I wanted to share a dashboard I’ve been building for one of my BirdWeather PUCs here in western New Mexico.
For anyone unfamiliar with the PUC, it’s a small always-on acoustic monitoring device that listens for birds and identifies their vocalizations in real time. One of the things I particularly like about BirdWeather is that it provides an API, which makes it possible to do quite a bit more with the data.
Over the past month I’ve been experimenting with that and built this:
It’s best viewed on a computer rather than a phone.
The main display is a species-by-time grid showing what’s been detected throughout the day. Clicking any square lets you listen to the detections behind it. There’s also a “Dawn chorus” feature that plays the morning’s species in sequence, an audio player with a spectrogram and access to the full recording, species history, and some tools for looking more closely at identification confidence.
Most of the data is pulled from BirdWeather through its API and then stored and processed locally by the application. I’ve also spent some time trying to make the large amount of detection data easier to browse rather than simply presenting a chronological list of detections.
This started as something I built for my own PUC, but a few other PUC owners who’ve seen it have asked about using something similar for their stations. That got me curious about what other people have built around the BirdWeather API.
I’d be interested in hearing from anyone here who’s working with BirdWeather data, particularly if you’ve integrated a PUC with Home Assistant or built your own visualizations or analysis tools.
And if you have a PUC, feel free to have a look at mine. I’m interested in suggestions for things that would make the data more useful.