Backyard Bird Identifier

If you live in a suburban or rural area, you more than likely hear various birds when you go outside. While their calls and chirps are pleasant background noise, few of us take the time to analyze which species is “broadcasting,” much less how many times each type of bird makes an audible appearance throughout the day.

Fortunately, such analysis doesn’t have to involve sitting on your porch for hours at end. As shown in this project, Jeffrey Mann set up a Raspberry Pi 3B+ to do the constant listening for him via the BirdNET-Pi software package. This impressive piece of code constantly records bird sounds via a USB sound card and microphone, and analyzes them to determine what type of bird is making noise. Mann installed his Pi in an enclosure outdoors to capture and log sounds, and created a web dashboard to allow him to check it from anywhere.

Taking things one step further, Mann also created a physical bird display, using a Wemos D1 mini ESP8266 dev board and four 8x8 LED matrices arranged side by side. These displays scroll to show the daily bird count, along with the latest species identified by the system.

Display hardware is fairly simple, though getting things to work nicely together requires a NodeRed Client and an MQTT server. Mann used his Home Assistant capabilities to take care of these functions, facilitating his rather elegant monitoring solution!