As much as I loathe LLM "AI" built from hoards of stolen data, machine learning "AI" has become terrifically useful.
This past week I had 10 audio recorders set out in the forest and nearby grassland, all recording non-stop from Monday afternoon to Friday morning. That was on our recent university field ecology field trip.
Today I downloaded all the files to a hard drive (156 GB of data) and then I set my little M1 Macbook Air to work, using the offline desktop BirdNet app to identify all of the birds in the recordings.
It took most of the day, and now I have a 42,284 row spreadsheet of birds detected.
It really feels like magic.
Here's a quick sorted lists of all the bird detections with species IDs with a confidence score >0.9.
Together with the students in the course, we'll later compare how birds have changed since we started doing this in 2020, and how the birds in the grassland differ from the forest.
