I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

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.

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.

I tried that with my Aqara camera. The mic there has no windshield, though; wind noise was terrible. Also I couldn’t get Aqara support to enable higher sampling rates in the firmware than 16kHz; BirdNET expects 48kHz audio samples.

Ended up installing a better microphone attached to a RPi3A+ and using a RaspberyPi 4 which I already owned for hosting BirdNET-Go https://maciejb.me/posts/birdnet-go-setup/

Much better sound quality now!

Nice! I never thought about using my security cameras but ended up building a regular Birdnet-Pi with a microphone. I took it one step further to make it portable so that I can use it when we hike or travel to new places. Added a little e-ink display to the front and it allows me to see Top 3 for the day, last detected, and total number for the day.

Case I used to make it portable and fit the display https://makerworld.com/en/models/1336154-portable-pi-sdr-cas...

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...

I run BirdNET-Go as an app on my Home Assistant i7 M710q. I use the GPU-enabled BirdNET model and Perch V2, and it works swimmingly.

Input is three RTSP streams from various Reolink PoE cameras around our house, and it is pretty cool to be able to find and listen to the birds/frogs that come.

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.

Thanks - this post reminded me to enter some sightings from yesterday into eBird (yes, another Cornell Lab birding app). A pair of rainbow bee eaters that I hadn't seen in the area before.

Came to say birdnet is fantastic but, at least in Australia, it regularly identifies calls with low probability (which are often wrong / skewed for location, but sometimes correct). Meaning you still need some wits about you. That said, it can correctly identify multiple birds in a single chorus which is cool. Just need to keep an eye out for those false positives.