https://www.birdweather.com/

I bought a Birdweather "PUC" at a discount via a kickstarter project earlier this year. It showed up just after Christmas and I have been playing around with it for a few days. They still have some things they are working on with battery life improvements via firmware updates, but so far I can see it being a useful tool for doing remote bird census work on properties where people are managing land for birds to get a wildlife tax valuation.

I am getting about 48 hrs of life on 3 duracell AA batteries with it running continuously and connected to wifi. I suspect I can get that higher with some scheduled off time and in listen only mode once they update the firmware. I am toying with the idea of feeding a battery pack with a solar panel and connecting the PUC to that via usb for longer term use.

I have found it to be more sensitive to bird calls than using my phone with the Merlin app and it has identified several birds I would not have heard or seen due to cover, distance, or time of day. Right now we are doing periodic census counts on our property for 10-15 minutes each at a series of points. So many factors can affect what you see and hear on any given day and there are some birds that are just going to hole up and keep quiet anytime we are around. I could see using one or more of these to do weeklong (or longer if I can work out a way to use solar reliably to power it) census monitoring at select locations to get a better feel for what is really out there when I am not around to scare them off.

Here is today's count from our back porch in Bastrop where we don't have many birds around right now.


Trying it in my sister's heavily wooded backyard in Crosby over the weekend, we had around 20 species and over 300 detections in a single day.

Haven't heard of this before, but that seems pretty neat. Do you mind saying what the discount was on kickstarter? $249 isn't too bad, but it would be for a hobby only for me.

I can hear that last one 24/7/365 at my house

Aggie1205 said:

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Haven't heard of this before, but that seems pretty neat. Do you mind saying what the discount was on kickstarter? $249 isn't too bad, but it would be for a hobby only for me.

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I paid $179 for the PUC and I think $15 for a tripod. I am hoping the $249 will be an "MSRP" and they will routinely sell them cheaper in the future.

B-1 83 said:

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I can hear that last one 24/7/365 at my house

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I suspect your wife would agree. We live on the edge of a pasture/prairie and there is a seasonal pothole wetland that is dry right now. I suspect the coot and the yellowlegs have stopped there in past wetter years. Hopefully it will refill some with the rains we had yesterday and are expecting over the next week.

I'm in Costa Rica right now. I set my phone by the window today and started the Merlin app. I recorded 28 species in about one hour! Several parrot species and a really neat Tanager was in the mix. The app doesn't seem to let me review the recordings and see the species once the recording stops.

marcel ledbetter said:

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I'm in Costa Rica right now. I set my phone by the window today and started the Merlin app. I recorded 28 species in about one hour! Several parrot species and a really neat Tanager was in the mix. The app doesn't seem to let me review the recordings and see the species once the recording stops.

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If you click on Sound ID, under the record button is a link to "My Sound Recordings" that will let you sort through them and see the species for each one.

First thing I would try is to sub in 3 Energizer Lithium AA's and see how long that gets you.

I would be very interested to see results of the comparison.

I used a set of those, and they only lasted about 36 hours or so, but they were about 5 years old, so I am not sure it was a fair comparison.

Interesting....I know they won't freeze like an alkaline will also.

Animal said:

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Interesting....I know they won't freeze like an alkaline will also.

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Their website FAQs seem to suggest they would last longer, so I am pretty sure mine were just old and not in prime charge when I put them in. Since I don't live on the property I am going to be monitoring, I am really looking for a way to run it full time without a need to change batteries out. I am thinking a small camping type solar panel with a battery pack and a USB plugged to the PUC is my best solution for continuous operation. We did just install a wifi repeater antenna that should cover a good chunk of the property. So if I can get the power situation worked out, we should be able to have a realtime network out there monitoring 24/7.

txags92 said:

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https://www.birdweather.com/


I am getting about 48 hrs of life on 3 duracell AA batteries with it running continuously and connected to wifi. I suspect I can get that higher with some scheduled off time and in listen only mode once they update the firmware. I am toying with the idea of feeding a battery pack with a solar panel and connecting the PUC to that via usb for longer term use.

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Seems strange that, if they are marketing it partly as a "Bird Weather Station", that it would not have the ability to accept an outside power source like a solar panel (as all weather stations do).

It can accept outside power, but only via a usb-c connection. But it wont recharge batteries from that connection. I can see that being an improvement that they add in the future.

txags92. That is damn cool. Did not know anything like that existed. Thank you for sharing this very much.
Might need to get me one !
Thanks again.
Post more about it!

I figured that out this morning! The problem is that I've recorded so many birds within the first hour, the app just spins its wheels trying to load up all the sound. I'm recording some really neat birds down here.

txags92 said:

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It can accept outside power, but only via a usb-c connection. But it wont recharge batteries from that connection. I can see that being an improvement that they add in the future.

