I have a UniFi doorbell that I chose because it's self hosted and the video stays in my home. It also easily lets you get an RTSP stream of the camera feed.
Earlier this spring we put a bird feeder outside the front door and it dawned on me I could be piping the doorbell cam into BirdNET to classify the bird calls. With an RTSP stream there's no need to mount a microphone anywhere, that comes for free from the doorbell.
My wife is the bird person in the house more so than I am, but it was still really fun to set up and watch the identifications come across.
RTSP listening instructions for anyone curious:
https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi/wiki/Using-an-inte...
I need to try this with my Reolink
This post references Logan Williams’ BirdNET experiments, he did a really fantastic talk on that project at WHY2025 (the Dutch hacker camp) recently: https://media.ccc.de/v/why2025-240-is-ai-for-the-birds-the-b...
Thanks for sharing, thoroughly enjoyed it!
Long time BirdNET fan, but I used the Merlin app for the first time yesterday and found it much more useful [0] It’ll display multiple bird species at the same time, and highlight which song belongs to which species in real-time. Recommend giving it a shot if you haven’t!
Just to clarify - the article describes BirdNET-Pi, not the mobile app Birdnet. In the mobile app we have to record and manually select a fragment to analyze, here it's a continuous monitoring where detections are visible in real time and can be replayed.
OP explains all that admirably in the section entitled: "Terminology: BirdNET vs BirdNET-Pi"
I use both. I have a BNPi at home in our summerhouse with a mic on the outside. We live next to a park and the bird song can be deafening in summer!
I have the Birdnet app on my mobile and its ideal when out walking to do a quick survey or identify a song I don't recognise.
Whilst I'm commenting here, I'll drop a shout out for the "Flora Incognita" app for plant identification.
I wonder if I could use on old phone for this.
This might work well for frogs too.
This is so cool. I'm using BirdNET on Android for a long time and that is awesome, but running continuous monitoring on a Pi is really interesting. I saw there was also a Home Assistant integration for it.
yes! Home Assistant integration with BirdNET will take the audio streams from your cameras; no immediate need for the BirdNET-Pi. Since cameras are often outside, there is better chance to capture some interesting bird audio.
That bird viz is awesome
Another BirdNET option if you don't want to build your own: https://www.birdweather.com/