A year of
listening.
How 2026 sounds and looks, up to today. Figures refreshed daily.
In 2026 the stations collected data on 243 days, starting 1 January 2026.
The eight regulars.
A small group of species accounts for the bulk of all recordings. Tits, crows, blackbirds and their neighbours pass by every day. Further down the list, sightings become rarer: from common tree dwellers to the occasional striking migrant.
- 01 Common blackbird 324,827
- 02 Common swift 277,502
- 03 Eurasian blue tit 150,883
- 04 Eurasian magpie 113,337
- 05 Great tit 97,715
- 06 Common wood pigeon 94,197
- 07 Western jackdaw 75,438
- 08 European robin 42,984
Ultrasound from the dusk.
The Ultramic microphone sits on the roof and listens from sunset onwards for anything above human hearing. Pipistrelles dominate, with the occasional visitor from a rarer genus.
- 01 Common pipistrelle ~49 kHz
- 02 Unknown bat ~26 kHz
- 03 Leisler's bat ~28 kHz
- 04 Serotine bat ~32 kHz
- 05 Nathusius's pipistrelle ~39 kHz
- 06 Common noctule ~21 kHz
Who bred here in 2026.
- Box Nestkast AchterEurasian blue titactiefTo the story →
- Box Nestkast MiddenNo breeder this yearemptyTo the story →
- Box Nestkast VoorNo breeder this yearemptyTo the story →
Four Pis, a NAS,
a few thousand lines of code.
Everything you see on this site comes from equipment in the garden and the shed. Four Raspberry Pis, a Synology NAS, a Davis weather station and some homemade Python and TypeScript. No subscriptions, no cloud platform. Just open source code and our own electricity.
Read the full technical story →- BirdNET-Pi · three listening posts, 24/7 bird recognition
- BatDetect2 · bat detection above 20 kHz
- FastAPI + Postgres · all data through a single API
- Astro 5 + Vercel · this site, static where possible
- Cloudflare Tunnel · NAS behind a fixed hostname
- MQTT + SSE · live detections to the browser
Next year, even better.
I want to make the dataset more robust, add more photos and notes, and over time also a few real field trips with the mobile station. What you see now is a first full year. What stands next year is a second year, with the same equipment in the same place, so that changes only become really visible.