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OK. I read the USB-C connection as "data only" on the website. Without charging batteries, the point is still the same; it's not going to sit out there and continuously gather data like a weather station does.

I agree, that would be a considerable improvement in the future (with it, I would consider buying one of these).

goatchze said:

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txags92 said:

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It can accept outside power, but only via a usb-c connection. But it wont recharge batteries from that connection. I can see that being an improvement that they add in the future.

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OK. I read the USB-C connection as "data only" on the website. Without charging batteries, the point is still the same; it's not going to sit out there and continuously gather data like a weather station does.

I agree, that would be a considerable improvement in the future (with it, I would consider buying one of these).

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Yeah, I think their initial idea was to make a mobile/transient station that people could carry with them or stick outside to see what birds were around them, and they probably realized the research implications of it down a road a ways on the design. Probably also had a price point they were trying to hit and had to make some compromises. Based on what they have been sending out in their updates and in their community discussions, I can see this being their first version with upgrades and improvements coming in the future. It will be very useful as is but will be moreso in the future if they add some other power options.

Are you getting the updates via email or somewhere else?

Aggie1205 said:

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Are you getting the updates via email or somewhere else?

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I am viewing the real-time results using the BirdWeather app. You can also connect via USB or pull the micro SD card and download a .csv file with all the detection data.

I was curious about the updates you referred to about their future development plans. If those were via an email list or not. I'm on the fence and would be curious if there could be a version two as you referenced.

Thanks for the heads up on this product.

Aggie1205 said:

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I was curious about the updates you referred to about their future development plans. If those were via an email list or not. I'm on the fence and would be curious if there could be a version two as you referenced.

Thanks for the heads up on this product.

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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scribelabs/birdweather-puc/posts

That is the link for the original kickstarter project and they have posted a series of updates, mostly dealing with shipping updates and whatnot, but they have also discussed some of their planned firmware updates. There is also a community there with a quite active exchange between users and the creators. I haven't seen anything concrete about a "version 2.0", but some of the things they seem hopeful about adding in the future would probably need slight hardware tweaks that would work best in a new version.

Being a kickstarter, this was obviously a way to get their product out to the public in large numbers with the upfront funding taken care of. Now that they have proved the concept (at least in my eyes), I expect they will want to keep improving their product to stay ahead of the inevitable competition that will come around.

Gotten to use this more? Still happy with it? I joined their message board for updates.

Very cool. Thank you for sharing.

Gunny456 said:

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Very cool. Thank you for sharing.

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Thanks for the bump. I have not had the chance to take this out to the property for an extended test of a solar/battery pack setup yet, but just running it on my back porch for a few weeks, it has been a bit of a mixed bag. It definitely is more sensitive as a microphone than a phone using the Merlin App. However, it has a tendency to try to make a lot of man made sounds into what it thinks are bird calls, and for some birds I know we have, it is not yet accurately IDing their calls. For instance, our neighbor has a very high pitched wind chime that it keeps wanting to call a golden crowned kinglet. It sometimes IDs police sirens off in the distance as Common Loons. And it is consistently IDing what I know to be Redwinged Blackbirds as Common Grackles. They have a tool to reject their IDs that seems to be helping it learn a bit, but with several hundred call IDs every day, it is a bit of a tedious process.

I am hopeful that getting it out onto the property where it will have a quieter environment overall and fewer human generated sounds will clean up some of that. But their IDs still need more work before I would trust this as a single source for census work. But I can see the improvement happening and I think they will get there eventually.

Sorry, replied to wrong post. See above for an update.

Really interesting, can you see the synthwave data stream for the calls?

We use wildlife acoustics which are, much more expensive, but potentially less prone to ID errors. Having this automatically run the calls against birdNet removes a step that we have to manually do. The WA version is wildly accepted by science professionals - wonder if this would be.

OnlyForNow said:

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Really interesting, can you see the synthwave data stream for the calls?

We use wildlife acoustics which are, much more expensive, but potentially less prone to ID errors. Having this automatically run the calls against birdNet removes a step that we have to manually do. The WA version is wildly accepted by science professionals - wonder if this would be.

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Yes, you can look at the wave pattern for each call and listen to what was recorded. There is a thumbs up/down button available, but as of now, no direct feedback where you can enter text about correcting the call. There is also no mass edit function that I am aware of that will allow you to go tag a group of calls as all being incorrect. You still have to go through one by one. With the RWB and Grackle mis-ID, we were having a flock of RWBs come in to our feeders and hang around for a while, so that would generate at least a couple dozen calls per day. It has gotten now to where it gets about half right, but I think that is also because some of the males are doing their song calls, and not just the "chuck" calls that are very similar to a grackle call.