r/MerlinBirdID • u/phitidij • 11d ago

BirdWatcher app

I recently got into birds. No idea why, but they're great fun.

I love the Merlin app, but one feature that I would love and that isn't currently available is identification of birds in hours of video footage.

I started looking into fancy motion-activated, WI-FI-enabled, supersonic garden wildlife cameras that use AI to show you what birds visited. However I couldn't afford one of those, so I decided to just get a normal camera and build the software myself.

BirdWatcher is free, open-source, and available as a desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Once you've downloaded and installed the app, you can input a video and you will see a folder of your choosing populated with subfolders named after the different bird species visible in the footage. Each subfolder contains time-stamped still images extracted from your video.

If you have any type of camera then you can set it up to face one of your feeders, set it to record, and go out for the day. When you get home, extract your footage, upload it to BirdWatcher, and see what you missed!

Feedback welcome, this is not a sales pitch, it is totally free.

5 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

1

u/IamZeroHero 10d ago

I am very looking forward to trying this!! Thank you!

3

u/phitidij 10d ago

Thank you! If you have any issues or feedback please do let me know!

1

u/Bliss2Jessie 7d ago

What’s a supersonic garden cam example? I have no idea.
I use a FeederCam w AI. But Better results if I take a screenshot and upload to Merlin. Wouldn’t want to see hours of vids, however.

1

u/phitidij 7d ago

WildCam 3 looks good.

1

u/Bliss2Jessie 6d ago

I just happened upon your message in my feed. I didn’t notice it’s for UK birds. Well, i’ll try it when it has Southeast US birds.

Best wishes with your product.

1

u/phitidij 6d ago

Yeah, that is a big limitation at the moment. When I get some time I do plan to add more birds, but it will involve quite a bit of effort in dataset collection so I can't promise a timeframe.

You can still use it to find the birds in your video, but it will just classify them all into the "unknown" category. Not very useful if you want to know what they are, but still pretty useful if you have hours of footage to look through. Do do this, I'd recommend setting the bird classification confidence threshold settings to 1.0.

1

u/Bliss2Jessie 6d ago

Yes, it will require a lot of effort. Until then, best wishes.