The Digital Bird Hide

What it is

The Digital Bird Hide is two things working together. An acoustic monitor listens continuously on your site. A public-facing display (kiosk, screen, or embedded web page) turns what it detects into something your visitors can watch unfold in front of them. A nuthatch calls. Seconds later, the display lights up with its name and relevant information about the bird.

It runs 24/7. It doesn't need a staff member watching it. And over weeks and months it builds the kind of species record that trustees, funders, and local nature recovery teams ask for.

What's included

• An acoustic monitor. A Raspberry Pi with a weatherproof microphone, configured to your site and installed on location.
• Detection software. Built on BirdNET-Go, the open-source species identification model from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Runs locally on the device, no cloud dependency.
• A public-facing display. A web-based kiosk page suitable for iPads, visitor-centre screens, or embedding directly into your own website.
• A staff dashboard. Daily species summaries, long-term trends, and a searchable detection log with audio clips and spectrograms for verification.
• Monthly reports. Species summaries in a format suitable for trustees, funders, and nature recovery reporting.
• Support. Remote monitoring, firmware updates, and a real person at the other end of hello@beaktech.org.

Who it's for

Two kinds of site tend to get most out of it.

Visitor centres, reserves, and country parks

If your job is turning a wet Tuesday in a wooden hide into a family memory, the Digital Bird Hide is for you. It gives visitors something to do with their ears and eyes when the birds themselves are out of sight, and it gives rangers and education officers a reliable talking point on any given day of the year.

Rewilding estates and private nature-recovery projects

If your job is proving rewilding is working, the Digital Bird Hide gives you continuous evidence. Monthly species reports for trustees and funders. A public-facing dashboard paying guests can explore from the farmhouse, the lodge, or their own kitchen at home, long after they've left.

How installation works

A Digital Bird Hide gets up and running in five steps.

1. A short conversation about your site: where power and connectivity are, where birds tend to be most active, whether the display will be a fixed kiosk or a web embed.
2. A site visit to choose microphone placement.
3. Device build and configuration to your site.
4. On-site installation, usually a single morning.
5. Dashboard and display set-up, plus a walkthrough for your team. Your first monthly report arrives after four to six weeks of baseline detections.

Pricing

Indicative pricing is coming soon. In the meantime, get in touch and we'll talk through what your site needs.

See it in the field

Our first Digital Bird Hide has been running at the Lake District National Park's offices near Kendal since early 2025, logging species detections continuously, in all weathers, with minimal intervention.

Read the case study →