting BirdNET-Go
https://maciejb.me/posts/birdnet-go-setup/
Much better sound quality now!
brewtide 21 hours ago [-]
I built an esp32 with 48khz mic soldered on, feeding rtsp stream to server in living room. Works amazing. Need to build more mics.
venmul 16 hours ago [-]
I like to know more about your project can you help with the details
maciejb 18 hours ago [-]
How do you transmit the audio once captured?
tacodestroyer 1 days ago [-]
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.
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.
Eerie how easy it is to leverage these always on network connected sensors we keep putting everywhere to get precise data profiles
utopiah 14 hours ago [-]
DIY NSA.
Ouman 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the bird use case is charming, but it's also a pretty good demonstration of how much information is sitting there waiting to be extracted from sensors that were installed for some completely different purpose.
mulle188 19 hours ago [-]
The documentary 'Listers ' (about two brothers who go all in on birding for a year) on YouTube is so hilarious and got me into birding (and using Merlin) this year. Highly recommend.
Aboutplants 13 hours ago [-]
Really enjoyed it as well. I watched so many documentaries in college (20-25 years ago) and it really harkens back to a 90s/early00’s style documentary, in a fun way.
dewey 1 days 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.
inventor7777 1 days 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 1 days 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?
sdenton4 1 days ago [-]
There's a growing literature on individual animal identification from sound!
My impression is that the hardest part is knowing whether or not you're actually doing a good job. For vocal learners (like the ovenbird example linked above), it seems to be pretty easy using embeddings from existing models (like perch or birdnet). For non-learning species (possibly including your swifts), you can use timbre clues to differentiate many individuals, but may not be able to really nail down individual identity.
detourdog 11 hours ago [-]
I guess the first step is to install the cameras and see what I can figure out from there. I never thought about the perching or vocalizations as an identifier.
Thank you for bring this up.
bradly 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days 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 days ago [-]
OHHHH! That explains it. Had not figured out why that false detection kept coming up.
oever 1 days 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.
nephihaha 10 hours ago [-]
Famously "koax koax koax" in classical Greek.
Aboutplants 13 hours ago [-]
Why wouldn’t Ring integrate this into their cameras or at least provide a “premium” device that includes it? Seems like a marketing no brainer!
Security is all about trade offs and if the public perceives they are getting additional benefits from their devices then the trade off over surveillance becomes less so.
I’m actually surprised Flock hasn’t done it to their cameras already. “Stop cutting down our bird monitoring devices! We are doing good science!”
If they integrated actual positive benefits to their actions then society pushes back less
electroweak 21 hours ago [-]
I don't know how this possibly worked for the northern mockingbird. One full moon I stood and listened to one call continuously for an hour and I couldn't remember hearing the same call twice. Every bird I'd ever heard in person and more mimicked...several car alarms..sirens... Do they even have their own distinctive call?
20 hours ago [-]
derwiki 21 hours ago [-]
Merlin identifies them for me
Ouman 17 hours ago [-]
Security cameras becoming a 24/7 backyard biodiversity monitor is already great. The fact that the same system eventually detected a neighbor farting in the driveway somehow makes it perfect.
tolerance 1 days ago [-]
I am imagining a Gary Larson strip about a flock of birds who are so not fond of this.
pards 12 hours ago [-]
> I got a notification from Home Assistant that a fart was detected in the driveway. My neighbor was walking by my house on his nightly walk and ripped one as he passed by the driveway and the fart was detected.
I'd have to disable notifications for this in my neighbourhood to avoid alert fatigue.
cromka 12 hours ago [-]
I just wonder, wouldn't ornithologists be interested in a system in where people voluntarily upload bird photos from their camera, helping them with bird spitting? They do that by hand already, after all. Think something like FlightRadar and crowd-sourced ADB-S info?
Maybe you could try go2rtc[0]? It can ingest multiple stream formats and output them in a different one.
Also has some other nice features, like I use it to ingest one RTSP stream and share that to multiple applications, and to push audio out to my Tapo camera
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.
