Listening stations · Vi Natura × BirdNET-Cloud
Hear the birds around you, even when you're not listening
A small computer and a microphone, tucked away in a garden, a shed or a hide. It listens day and night, identifies every call and song it hears, keeps the recording, and puts each detection on a dashboard you can check from your phone wherever you are.
How it works
From a microphone in the hedge to your phone
Set it up
A Raspberry Pi and a microphone, in a quiet spot outdoors with power and Wi-Fi in reach.
It listens and identifies
The station records around the clock and runs BirdNET, the bird-sound model from the Cornell Lab and Chemnitz University, to name each call and song.
Explore from anywhere
Detections, recordings and spectrograms appear in a free BirdNET-Cloud account, ready to revisit.
Your dashboard
Everything your station hears, in one place
Watch detections arrive live, replay the recordings and follow each bird through the day. Our own station's page shows exactly what you'd get.
Always listening
It keeps working while you sleep, work or travel, including the owls and night callers after dark.
See the patterns
When the dawn chorus starts, who arrives in spring and who's gone quiet, rather than a long list.
Learn as you go
Every bird it hears links to its Warble UK page, so you can learn the songs from your own garden.
Share it
Give your station its own link for family, a classroom or supporters.
Built to order
Made for your garden
Every station is a little different: the microphone that suits the spot, how it's powered, and how hands-on you'd like to be. So we start with a chat.
- We build it for you: set up, tested and ready to place outdoors.
- You build it yourself: we send our step-by-step instructions and help if you get stuck.
Most stations cost between £100 and £200 in parts, depending on the microphone and the current price of computer memory. We'll talk it through before you spend anything.
For gardens, schools and reserves
We're looking for gardens, schools, nature reserves and landowners across the UK to host a station. Each one adds to a bigger picture of who's singing, where and when.
Already using BirdNET-Pi?
Keep your hardware and bring your history: see how moving to BirdNET-Cloud works.
Bird identification is powered by BirdNET, and nocturnal flight calls by Nighthawk. BirdNET-Cloud is an independent conservation project by PixCams and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Listening stations are a Vi Natura project.