Vasilis’ nerd blog presents
Last week I installed a Birdnet-Pi in our garden. It is a device that listens to all the sounds the the birds make, and it logs them. The device has a simple web interface which lets you filter and sort the birds in all sorts of ways. I missed a more poetic way to tell what birds visited our garden. So I wrote a bot that does just that.
There are more birds in our garden than I expected. I didn’t expect too many, because we live in Amsterdam, in the city. But just like humans, birds seem to like the city. Today the device counted 28 different species. Yesterday 29, and so far it detected 43 different species. These are just stats. Boring. The interface also lets you listen to all the bird sounds, which is very nice. Yesterday in the very early morning a flock of geese flew over, and they yelled at us. Fantastic to be able to hear these sounds that I missed while still asleep.
Yesterday I found a list of animal sounds on Wikipedia. I found out that fish brrp and that laughing kookaburras, indeed, laugh. There’s also a Dutch version of this list. Pigeons koeren and donkeys iaën and giegagen! I used this Dutch list to create my mastodon-bot (my Birdnet-Pi collects birds in Dutch).
This bird-bot will always post something else. The start of the sentence is always slightly different, the order of listed birds is random, the noise they make is randomish, the end of the sentence is always slightly different as well. And the birds that don’t fit into the first post are posted in a reply to the post, which is constructed differently. And this post is posted every day somewhere between 6 and 18.
If you want to, you can follow it.