It may not look like much, but that little black box is running a fully-powered computer dedicated to listening to and analyzing birdsong on our site. Using microphones, data on the six thousand most common bird species around the world, and some amazing software, it can listen and analyze what it hears in real time.
This project started a little over a year ago when we first discovered an amazing iPhone app called BirdNET, a project out of the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology and the Chemnitz Institute of Technology. Using your phone’s microphone, you can record and submit bird calls to their system for near-instant analysis. On a walk or in your backyard, often you hear birds before you can see them and we loved being able to pull out our phones and record anytime we heard an interesting bird song.
We couldn’t help but wonder how we could offer that feature as a service to those visiting our beautiful heritage site; because of our unique combination of tended gardens and old creekside cottonwoods, plus being on a major migratory pathway, we get an awful lot of interesting bird visitors. After a little research, we discovered that there were several efforts underway to take the key features of BirdNET and have them run on a kind of small hobby computer called a Raspberry Pi. This special software has been written by a small group of enthusiastic volunteers and is still in active development, constantly adding new features and improving reliability.
The process of setting up our bird box was a little technical, but we’re excited that we’ve now been collecting data for a week and hope to soon upgrade the microphone as well as put the whole thing in a solar-powered, weatherproof case. Eventually, we hope to give our visitors access to the recordings and statistics through our website as well as have some sort of automatically-updating signage so that site visitors know which bird species to watch out for as they tour the site.
This is the second of a series of citizen-science projects we’re undertaking on site (the first was installing our own weather monitoring) and we hope to add more as we’re able–we’d love to be able to monitor the conditions of the creek running through the site (oxygen levels, water level, temperature, cloudiness, etc) for example. There is also people working on developing systems that can do the same real-time identification as our bird box, but for ultrasonic bat calls and insect buzzing. If you have ideas on other project that might suit our unique space, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