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 1 days ago [-]
Wow kingfisher, lucky!
xattt 1 days ago [-]
Has your observation record reached a steady state, or are you regularly seeing unusual species?
arm32 1 days 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.
jasontucker 1 days ago [-]
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simenf 1 days ago [-]
Cool project!
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.
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.
Neywiny 1 days ago [-]
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pnw 9 hours ago [-]
This is awesome! I just asked Hermes to deploy it for me at home and it's already listing some interesting birds.
som 1 days ago [-]
Thanks - this post reminded me to enter some sightings from yesterday into eBird (yes, another Cornell Lab birding app). A pair of rainbow bee eaters that I hadn't seen in the area before.
Came to say birdnet is fantastic but, at least in Australia, it regularly identifies calls with low probability (which are often wrong / skewed for location, but sometimes correct). Meaning you still need some wits about you. That said, it can correctly identify multiple birds in a single chorus which is cool. Just need to keep an eye out for those false positives.
Alles 14 hours ago [-]
For birds (or animals) sound lovers i suggest Cosmo Sheldrake songs
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.
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.
IncreasePosts 1 days 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.
order-matters 1 days 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 1 days 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 days 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
micromacrofoot 10 hours ago [-]
machine learning has been used to identify bird calls for a while now, it's more of a classifier than a content generator, so it identifies calls and provides a confidence level
while it's not perfect it's not really producing hallucinations of pterodactyls or anything like that
IneffablePigeon 1 days 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.
alexanderilg 1 days ago [-]
I love this, much better than AngryBirds. Truly an amazing idea!
(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!)
goldie_wilson 1 days ago [-]
Finally a good use for Flock cameras. They're even named appropriately.
Aboutplants 1 days ago [-]
How do you like the bird weather device? I’m interested in a more turnkey solution as well
toomuchtodo 1 days 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.
Disclaimer: I’m also using this to see how far I can push supervised pure AI coding before it turns to mega slop, so know that before you dive in with the disparaging comments :D
enos_feedler 1 days ago [-]
just don't use it to catch a congressman being murdered over a privacy bill.
shevy-java 1 days 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 ...
Little did he know in 2026 you can feed that cartoon into AI and it will build you that app
sciencesama 1 days ago [-]
flock for family tracking and block for bird tracking may be !
DarmokTanagra 1 days ago [-]
can i turn this into a doorbell?
gverrilla 1 days ago [-]
I got a little bit into birds when I met the Merlin app. And I have thought about making a bird identification station, but I'm under the impression mostly the same species of birds visit where I live. I may be wrong though.
dfxm12 1 days 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?
contingencies 1 days ago [-]
110 detections over 7 days? Here in Sydney I would expect >110 detections per day!
zucked 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
You can adjust which detections are accepted based on confidence level, so it might be that the settings are very strict.
contingencies 1 days ago [-]
Two rainbow lorikeets just had sex 2m from my breakfast table. I think there's a substantive distinction in avian fauna density.
drstewart 10 hours ago [-]
ONLY? Here deep in the Amazon jungle I would expect 110 per HOUR!
minimaltom 1 days 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)
Yondle 24 hours ago [-]
Alternative title: "My neighbour farted in my driveway, a technical overview"
creamedpeas 1 days ago [-]
I love AI. Thank you for such great software, anybody can do it now! Just like making videos, songs, pictures, stories, etc. What a great time to be alive! Oh, and F China for trying to sabotage our data center buildouts by leveraging useful idiots.
atoav 1 days ago [-]
Ot to rain on your parade. But I made videos, songs and pictures, wrote stories back in ca. 2006 when I was 16 and read my first AI book. Without AI.
I see AI as a useful tool, but doing art with it is extremely bland compared to the real thing. I can't eben begin to describe what people who let the machine do the art miss out on.
Xywzel 16 hours ago [-]
I'm kinda disappointed there was no relevant xkcd linked in the article.
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ck2 1 days 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
dhosek 1 days ago [-]
Sorry, no luck tracking down your ex-girlfriend, but we do have a line on an ivory-billed woodpecker.
dosman33 1 days ago [-]
Lol, nice. Does an audio recording of an ivory-billed exist?
