A while ago I read this post by Vasilis where he set up Birdnet on a Raspberry Pi to track the types of birds in his garden.
Later, I mentioned this to my mom since she's interested in birds and she was pretty excited about the idea so I decided to set it up.
The hardware
The hardware of this is pretty simple. I ordered this cheap USB microphone from Amazon and already had a Raspberry Pi 4B laying around. I wasn't planning on making this very permanent and the weather happened to be nice so I simply stuck the microphone out of the window and have the Raspberry inside on the windowsill.
The software
I installed BirdNET-PI on the SD-card of my Raspberry, which was pretty easy to do. The instructions are a little jumbled as they're divided between two different repositories but it's clear enough if you pay attention.
Once everything was installed it automatically hosted a GUI on birdnetpi.local which I could access from my network.
The results
These are the results after running the software for about a week:
It's done a total of 24347 detections, of which it found 71(!) different bird species. The majority of noise comes from the Winterkoning(Wren) which is a really cute tiny bird. It doesn't show up as high but I feel like the pigeon/dove is very common here as well(We have some really fat ones that take giant dumps on our porch).
And it visually displays peaks like so:
And makes recordings as well.
Pretty neat.
You can create a bunch of fun automations with this tool, but for now I'm content as is. It's making my mom happy so it's a win.