Project Spotlight Two: Bird Monitor

By Chuck Hennet — September 10, 2025

The Bird Monitor is a long-running field project hosted at davidsonfarmbirdproject.org. It uses Raspberry Pi computers, omni-directional microphones, and open-source AI tools to monitor bird activity across a 100-acre Pennsylvania farm.

At its core, the system runs 24/7 acoustic detection using BirdNET-Analyzer, which identifies species from audio and logs the results to a local database. Multiple stations (S1, S2, S3) each record their own stream of detections, and a set of custom scripts processes that data: converting WAV files, parsing CSVs, importing detections into MySQL, and generating dynamic charts and species pages for the website.

It’s a real working example of what this site is about:
DIY tech, powered by AI.

Everything is modular. Most everything is documented (at least it’s on github at github.com/hennet8148). And most of it is running on gear you can set up yourself.

The Bird Monitor is also an ecological project — tracking migration, presence, and species behavior over time. It’s become a kind of local biodiversity sensor, and the hope is that it can eventually contribute to regional conservation efforts and long-term habitat planning.

We’ll use this space to walk through the guts of the system: the hardware, the software, the scripts, the dashboards, and the challenges. Whether you’re interested in birding, AI, or rural data collection, this is a project built to show what’s possible.