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  • 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.
    by mulle188
  • 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.
    by Aboutplants
  • Super cool, could be plugged into https://www.earthcam.com/ for global bird tracking.

    (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!)

    by toomuchtodo
  • Finally a good use for Flock cameras. They're even named appropriately.
    by goldie_wilson
  • How do you like the bird weather device? I’m interested in a more turnkey solution as well
    by Aboutplants
  • Eerie how easy it is to leverage these always on network connected sensors we keep putting everywhere to get precise data profiles
    by CircuitSeuss
  • 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.
    by Ouman
  • DIY NSA.
    by utopiah
  • > 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.

    by IncreasePosts
  • 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'.

    by jnaina
  • 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.

    It's under a collapsed block here:

    https://www.kyleniewiada.org/blog/2025/05/backyard-bird-trac...

    by KyleWasTaken
  • 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.

    Case I used to make it portable and fit the display https://makerworld.com/en/models/1336154-portable-pi-sdr-cas...

    by tacodestroyer
  • 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.)

    by a3w
  • > 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.

    by f_devd
  • 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!

    by maciejb
  • I built an esp32 with 48khz mic soldered on, feeding rtsp stream to server in living room. Works amazing. Need to build more mics.
    by brewtide
  • 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.
    by comboy
  • Btw the btw Merlin ID and OP's Birdnet uses the same model
    by venmul
  • Listers: A Glimpse into Extreme Birdwatching

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-wAqplQAo

    by trillic
  • Indeed. I use Merlin Bird ID all the time. I found it good across many countries.
    by bakibab
  • But a warning for novice birders: Merlin's sound ID feature produces a lot of false positives.
    by phainopepla2
  • 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.
    by drcongo
  • Merlin's story is very interesting: https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/the-magic-of-merlin/

    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.

    by CobrastanJorji
  • This is a lot more wholesome than my project. I detect birds and automatically spray them with a sprinkler to keep away from pool area.

    code: https://github.com/mattsahn/bird-away

    Writeup: https://mattsahn.github.io/bird-away-blog/

    by sahn44
  • How about deer?
    by boringg
  • 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.
    by ddmf
  • I am deeply moved by your anti-bird crusade xD
    by artemis_aep
  • I guess you can combine it? Identify what the bird was you sprayed away ..
    by lukan
  • Reminds me of the "Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes" talk from 14 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPgqfnKG_T4&t=2s
    by kjs3
  • 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?
    by atestu