I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

183

sspeckx about 3 hours ago 59 commentsRead Article on jasontucker.blog

ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

86% Positive

Analyzed from 1533 words in the discussion.

Discussion (59 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ben1040•about 2 hours ago

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.

sciencesama•about 2 hours ago

just use trmnl it will make it super easy

comboy•about 2 hours ago

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.

bakibab•about 2 hours ago

Indeed. I use Merlin Bird ID all the time. I found it good across many countries.

phainopepla2•about 1 hour ago

But a warning for novice birders: Merlin's sound ID feature produces a lot of false positives.

sq_•9 minutes ago

Merlin got me into birding, and I've found this to be true, at least in some regions, especially if there's lots of background noise.

Unless a species has a really, really unique call or song, I've made it my personal rule to get eyes on it and, if I'm still not convinced, to take a picture and cross reference with iNaturalist and what folks on there think of it.

I've learned to curse the species that differ from others by the sheen of the backs of the males' necks or the angle of a wingbar. Also, gulls that only differ by things like the color of their feet or beaks.

drcongo•about 1 hour ago

I've not seen this personally, but maybe it's region specific.

drcongo•about 1 hour ago

I call it Pokemon Go for grown ups. How many do you have in your life list? I finally managed to snag a Tawny Owl last week.

nbaugh1•about 1 hour ago

I've got 33. I don't know how that stacks up against other but a large percentage of them came just from my backyard. Just got added a Baltimore Oriole that showed up this week.

drcongo•about 1 hour ago

I'm up to 71 thanks to the joys of taking it on holiday to other countries (less joy for my family), and occasionally going places just because I know there'll be new birds there.

Personal best for a single session is 23 birds in my back garden over the course of a couple of coffees. I have though spent a fair bit of time making the garden as attractive to different types of bird as possible - mainly through having a variety of different shaped feeders with different feed in. I can recommend the NatureSpy camera feeder too [0] - though I have had to modify it a little to make the food hole smaller otherwise magpies empty the thing in a single day just chucking all the seed on the floor. Dickheads.

[0] https://naturespy.org/collections/wifi-solar-bird-feeder-nes...

tacodestroyer•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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.

koinedad•17 minutes ago

Really cool! The fart detector was a hilarious bonus

inventor7777•about 1 hour ago

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.

detourdog•38 minutes ago

I have a situation with a couple of hundred chimney swifts. I want to set-up cameras to differentiate between individual swifts.

Any advice on how to go about this.

My current plan is to put multiple cameras at the mouth of the chimney opening which is about 42"x42"(1mx1m).

Does this sound realistic to anyone with experience?

bradly•about 1 hour ago

Have you found a way to identify frogs? I also have a BirdNET (the older -PI, not -Go) setup, but haven't seen a way to get anything other than birds identified.

oever•about 1 hour ago

The many frogs around my house are identified as black-crowned night heron. I was very excited for a while since that bird is not common where I live.

jameshart•17 minutes ago

OHHHH! That explains it. Had not figured out why that false detection kept coming up.

alexanderilg•7 minutes ago

I love this, much better than AngryBirds. Truly an amazing idea!

taylorbuley•24 minutes ago

Xeno, you are my hero https://xeno-canto.org/

KyleWasTaken•about 2 hours ago

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...

aerodexis•about 1 hour ago

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.

KaiserPro•about 1 hour ago

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.

dewey•about 2 hours ago

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.

jp191919•27 minutes ago

I'm pretty sure you can do this with Frigate as well.

order-matters•about 1 hour ago

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?

tdb7893•about 1 hour ago

It looks like they are using audio. Even with poor audio on my phone I find that it works very well. Once in a blue moon I'll get an ID I am doubtful of from BirdNet but it's rare in my experience.

order-matters•5 minutes ago

but the thing with AI is that it excels in creating things we would not doubt, regardless of the truth. in particular, i find it to be susceptible to avoiding doubt at the expense of truth.

though i would be hopeful for bird audio, as differentiating their calls is something the birds themselves excel at, so it could very well be a great usecase for ai

trjordan•about 1 hour ago

I really gotta set mine up!

kvam•about 1 hour ago

Relevant: https://www.spoor.ai/

anticorporate•about 3 hours ago

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•about 3 hours ago

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/

bradly•about 2 hours ago

Here is mine: https://birdymusic.com/

I'm also working on a little project that is a walnut frame with a waveshare eink display and esp32 that polls for latest detection and display the picture.

bix6•about 2 hours ago

Wow kingfisher, lucky!

xattt•about 2 hours ago

Has your observation record reached a steady state, or are you regularly seeing unusual species?

arm32•about 2 hours ago

I’m at a very steady state now years into running a BirdNET-GO instance. Disclaimer: I’m a contributor to the project.

I’m a pretty unhinged sorta engineer, so I actually recently created a 24/7 weather TV channel that combines real-time bird alerts, weather radar, timelapses and a sky cam feed (just a UniFi camera mounted on my home’s roof PV).

https://www.youtube.com/live/sAC3o6KW2N0

Watchable from every TV in the house and shows the birds photo and name when it hears one. Whole thing is a single cursed FFMPEG command.

tolerance•about 2 hours ago

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

IncreasePosts•about 3 hours ago

> 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.

jamesforestwest•about 1 hour ago

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

scary-size•about 3 hours ago

Really nice project! Expected a visual ID system, surprised it was using audio. "Flock" would be a great name for the project...oh well!

gberger•about 2 hours ago

https://xkcd.com/1425/

toomuchtodo•about 3 hours ago

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!)

Aboutplants•about 2 hours ago

How do you like the bird weather device? I’m interested in a more turnkey solution as well

toomuchtodo•about 2 hours ago

I'm fairly satisfied with it and would recommend it to others who aren't interested in building their own solution. I like supporting the folks who are building it, although I'm unsure what the future looks like for the product. Could enshittify, could turn into Home Assistant Foundation [1] (which I also financially support). Time will tell. That's why I think its important to have open alternatives, similar to how one of the https://www.adsbexchange.com/ operators went rouge [2], sold to private equity, and others have filled the gap with new ADS-B network solutions.

[1] https://www.openhomefoundation.org/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45582907 (citations)

sciencesama•about 2 hours ago

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

minimaltom•about 2 hours ago

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•about 2 hours ago

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

zucked•about 1 hour ago

I've done essentially the same thing before (using my existing Go2RTC and Frigate setup) but the challenge I ran into is that the microphones on my cameras just aren't very good.

deepvibrations•about 1 hour ago

You can adjust which detections are accepted based on confidence level, so it might be that the settings are very strict.

LIMEVINCE•about 2 hours ago

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•about 3 hours ago

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

IncreasePosts•about 2 hours ago

I just used AI(antigravity with gemini 3.6 flash, but i'm sure many others would work) to implement this and integrate it with my security cameras after reading the blog post 26 minutes ago. I suspect the author did the same thing. I also had it steal the idea from the AvianVisitors link in this thread and it displays a generated collage of the recently detected birds.

ck2•about 2 hours ago

ha, now imagine some hacker changing all the Flock firmware nationwide to do bird identification too

would have been a great Mr. Robot episode

dylan604•about 2 hours ago

My cat wants to know who/where does one ask to request to have a specific bird located?

dhosek•about 2 hours ago

Sorry, no luck tracking down your ex-girlfriend, but we do have a line on an ivory-billed woodpecker.

dosman33•33 minutes ago

Lol, nice. Does an audio recording of an ivory-billed exist?

nephihaha•42 minutes ago

Flock would live up to its name.