Acoustic surveys

What you get

You get a record of which birds were heard on your site and when, with the recordings behind it. A recorder can gather thousands of detections in a week, so we've spent a lot of time developing our charts and reports, to make those detections clear to a land manager, a funder or a board.

Our reports include species lists, activity heatmaps showing when birds were calling, and comparisons between habitats or visits, with plain-English notes on what stands out. The full detection data comes with every report for anyone who wants to dig deeper.

It adds a lot to a baseline or an ecological assessment, but it isn't a full species list or a count of birds.

Two ways to survey

• A survey on a site with no power. AudioMoths are small battery-powered recorders that can listen out in the habitat for days or weeks with nobody on site, and one recorder can sample several habitats in turn. We plan each survey around your site and what you want to find out, including where the recorders go so they pick up the birds clearly, when they record (through the night for owls, say), and the waterproof cases and wind protection the conditions call for.
• Ongoing monitoring where there's power. An acoustic monitor listens around the clock, so the record keeps growing for as long as it's installed. If the site has power and Wi-Fi, this is the simplest and often the cheapest option. We're also developing an off-grid version with its own solar power and mobile connection.

To see one running, the Lake District National Park publishes live detections from one of our monitors. This year our monitors also picked up curlews at five sites in Cumbria, some of them in the breeding season, and that's the kind of priority species a survey is often about.

Case study: a winter pilot near Keswick

In December 2025 we ran a winter pilot at the Storms Estate near Keswick, for a Lake District National Park Authority Biodiversity Net Gain project. A single AudioMoth was moved through three habitats over 11 days: scrub, oak woodland and an open field.

• What we found: 32 species from about 2,200 automatic detections, after we listened back to the doubtful ones and removed two that were wrong, a "mute swan" and a "short-eared owl".
• What we delivered: the detections for each habitat as a spreadsheet, and a short report with activity heatmaps.

Working with ecologists

We specialise in the acoustic side, from choosing where recorders go and running them to processing the audio and presenting the detections clearly. We're happy to work alongside your ecologist, or to supply the acoustic data for an ecology consultant's assessment.

How it works

Recorders follow a schedule chosen around the birds and questions you're interested in. AudioMoths come back with us for processing, while a continuous monitor running BirdNET-Go processes detections as it goes.

We run the audio through a species identification model, currently BirdNET from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Chemnitz University of Technology, and we review newer models as they appear. Each report says which model and version we used. Every detection has a timestamp, a confidence score and a reference to the recording, so it can be checked by ear, and we make clear which ones we've checked. We agree how long recordings are kept before the survey starts.