Intro to BirdNET-Pi: Eavesdropping on my feathered friends | Hacker News Reader

Intro to BirdNET-Pi: Eavesdropping on my feathered friends

hannahilea.com

126 pointszdw30 comments

I have a UniFi doorbell that I chose because it's self hosted and the video stays in my home. It also easily lets you get an RTSP stream of the camera feed.

Earlier this spring we put a bird feeder outside the front door and it dawned on me I could be piping the doorbell cam into BirdNET to classify the bird calls. With an RTSP stream there's no need to mount a microphone anywhere, that comes for free from the doorbell.

My wife is the bird person in the house more so than I am, but it was still really fun to set up and watch the identifications come across.

RTSP listening instructions for anyone curious:

https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi/wiki/Using-an-inte...

I need to try this with my Reolink

This post references Logan Williams’ BirdNET experiments, he did a really fantastic talk on that project at WHY2025 (the Dutch hacker camp) recently: https://media.ccc.de/v/why2025-240-is-ai-for-the-birds-the-b...

Thanks for sharing, thoroughly enjoyed it!

Very nice, I wonder how this was made, couldn't find anything on his github.

Which part of it? I assume you mean the visualisation as that’s (if I recall correctly) the only part he doesn’t break down technically in the talk. I asked him after the talk and he said he uses Vue

Thanks, I had hoped there was a tool I could just feed my csv data into...

I was mild hoping there was a birdnet pi image with all of the magic mostly done for something like this.

like the author I'd love to set this up for my mom and mother in law as they have the phone app but it's not as exciting unless you're sitting outside.

I recently completed a MSc with a focus on bird bioacoustics, and this problem goes for the whole ecosystem/pipeline: there are very few (non-proprietary) off-the-shelf, ready to go products. Even the most popular methods that are extolled in lots of papers and by NGOs all practically need a dev/data scientist for basic implementation

Both BirdNET-Pi and BirdNET-Go provide statistics pages with similar plots where you can choose birds and date ranges, but they are not as polished.

Long time BirdNET fan, but I used the Merlin app for the first time yesterday and found it much more useful [0] It’ll display multiple bird species at the same time, and highlight which song belongs to which species in real-time. Recommend giving it a shot if you haven’t!

[0] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

Just to clarify - the article describes BirdNET-Pi, not the mobile app Birdnet. In the mobile app we have to record and manually select a fragment to analyze, here it's a continuous monitoring where detections are visible in real time and can be replayed.

OP explains all that admirably in the section entitled: "Terminology: BirdNET vs BirdNET-Pi"

I use both. I have a BNPi at home in our summerhouse with a mic on the outside. We live next to a park and the bird song can be deafening in summer!

I have the Birdnet app on my mobile and its ideal when out walking to do a quick survey or identify a song I don't recognise.

Whilst I'm commenting here, I'll drop a shout out for the "Flora Incognita" app for plant identification.

BirdNET has some advantages -- it lets you select a segment of audio and it'll give suggestions, even if it's not extremely confident in those suggestions, meaning it can sometimes do better in noisy environments. Merlin is generally more useful, but the BirdNET app has its place for sure

I make realtime algo generated ambient music based on my Birdnet-Pi server in my backyard. Give a listen at https://birdymusic.com or search birdymusic.com in your music app for some cut tracks.

I recently added an in URL meter after getting inspired by the URL based snake game on HN last week.

This is awesome.

Thank you!

This is cool.

FYI the URL meter makes copying and pasting the URL impossible while the music is playing. Not the best idea if you want people to share it.

Thank you and good point! Maybe I’ll see if I can move it into the title or favicon.

The URL meter is super cool looking though, nice trick!

There’s also BirdNET-Go https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go

It’s under active development and uses the same data models.

Just checked the dataset, it only uses the top 1000 most common north american and european birds, so if you don't live in those regions, you may not find it particularly useful

One of my future hobby projects is developing a low-cost device that can detect pigeon calls and will automatically respond with random audio of whatever local predator they fear the most. I can't stand their monotone calls in the morning.

Google research also recently released their Perch v2 model, which identfies 10k birds and 5k other species' sounds (and human noises). https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/how-ai-is-helping-adva...

This is so cool. I'm using BirdNET on Android for a long time and that is awesome, but running continuous monitoring on a Pi is really interesting. I saw there was also a Home Assistant integration for it.

yes! Home Assistant integration with BirdNET will take the audio streams from your cameras; no immediate need for the BirdNET-Pi. Since cameras are often outside, there is better chance to capture some interesting bird audio.

I wonder if I could use on old phone for this.

This might work well for frogs too.

That bird viz is awesome

Another BirdNET option if you don't want to build your own: https://www.birdweather.com/

Interesting. Are you an owner of this product and if so do you have any feedback on it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com