Our Work
A number of listening posts and short-term surveys, in quite different settings. Some run continuously through the year; others gather a few weeks of baseline recordings and then move on to the next site.
The Digital Bird Hide
A listening post that hears the birds on your site, and a display that shows your visitors what it's hearing, in real time:
A Siskin calls. Seconds later, the public screen lights up with its name, statistics and general information 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 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 installation has been running continuously at the Lake District National Park's offices near Kendal since early 2025. In a typical month it logs roughly 18,000 detections across 50+ species, the kind of record a handful of site visits can't really approximate.
The same device runs a small staff dashboard: what's been heard today, which species are turning up more or less often this month, and a searchable detection log with audio clips. No specialist software needed.
Off-grid acoustic surveys
Not every site has mains power or mobile signal, which means a live listening post 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 broadleaved woodland, neutral grassland, and scrub, ahead of a longer-term restoration plan.
