Oh, have you not heard? It was my understanding that everyone had heard..
We’ve always been at least bird-watcher curious. Now at the house, between the garden and multiple bird feeders we’ve set up, we get a lot of birds visiting.
We’ll often use the app Merlin to identify the birds we are hearing. I thought it would be great to have that running 24/7 identifying any birds that came by. There’s a device you can buy that does that, but being a tinkerer I wanted to make my own.
Well it turns out I’m very much not the only one, and there is an opensource project called BirdNet-Pi that lets you create a bird identification station running on a raspberry pi. I installed it on a pi and put it on a waterproof case..
attached a microphone mounted on a janky pile of wood.. and, ta-da!
and, ta-da!
Now I get a nice daily chart of bird “sightings”.
I also wrote a little program to parse the last days data and create this page on the website. The list shows what bird was heard, how many times, and a rarity number. The rarity is a bit of a complicated formula, but essentially it’s showing how likely you are to hear that bird, in your location, at the current time of year, on a scall of 0.0 to 1.0. I plan to write some more code to come up with nice longer term retrospective charts, but thats still a work in progress.