We trialled seven of these passive audio recorders in Marden last year with a grant from Voltalia (the company that installed the solar array at nearby Claygate) as part of our Turtle Dove project with Kent Wildlife Trust.
For amateurs like us, the licence to use the commercial software to analyse the data (£400+VAT per recorder, per year) cost an ‘arm and a leg’ – or should that be a wing and a leg!
So, Marden Wildlife member Nick de Smith in Goudhurst set about developing our own. It uses the same computer BirdNET database at Cornell University (the one the Merlin app uses) to produce lists of species and then generates a host of charts and analyses at the touch of a button.
As well as by Marden Wildlife members, the software is now being used by ornithologists across the world (including users of other makes of audio recording devices) – Europe, USA, Japan and Australia.
It is free to use by all ornithologists and researchers and Nick welcomes suggestions for improving and developing it, for example by linking bird and meteorological data in real time. His site can be found here: BirdNET-Pulse Report Generator
