Teddy Warner created Heard Recently, a website showing the birds heard near his apartment. Unlike our Bird Buddy (a smart feeder with a camera) it uses audio to identify avian visitors and doesn't require a subscription.
I mounted a tiny microphone on my apartment balcony to listen for any birds passing by and built a site to collage them as they're heard
The software was built using Cornell University's BirdNet, which uses deep learning to recognize more than 6,000 species, and BirdNET-PI, an implementation that runs on inexpensive hardware. But it's the collages of kachō-e illustrations of visitors that really charms. It's like a color plate from a vintage ornithology book.
There's also stats showing the count of recent visitors, species names and other interesting numbers, and an "Atlas" that shows an ordered gallery of the birds with links to encyclopedia entries and recorded birdsong for each.
Teddy provides instructions on building your own. You'll need a Raspberry Pi, a MicroSD card, a mic, and a power supply for the Pi: $80 all in.
The collage ships with 450 bundled illustrations of the most common North American species, generated via Gemini's gemini-2.5-flash-image model. Each species gets two poses: perched perched American Crow and in-flight American Crow in flight. The prompt template lives at avian/scripts/prompt.template.md:
The AI art is pleasant and not at all sloppish, but there's a vast treasury of avian art by human artists who didn't need to be reminded explicitly that birds have "exactly two wings" and "one head." John James Audubon's paintings (including Birds of America) are now public domain, and The Library of Congress has a substantial set of public domain paintings. Stylistic consistency over the many species is the obvious problem, but there are so many wonderfully-illustrated bird books from the 20th century. I feel we must already have tackled this 10 times over.
See also Merlin, Cornell's own implementation of its BirdNet platforn, available as an app on iOS and Android. No collages!
