Someone on my local online marketplace was selling a Raspberry Pi 4B (8GB of RAM) for $75 (the kit is shown in the image below). It came complete with Power Supply, the Raspberry Pi computer (its the size of a credit card), MicroSD Card (64GB Hard Drive) and a plastic case.
On this little credit-card sized computer - you can install an Operating System (Linux) and then an application called BirdNet.Pi --- its a full fledged program with a web-based "front end", a server that listens to bird sounds in your yard, and uses AI to ID those sounds. The data obtained is stored in local database on the "back end".
I've tried to implement this a few times and I was never really able to get it to work until this week. This is what I've realized:
SPECIFICIONS AND REQUIREMENTS FOR THIS PROJECT:
- You need a Raspberry Pi 4B (with 2, 4 or 8GB of ram)
- You need to install the "Bullseye" Linux OS (64bit).
- You need to install the Birdnet.Pi application from the command line in Linux OS on your Raspberry Pi.
- You need a microphone with a USB connection.
- You need to change the audio recordings library from the default to the other option.
- If you deviate from these specs above - this project will fail.
The reason I wanted to implement this is because I have been amazed at the birdlife in my backyard over the years. I have heard American Woodcock on Feb 19th. I have heard Whip-Poor-Wills just by chance, along with other good birds like Olive sided flycatchers, yellow bellied sapsuckers ... and more. Last year I had Northern Waterthrush in singing distance for over a week! The thing is --- I'm on my back porch maybe 3% of the day. Just imagine what I could be missing!!!
These are screenshots of the daily reports (as seen from the web-view from my celll phone) on March 5 & 6th. Some of these birds would be new on my ebird yard list.
.jpg) |
| March 5th Report |
 |
| March 6th Report (I've excluded Blue Jays in the settings after the previous day) |
Installing this application at this time of year (Early March) can give me daily reports of what birds are singing while I'm at work. Today - March 5th, 2025 was the first day I had success with an interesting report (see screenshots). It will be amazing to see the day by day reports through April and May this year. I can post these reports to ebird as well.
One further tech tool I've implemented was to use a VPN server to connect to my house's lan from outside my local network. So --- today, using my cellular data from work during lunch, I was able to "VPN" into my LAN to check the web based interface- which is hosted from the raspberry pi wirelessly through wifi. This is a surprising amount of Tech --- just to see a daily report of birdlife.
Here is a cost breakdown of this project:
- $75-$125 - Raspberry Pi 4B Computer and Kit, case, power
- $20 - USB microphone
- Free - 1-2 hours to install OS (free) and The Application (free)
Web Links of Interest:
- The Project Code Site by its Author (respect):
- https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi
- https://www.birdweather.com/birdnetpi
- Kevin Murphy (no relation)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obHcjxEITQk
- Core Electronics
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM-F4sJ-5rc
- https://core-electronics.com.au/projects/bird-calls-raspberry-pi/
Conclusions - This is really neat. Its the real deal and it will be really exciting to see a day-by-day report of migration, summer breeding birds, and southbound fall migration. I will try to automate Ebird and Bird-weather connections to maximize the data sharing with the scientific community.
Good birding,
Dwayne
No comments:
Post a Comment