Our Philosophy and Values

Beak Tech was born from a deep love of nature and a passion for experimenting with micro-computers and open-source technology.

After 25 years in the tech world, I’ve watched many small companies with great ideas and genuinely helpful technology put profits first and grow into big corporations that seem to lose any regard for their negative impacts on the world, all in the name of ‘progress’.

We wanted to choose a different path for Beak Tech, whereby we use technology to help serve the planet rather than extracting from it.

Core Principles

To keep ourselves honest and help guide future decisions, we created these core principles:

• Always build our technology to help protect and restore ecosystems, working towards a future where humans and nature live in balance.

• Help give a voice to birds and other animals by listening to and learning from them.

• Deepen the human connection with nature through awareness and education, while respecting the local communities who act as the true guardians of the land.

We currently use open-source bioacoustic software and small, quiet devices to pay attention to the natural world. Our job is to listen carefully and make sense of what we hear, then share those insights. If we have done our job well, these insights should offer valuable information about the habitat so it can be better protected or restored. Alternatively, the data can be presented on a website to raise awareness and help people learn about their local bird populations.

We also want to thank the teams behind the neural-network technology we rely on - including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Chemnitz University of Technology - as well as the developers of BirdNET-Go and BirdNET-Pi for creating such excellent user interfaces.