My cat wants to know who/where does one ask to request to have a specific bird located?
nephihaha 1 days ago [-]
Flock would live up to its name.
LIMEVINCE 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
LIMEVINCE 1 days 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.
CamperBob2 1 days ago [-]
It sounds like a "both sides" argument, which should indeed be flagged early and often. It's not, though.
I'd still vote for her over the alternative the Republicans chose to offer to us (and did so). It was the only responsible thing to do.
LIMEVINCE 18 hours ago [-]
Yea tbh the only thing "wrong" about Hilary to me is that she rubs me the wrong way -- like I have a feeling she's just married to Bill so they can be the ultimate political power couple. But realistically that's such a terrible reason to dislike her, and is such a non-factor compared to the miles long laundry list of god-emperor Cheetolini's substantive flaws.
nephihaha 10 hours ago [-]
The real both sides argument is that there are only two teams to pick from.
1 days ago [-]
dhosek 1 days ago [-]
Come on man, let us have a nice little alternate universe without peeing in our Cheerios.
nautilus12 1 days ago [-]
I get jealous of people that have the luxury of time to do things like this
maciejb 1 days ago [-]
My setup took maybe ~4-8h of initial work. All with the help of Codex: code, configuration, even figuring out which equipment to buy.
IncreasePosts 1 days 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.
code: https://github.com/mattsahn/bird-away
Writeup: https://mattsahn.github.io/bird-away-blog/
Set up an amp and speakers that would pump out ultrasonic noise when it heard the barking, sending them running to the other side of their house.
I will borrow that.
But, then I noticed that it was missing birds that were at the back of the pool and I needed to use higher resolution and better models and cost went up 10x. Now, it's to high for my liking and I need to do more model testing to get it down to a few dollars a month that seems reasonable. I can also reduce frequency, I'm doing every 2 mins during daylight hours.
Pigeons scram instantly. 7-bird takeout: https://pub-27e5170d67ab43d8a22019a94eac1572.r2.dev/events/2...
Ducks don't care: https://pub-27e5170d67ab43d8a22019a94eac1572.r2.dev/events/2...
Whatever these are, they just walk away: https://pub-27e5170d67ab43d8a22019a94eac1572.r2.dev/events/2...
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.
https://i.imgur.com/5XbM6bb.png
Also if anyone is interested, here is the server for the e-ink screen https://github.com/koryk/inky-impression-server
and here is a MCP for birdnet that I've been using for a bit https://github.com/koryk/birdnetpi-mcp-local-server
I’ve been unhappy with my little lcd board I’ve been using for the same here https://github.com/simonjgreen/OpenObservatory as the contrast is bad. I was considering using one of my trmnl displays, but it isn’t quite the right operating model for the frequency of updates I want.
Its very popular with friends and family, especially with older people that dont enjoy traditional tech.
Do you mean an RTSP audio only stream separate from the video+audio feed you might ingest to an NVR, or combined audio/video RTSP stream? Most manufacturers of security cameras with ordinary RTSP stream functions support provide both video and audio together. 'Frigate' for instance will auto detect audio stream on a reolink camera and it "just works" in the latest versions of Frigate.
Even in EU, we barely give freedom of speech to enemies of the state. (See https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/eu-sanktionen-putin-prop... , no right to a trial before your rights of travel being revoked. Recently invoked in one case that made the legal civil liberty news.)
I'm not sure what exactly this refers to (because of the paywall), but revoking right of travel before trial is fairly common, it the US it would be classified as detained without bail. And happens when there is a reasonable concern for flight risk before trial as seen by the judge.
The journey to a magical, free bird sound ID app involves some obvious steps (the NSF gave them money), but the amount of timeline offramps is really high. The NSF didn't think this app was educational ("it's just telling them the answer, they don't even have to work for it!"), the funding ran out so they were thinking of charging money, eBird happened to have five years of bird sound recordings they could use, a computer vision guy on the team happened to learn that spectrograms are basically the same as pictures...
