Intro to BirdNET-Pi: Eavesdropping on my feathered friends

Summary

@hannahilea: home | projects | blog Intro to BirdNET-Pi: Eavesdropping on my feathered friends (and how you can, too!) 2 Oct 2025 It’s autumn here in the greater Boston area, and my bird neighbors have finally calmed down from all their summer yelling. Yours too? Sounds like the perfect time for any good birb creeper citizen scientist to set up a spy ring for snooping on birbs passive acoustic monitoring station! It is easier than ever to become the bird voyeur you were born to be, thanks to the BirdNET model trained and released by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the BirdNET-Pi application built on top of it by an open-source community. I’ve set up several of these now, for both myself and my parents; our BirdNET-Pi’s have been both an ongoing source of joy and a connection point with folks around us. For example, here’s what I measured on May 6, from the microphone just outside my window in a semi-urban neighborhood: We can see that the House Sparrows (Passer domesticus) chorp from dawn to dusk, 5am-6pm; that a Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata) shows up around 4pm and just does not stop hollering for about an hour; and that our American Robin (Turdus migratorius) friends make a brief stopover shortly after 5am. In contrast, a month before—on April 6—there was a much larger American Robin and Blue Jay presence, while the sparrows had not yet come into their own: A month after—on June 6—the sparrows persist but their babies have fledged, so the jay is back to asserting auditory dominance: Over the last several months I have been fairly consistently chorping talking with folks about this installation, which is how I know that a bunch of other people would love to set up bird monitoring systems of their own, for themselves or others. To that end, I have written up my BirdNET-Pi setup instructions for you, person who wants to set up your own bird listening station as quickly and cheaply as possible! To make set-up as straight-forward as possible, I detailed exactly wha...