Avian Visitors is a lovely project by [Teddy Warner] that uses a Raspberry Pi and microphone to keep track of which birds have been visiting your home, and creates a colorful illustration of recent visitors on top of it all.
It reports on a web interface of its own making, but what really takes things to a new level is an optional, stylish E-Ink panel that shows the last 24 hours’ worth of visitors at a glance in a collage.
The key to identification is BirdNET (GitHub here), a deep learning classifier from Cornell that can reliably identify and classify more than 11,000 species worldwide based on sound alone.
Based on that information, the system pulls bird images from a reference set for the region and creates a collage representing the breadth and frequency of visitors in a single image. The larger the image of a bird, the more frequently it was heard.
That’s a cool project, but [Teddy] took things one step further by setting up a color E-Ink display to show a running summary of all the avian visitors the system identifies. [Teddy] has a knack for leveraging projects into wall-mounted art, as we saw with his generative art wall plotter.
Got ideas of your own? Avian Visitors even has options for sending the latest detection to Home Assistant or over MQTT, allowing automation triggers based on specific bird species. If you decide to try it out and put your own spin on it, be sure to let us know by sending us a tip!
The GitHub repository for Avian Visitors has everything you need to get set up, and the basic system needs little more than a Raspberry Pi and a USB microphone. There’s a build video embedded just below, so give it a shot if you want to get a better idea of what birds come visiting.
Charming…I wish my parents were around to enjoy it…they loved little birds
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Where I live there are only pigeons and flies 😱
Oops
https://phys.org/news/2026-08-pulsed-radiofrequency-magnetic-fields-disorient.html
A more useful case of ML compared to LLM. What if they made an BirdLM on this, and birds could use it?
It’d be cheap to make.
Thanks to birdNET i’ve learned a lot about bird i never could imagine i would do.
I LOVE It and im gratefull to cornell university for create it and make It públic. I Hope they never close It.
Have the android app and LOVE to Discovery the new spoted bird in my región.
Also if you mimic the sound of the Bird It can discerns if It a human if you make It wrong!
Wait until we develop a two way model!
I’ve made something similar but for people.
i usually track birds when the cat is meowing at them through the window.
That might be a way to teach cats language by proxy.
They mimic prey items, so get the foulest mouthed Myna Bird a perch just out of reach, so’s they don’t have to ape us apes.
I wonder if something similar could be used to track the propagation of barking dogs through neighborhoods.
Dog can be added to the species list. Also engine and siren. It’s all pretty cool.
Track the dogs, send location to HOA drone intercept….
Bridnet already identifies dogs and humans in its results
Spert-aleat ceo-wheet. Should come up as robins. I’d like to test my vocalizations of birds.
That is a just plain pretty design. Nice illustration of the difference made by a good user interface and presentation.
(I am still trying to find an affordable prototype-quantity source for larger e – Ink displays, two to three ft wide, for a dynamic signage idea. Yes, I know, off the shelf systems exist complete with weatherproofing and rechargeable power, but simply finding out what single quantity prices on those would be has been a challenge.)
Any day without parus major in front of my home office windows is a good one. They even harassed passer domesticus away and those were my favourite.
The Paridae are indeed pretty wiley. But I have never seen them displace either of the common sparrows except when the breeding season ends and the sparrows move to less populated areas.
Remember that birds are not here to entertain you, that is just a happy side effect.
No they are mostly for the entertainment of people overfeeding them in concrete cities, boosting up their numbers and making them dull (even city foxes had smaller brains in a study).
Now bird populations have shifted to certain species shrinking and others thriving too much due to irresponsible do gooders that want their fun without any thought to reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_tit
I was watching the news the other day and there was a story that Great Tits were in danger because of global warming. I personally cannot envision the world without Great Tits.
I saw lots of great tits last weekend. Summer, sun, sun, tits. Whenever I gazed around, great tits everywhere. I couldn’t imagine a life without great tits. Oh, and i saw some japanese tits once, don’t even get me started on those!
Great project, a perfect example on how electronics and some code can become a beatiful piece of art.