I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

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!)

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.

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.

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/

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!

nautilus12

I get jealous of people that have the luxury of time to do things like this

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.

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.

ck2

ha, now imagine some hacker changing all the Flock firmware nationwide to do bird identification too would have been a great Mr. Robot episode

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.

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...

contingencies

110 detections over 7 days? Here in Sydney I would expect >110 detections per day!

tolerance

I am imagining a Gary Larson strip about a flock of birds who are so not fond of this.

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.

sciencesama

flock for family tracking and block for bird tracking may be !

gberger

https://xkcd.com/1425/

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)

jamesforestwest

What an interesting and fun project. Now I want something similar too.

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?

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...