I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
81 points by speckx 2 hours ago | 30 comments

minimaltom 60 seconds 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)

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ben1040 55 minutes 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.

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sciencesama 21 minutes ago
just use trmnl it will make it super easy
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KyleWasTaken 48 minutes 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...

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dewey 57 minutes 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.
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comboy 33 minutes 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.
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bakibab 7 minutes ago
Indeed. I use Merlin Bird ID all the time. I found it good across many countries.
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tolerance 34 minutes ago
I am imagining a Gary Larson strip about a flock of birds who are so not fond of this.
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anticorporate 2 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.

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arm32 2 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/

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bradly 37 minutes 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.

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bix6 15 minutes ago
Wow kingfisher, lucky!
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xattt 56 minutes ago
Has your observation record reached a steady state, or are you regularly seeing unusual species?
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arm32 40 minutes 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.

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scary-size 59 minutes 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!
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IncreasePosts 2 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.

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sciencesama 22 minutes ago
flock for family tracking and block for bird tracking may be !
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toomuchtodo 2 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!)

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Aboutplants 38 minutes ago
How do you like the bird weather device? I’m interested in a more turnkey solution as well
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toomuchtodo 15 minutes 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.

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

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LIMEVINCE 48 minutes 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.
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CamperBob2 28 minutes ago
This would be Hillary "Can't we just drone him?" Clinton, or some other Hillary?
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dhosek 20 minutes ago
Come on man, let us have a nice little alternate universe without peeing in our Cheerios.
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contingencies 47 minutes ago
110 detections over 7 days? Here in Sydney I would expect >110 detections per day!
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nautilus12 59 minutes ago
I get jealous of people that have the luxury of time to do things like this
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IncreasePosts 34 minutes 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.
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ck2 54 minutes 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

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dhosek 18 minutes ago
Sorry, no luck tracking down your ex-girlfriend, but we do have a line on an ivory-billed woodpecker.
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dylan604 48 minutes ago
My cat wants to know who/where does one ask to request to have a specific bird located?
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