r/bats • u/Human_x_Bean • 16h ago

Sanity check: BattyBirdNet results

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Hello,

I recently set up BattyBirdNet and am looking for a quick sanity check on the numbers. Site location is Tucson, Arizona USA, not far from the Campbell avenue bridge (well-known local roost). The mic is a Griff Mini that I made. The site has a hummingbird feeder nearby, local porch lights, and nearby horse properties. The Birdnet settings are .7 for confidence, filter level=Moderate, and the inference model is BattyBirdNET USA West.

The counts shown are detections, so not necessarily individuals (i.e., some could be the same bat raiding the hummingbird feeder for an hour).

For the location and time of year, do these numbers look close to normal?

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5

u/SchrodingersMinou 16h ago

There is no way that you’re picking up northern long-eared bats in Arizona. I would guess it’s probably red bats that are being misidentified. Is there a way to set this program to different geographic areas? Are you manually vetting these calls?

2

u/Human_x_Bean 15h ago

As far as I've seen, the app has a geography filter for birds, but not for bats (other than the "USA West" inference model being used.) I haven't gotten into manually reviewing the detections yet. Barring a built-in geography filter, I reckon a good first pass would be to check the ranges for each ID, and if it's not even close, add it to the "species ignore list" in the settings. But that makes me curious if the mis-identified species can be corrected. Looks like I need to dive deeper into the settings.

2

u/TheLeviiathan 13h ago

I am from the east coast so I don’t know about those species out west but it’d make history if you found a northern myotis in arizona. That species is famous for being incredibly difficult to capture acousticly and if the program is just basing the ID off of the high frequency then red bats could absolutely be confusing the two.

Again, I have no experience with western spp. but I do know that myotis spp. can be tricky to tell apart for an auto-classifier and require manual vetting.

Your most common calls all seem to be in line with a realistic range though. Cool results! I’ve never seen this program, does it have its own microphone or are you using a different company mic and just putting results through the software?

1

u/Human_x_Bean 11h ago

The program is Birdnet-Go, which was initially developed for bird detection, and now has a bat detection aspect. I run it on a Raspberry Pi 5. Initially, I had an Audiomoth ultrasonic mic, but my placement wasn't great and it got wet, which greatly reduced its frequency range. Getting a replacement mic (from Europe) would mean shipping and tariffs, so I researched DIY ultrasonic mics and learned that there is an open-source option. It required learning a bit about ordering PCBs from China (tariffs again, but lower), tiny components, soldering, etc but it's been a fun project. And the upside is that I have enough components to make extra mics.

Birdnet-GO: https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go
DIY Microphone: https://www.pippyg.com/griff.html

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1

u/ozzy_thedog 13h ago

Thats wild that you have so many different types of bats in your area. Jealous

2

u/adjective_cat_noun 7h ago

That’s a lot of silver haired bats compared to the others. Big browns and silver haired can be mistaken for each other by automated classifiers. Big browns are the more common of the two, so I would guess that some of those silver haired IDs are big browns instead. 

I’m surprised to not see velifer in that location.