And the result is tremendously useful! They get great signal on where birds are, and they're making people so much more interested in birds and nature and science. And I think charging $1 for the app or, shudder, some sort of subscription model might've ruined the whole thing.
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.
Given that it's colloquially “Shazam for birds” and Shazam is just amazingly resistant to noise, it's a bit disappointing :-)
Merlin is solving the more general problem so makes sense that it's much more finicky and less accurate.
Shazam primarily identifies on the geometry of spectogram peaks, FWIW (I wrote my master's thesis on the DSP of music recognition back in the day; it's possible that they are doing something more fancy now, of course, but I'm not sure if they would want to). I don't know exactly what Merlin is doing.
YouTube Music and Google Search do OK with these types. Sometimes if I know a song well enough, I will open YT Music, activate the mic search, and sing a few bars, instead of typing the song title.
According to Gemini, SoundHound is also a good app for song-hummers to try.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-wAqplQAo
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...
I live in the east coast of Singapore near changi airport, and also run FlightTracker on another Rpi3 with a cheap RTL-SDR dongle with a 1090 mhz antenna to receive real-time aircraft broadcasts/squawks.
So essentially tracking 2 different types of 'birds'.
Ended up installing a better microphone attached to a RPi3A+ and using a RaspberyPi 4 which I already owned for hosting BirdNET-Go https://maciejb.me/posts/birdnet-go-setup/
Much better sound quality now!
Case I used to make it portable and fit the display https://makerworld.com/en/models/1336154-portable-pi-sdr-cas...
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...
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?
Here's one example: https://github.com/sammlapp/ovenbird-individual-recognition
My impression is that the hardest part is knowing whether or not you're actually doing a good job. For vocal learners (like the ovenbird example linked above), it seems to be pretty easy using embeddings from existing models (like perch or birdnet). For non-learning species (possibly including your swifts), you can use timbre clues to differentiate many individuals, but may not be able to really nail down individual identity.
Thank you for bring this up.
Security is all about trade offs and if the public perceives they are getting additional benefits from their devices then the trade off over surveillance becomes less so.
I’m actually surprised Flock hasn’t done it to their cameras already. “Stop cutting down our bird monitoring devices! We are doing good science!” If they integrated actual positive benefits to their actions then society pushes back less
I'd have to disable notifications for this in my neighbourhood to avoid alert fatigue.
Also has some other nice features, like I use it to ingest one RTSP stream and share that to multiple applications, and to push audio out to my Tapo camera
[0] https://github.com/AlexxIT/go2rtc/
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.
I like the idea of doing something with the timestamp of the recording, or highlighting new (or recently unheard) visitors.
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.
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
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.
Came to say birdnet is fantastic but, at least in Australia, it regularly identifies calls with low probability (which are often wrong / skewed for location, but sometimes correct). Meaning you still need some wits about you. That said, it can correctly identify multiple birds in a single chorus which is cool. Just need to keep an eye out for those false positives.
example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRUQsZQU60k
Core use-case : push a message every time my dog is eating my shoes.
I do need to tune the false positives though.
> No cloud services. No API calls.
> No subscription fees. No terms of service changes. No company shutting down the service in two years.
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
while it's not perfect it's not really producing hallucinations of pterodactyls or anything like that
The future mostly sucks but some parts are pretty cool.
I really gotta set mine up!
(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)
I’m using a AudioMoth USB mic so I can capture extremely high sample rate and also ultrasonic for bat detections.
https://github.com/simonjgreen/OpenObservatory
Disclaimer: I’m also using this to see how far I can push supervised pure AI coding before it turns to mega slop, so know that before you dive in with the disparaging comments :D
(you either go the path of a burner or a birdie, I don't make the rules)
I see AI as a useful tool, but doing art with it is extremely bland compared to the real thing. I can't eben begin to describe what people who let the machine do the art miss out on.
would have been a great Mr. Robot episode
Edit: Wow that's insane that your comment was flagged.
I'd still vote for her over the alternative the Republicans chose to offer to us (and did so). It was the only responsible thing to do.