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I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

speckx

Comments (52)

  • ben1040
    I did exactly this with BirdNet-Go and my Unifi doorbell cam. Unifi exposes an RTSP feed for each camera so it was easy for the tool to just "listen" to the doorbell and start classifying.I have a spare e-ink display and my next weekend project to follow onto this is to wire it up so it shows some faux "woodcut" images of birds detected, or something like that.
  • tacodestroyer
    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...
  • doodlebugging
    I noticed the linked blog mentions birds and bats. I thought bat chirps required higher sample rates than the microphones normally use. I have an Audiomoth and to set it up for bats you need to use the highest sample rate for proper ID.I like this project. I have been using security cams around my place to keep track of animals meandering across the property. It's the best use for an outdoor solar-powered webcam if you ask me. You can get a feel for which animal to expect based on time of day or other characteristics. You also recognize those who regularly visit. I have a one-eyed raccoon that has been showing up for almost two years now. It's a female and the last time she visited the monitored fountain she had 5 rambunctious raccoonlets.
  • comboy
    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.
  • inventor7777
    I run BirdNET-Go as an app on my Home Assistant i7 M710q. I use the GPU-enabled BirdNET model and Perch V2, and it works swimmingly.Input is three RTSP streams from various Reolink PoE cameras around our house, and it is pretty cool to be able to find and listen to the birds/frogs that come.
  • KaiserPro
    I have this too, I was looking to get more automated call recognition after we spotted a pheasant in my (suburban) back garden. I was going to buy a dedicated mike, but then realised that birdnet go works with any rtsp audio stream.I do need to tune the false positives though.
  • aerodexis
    Been working on a similar project for doing animal behavioral analysis on cameras setup in a barn. I got YOLO running in real-time on several streams on a RTX4070. Managing the training data and doing DINO->YOLO distillation has me writing my own data management suite that I plan on OSing soon.Core use-case : push a message every time my dog is eating my shoes.
  • KyleWasTaken
    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...
  • kvam
  • dewey
    Nice! I've tried to build something similar with Unifi cameras (https://github.com/dewey/birdhomie) and it worked pretty well, the species detection wasn't that accurate but I'll continue on that project in the winter.
  • trjordan
    Related: https://www.birdweather.com/birdnetpiI really gotta set mine up!
  • order-matters
    how confident is it in the identification? i imagine sometimes the angle is or resolution is bad and it may detect a bird but not have a lot to go off of to say what kind. does it narrow the list down or just make a guess?
  • anticorporate
    I'm thinking of making one of these for my wife as a holiday present: https://theodore.net/projects/AvianVisitors/I like the idea of doing something with the timestamp of the recording, or highlighting new (or recently unheard) visitors.
  • tolerance
    I am imagining a Gary Larson strip about a flock of birds who are so not fond of this.
  • arm32
    Love this project, I did something similar. The next step is building a custom frontend for it that’s exactly how your wife wants!https://alec.is/posts/building-a-solar-powered-bird-station/
  • jamesforestwest
    What an interesting and fun project. Now I want something similar too.
  • scary-size
    Really nice project! Expected a visual ID system, surprised it was using audio. "Flock" would be a great name for the project...oh well!
  • IncreasePosts
    > 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.
  • anon
    undefined
  • toomuchtodo
    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!)
  • gberger
  • sciencesama
    flock for family tracking and block for bird tracking may be !
  • minimaltom
    Hell yeah a birdie over thirty, with a splash of tech!(you either go the path of a burner or a birdie, I don't make the rules)
  • contingencies
    110 detections over 7 days? Here in Sydney I would expect >110 detections per day!
  • LIMEVINCE
    In the non-fucked up timeline where Hilary won in 2016, Flock cameras is a nationwide network of automatic bird identification cameras to track bird population and migration.
  • nautilus12
    I get jealous of people that have the luxury of time to do things like this
  • ck2
    ha, now imagine some hacker changing all the Flock firmware nationwide to do bird identification toowould have been a great Mr. Robot episode