Birds of Briggs Terrace

Our hobby is tracking the birds that visit our yard. This page is a report of the detections we've heard so far! Each "detection" is made by a small outdoor microphone. A bird with more detections spent more time in our yard than bird with less.

Birds by first date of detection

    How it's done

    In our yard, there is a microphone hooked into a small computer (a Raspberry Pi) which is running a citizen science model named BirdNET. Each time a bird is recognized by this model, it's tallied above.

    Tech used to make this project work:

    1. Raspberry Pi 4B: the computer running the local detection model
    2. BirdNET: the detection model developed by Cornell University and Chemnitz University researchers.
    3. BirdNET-Pi: a collection of scripts used to serve the BirdNET model on a RaspberryPi (a huge amount of work done here by other folks)
    4. AWS Timestream: for logging bird detections
    5. Briggs-Freebird: the code for the site you're reading, built with the Observable Framework and rebuilt every three hours using Github Actions.

    On Privacy

    Typically, folks running this software also contribute data to Birdweather.com but contributing a birdweather station would require us to submit the audio recordings associated with each bird detection. While BirdNET has privacy filters in place to never send sounds recognized as human speech — we felt that we didn't want to risk a false negative getting through. Thus, for our own privacy and the privacy of our neighbors, the audio data associated with bird detections is never logged online and is otherwise regularly purged from the Raspberry Pi in our yard.