Still Habitat
Open source
Coming soon / Catbird Picnic
An open toolkit for building your own listening network.
Catbird Picnic is the open-source toolkit we are preparing for noncommercial hobbyists and community builders who want to build their own landscape-scale bioacoustic network.
The goal is to connect field recorders across a LoRa radio mesh, then make ecological detections available through a simple API. Listening stations could share results across a landscape without internet at every location, while researchers and builders could use the API in their own maps, dashboards, and field workflows.
one gateway
Open hardware
More ways to build and connect an Ear.
We want to document repairable microphone designs and expand compatibility across more LoRa radio hardware, so builders can adapt a station to available parts, power, and field conditions.
Open software
One place to manage a hobbyist mesh.
Our goal is a centralized open interface and LoRa management layer for viewing results from a mesh of Raspberry Pi 4 listening stations running BirdNET.
This BirdNET-based path is being designed for noncommercial hobbyist use in accordance with Cornell’s license. BirdNET remains separately licensed software, and release materials will make its use and attribution requirements clear.
Still in development. We hope to make the first public release in early 2027. Source code, mesh relay, user interface, API documentation, supported hardware images, compatibility testing, and field validation are not yet ready for public release.
Help test a repairable field network.
Interested in LoRa links, low-power hardware, weatherproof enclosures, microphone design, or local data tools? Tell us what you have built, what you can test, and where you are based. We can discuss a small, defined collaboration and what materials are ready to share.
Discuss a builder collaborationA practical contribution
Bring one useful test.
Share a radio, power, microphone, enclosure, or software question you can help test. We are especially interested in small collaborations that produce a result another builder can repeat.
Catbird Picnic is not yet a supported kit or public repository. We will be clear about what is ready to share, what remains experimental, and what a collaboration would cover.
Discuss a builder collaboration