GoKawiilI turned three security cameras into an automatic bird identification system using BirdNet-Go. Now my wife and I can track every bird species that visits our yard in real-time.
My wife loves listening to the birds and identifying them using an app on her phone. I thought I'd take this a step further and see if there was something that can identify the birds based on their song. Looking around I found BirdNet and BirdNet-Go, then discovered you can run this on Docker and use the security cameras you already have outside to identify the birds. Awesome! So I took 3 of the cameras around my house and used their microphones to identify the birds. It was magic.
Real-Time Bird and Bat Audio Detection
BirdNet-Go runs 24/7. It listens constantly. The moment a bird starts singing, it analyzes the audio and gives you an identification. No waiting, no manual recording. It works for bats too, which is pretty cool if you've got them flying around at dusk. The system just keeps running in the background, cataloging everything it hears. It also started detecting frogs which is interesting.
Multi-Model Local AI Inference Engine
The whole thing runs locally on your hardware. No cloud services. No API calls. The AI models live right on your server or Raspberry Pi. This means it's fast, private, and doesn't cost you anything per month. You can even run multiple models if you want different detection strategies or regional bird databases. They recently added Google Perch v2 to the model gallery allowing for 14,795 species to be detected vs the 6,000 that BirdNET 2.4 provided.
Alert Rules with Species List Matching
You can set up rules for specific birds. Want to know the instant a cardinal shows up? Done. Looking for a rare species in your area? Set an alert. The system matches against species lists and sends you notifications based on whatever criteria you set. It's like having a birding buddy who never sleeps. I even have it connected to a channel in my homes Discord server. Wait, your house doesn't have a dedicated Discord?
Setting up notifications and alerts for bird sightings into the house discord channel #birdnet
Species Novelty Tracking for New Detections
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