Our Work
We install and look after acoustic monitors that identify birds by their song, and build the apps that share what they hear. Some run all year round, showing visitors and staff which birds are around in real time; others are left out in the field for weeks to gather baseline recordings that we analyse afterwards.
Bringing birdsong to visitors
In summer 2026, a HEART grant from the Lake District Foundation helped us with funding to set up five bird stations at sites across the National Park: Low Beckside Farm (The Ernest Cook Trust), Sizergh (National Trust), Gowbarrow Farm, Basecamp North Lakes and Foulshaw Moss (Cumbria Wildlife Trust).
At each one, a bird monitor listens around the clock, and iPads run Bird Spotter, an app we designed and built for the project. Visitors of all ages can see which birds have been heard nearby that day, look at photos and facts, play back the recordings and try our "Guess the bird" game. Some sites also have Bird Watcher, our second app, on a screen that shows the day's highlights and the month's birds without anyone needing to touch it. We installed every station ourselves and look after them remotely, so the sites don't need any technical knowledge.
Every detection the stations record is free to download and use, whether you're an ecologist, a teacher or just curious.
The Digital Bird Hide
A bioacoustic monitor that hears the birds on your site, paired with a display that shows your visitors what it's hearing, in real time.
When a Siskin calls, the public screen lights up within seconds, showing its name, a photo, and a few facts about the bird.
It works particularly well for visitor centres and reserves that want something tangible to show the public, and rewilding estates that want a continuous record that their work is making a difference.
Detections are powered by BirdNET, a machine learning model from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Everything runs locally on a micro-computer, so your data stays with you, in open formats. All historic data is also saved, providing valuable insights over time.
Lake District National Park
Our first monitor for this project has been running non-stop at the Lake District National Park's head office near Kendal since mid-2025. In a typical month it logs around 18,000 detections from more than 50 species, a record that a handful of site visits could never match.
The same device runs a simple dashboard for staff. It shows what's been heard today, which species are turning up more or less often this month, and a searchable log of detections with audio clips. No specialist software needed.
We've since installed two more monitors with the National Park, bringing the total to three.
Off-grid acoustic surveys
Not every site has mains power or mobile signal, which means a live monitor isn't always an option. For those places we deploy Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) kit: small, battery-powered recorders that sit quietly in the habitat for weeks at a time, and come back with us afterwards for processing.
The audio runs through the same species-identification model the Digital Bird Hide uses, and the output is a baseline species inventory for the site. That tends to be useful for ecologists and land managers working on habitat condition monitoring, pre-intervention benchmarks, or Biodiversity Net Gain assessments.
We recently ran a short baseline assessment near Keswick, covering different habitats, such as broadleaved woodland, neutral grassland, and scrub, ahead of a longer-term restoration plan.
