What an ear actually sees
Before a sound gets a name, it becomes a picture. This is a spectrogram: time runs left to right, pitch runs bottom to top, and the brighter the mark, the louder that pitch was at that instant. Every ear on this land reads shapes like these.
An illustration. These are synthesized tones, not recordings, but they are analyzed exactly the way an ear analyzes real audio: a short-time Fourier transform over 64-millisecond windows. Real birdsong is messier than this. No audio from this property is published here, because none of it ever leaves the roof.
Heard on this roof
Every species the ears have named, most-heard first. Each bar is shaded by how sure the ear was. We show you the maybes.
Detections are counted at the microphone, not at the bird. Read these as acoustic activity, meaning how often something was heard, rather than as an estimate of how many birds are present.
How it works
Your land, your model. No servers to run, and no audio leaving the property.
An ear records around the clock and names species right on the device, tuned to what's most likely on your land. Identification is built on Perch, Google's open-source bird-audio model (Apache-2.0). No audio ever leaves the property.
All that's published to this page is the result: the species and how sure it is. No recordings, no locations. It updates the moment a bird sings.
Place more ears anywhere on the land. They relay through each other over long-range radio, so coverage grows into a full mesh across the property, and the model keeps learning your place.
The shape of a day
When the roof is loudest, across every day on record.
Who sings when
Each row is a species, each column an hour. Darker means more was heard in that hour.
A species whose rhythm contradicts its own biology is how we catch our own mistakes: anything diurnal showing up at 3am is a false positive, not a discovery.
The record, unedited
Every day the ears have been up, including the days they weren't.
From one ear to your whole property
Full-mesh coverage, and a biodiversity map of the ground in between
One Ear tells you what lives at one spot. A network of them, meshed together and joined to your property's habitat and terrain data, produces something no single sensor can: a quantified biodiversity picture of the entire parcel, including the acres no microphone sits on.
A self-healing mesh
Every Ear relays through its neighbours over long-range radio. No wiring, no cell service, no dead zones. Place them where the land matters, not where the signal is.
Extrapolation between sensors
Each Ear hears its own ground. The model blends what every Ear detects with your parcel's vegetation, terrain, water and soil data to estimate what's using the land in between.
A property-wide record
The result is a biodiversity surface for the whole parcel that sharpens every week the network runs, and can be re-run after any grazing, water or planting change.
This is what turns a gadget into land intelligence. Acre-by-acre biodiversity you can put on a map, tie to a management unit, and measure again next season. On agricultural, grazing and conservation ground alike.
Still Habitat Field Studies
The same ears, deployed as a working-lands study
The roof above has already named 22 species across 3,543 detections, running around the clock. That is the breadth. Take the same ears onto grazing land and they do something sharper: find where wildlife uses the ground, tie it to forage, shade and water, then return after a grazing or restoration decision and measure what changed. Same instrument, pointed at a question.
One afternoon, walked
What one afternoon produced
Eight recordings down a single hillside, from the oak-and-shrub crest to the open grassland by the creek. Green is how much of each recording carried animal sound. Rust is insect and pollinator sound. Where two independent models agreed, we name the bird.
at the oak-and-shrub crest, the busiest place all day, with a confirmed Oak Titmouse.
insect sound at the edge above the creek, ten times any other stop and the obvious spot for a pollinator planting.
spread between four recordings in the same woodland. A vegetation map would call all four identical.
One hillside, eight readings, a picture a map can't give you. The busiest ground for birds and the busiest for insects were at opposite ends of the slope, and the differences inside a single habitat type were as big as the differences between types. That is what listening adds to the layers you already have.
How a listening program actually works
Four roles, one loop
No single recording decides anything. The value comes from running the same loop, and repeating it after a management action.
Discover
A walked recorder screens habitat transitions fast and flags candidate places worth a fixed station. Reconnaissance, not the baseline.
Measure
Stationary ears in the same spot, same schedule, turn a visit into a comparable time series. This is the monitoring backbone.
Explain
Forage, residual cover, water, cattle use and weather explain why the sound changed. Audio never stands alone.
Compare
Treatment vs a matched comparison, re-run in the same season, reveals whether a decision actually moved the land.
Step 1 · walk the ground
The walk that finds the questions
A walked recorder crossed roughly a quarter-mile of oak-studded grazing land. It was a resource mosaic of open grassland (forage & fuel), a wooded draw (shade & refuge) and a creek edge (water & sensitivity). Dot size shows where the land was most alive with sound, and where a permanent station earns its place.
How to read it
The headline
The grassland edges (stops 17 & 24) carried the most sound and the wooded draw the least. an activity map you can plan grazing, water and planting around.
The fixed test
A short walk west, three stationary ears recorded the creek grove overnight. It is a candidate water, shade and sensitivity zone. That's the time-series test, detailed below.
Step 2 · what we heard at each stop
Loud is not the same as known
Every stop gets two scores, and we keep them apart on purpose. Acoustic activity is simply how much of the recording had animal sound in it. Species evidence is a stricter, separate test of whether we can actually name what made the sound. A place can be noisy and unidentified, or quiet and confirmed. Reading one as the other is the most common way this kind of data gets oversold.
Activity counts any animal sound, birds, insects and frogs alike. It is not a bird count and not a health score. Habitat is the cover actually measured inside each recording's own location circle, rather than whatever polygon the pin happens to land on.
Look at stops 24 and 19. The grassland was the second busiest place all day and we still could not put a species to it. The quiet bay-maple draw at 15% is one of only three places where the species evidence cleared our bar. A walk like this is good at ranking where to go back. It is not the measurement.
So we know where the land is busy. That still doesn't tell you whether any of it matters to how the place gets managed. Next: put it against how the land is actually used.
Step 3 · what it means for management
Where cattle want to be, against where the land is vulnerable
Sound tells you where the life is. It doesn't tell you where that's a problem or an opportunity. Two things decide that, and they're independent of each other: how strongly stock are drawn to a place, and how much damage that place would take if they stay. We never roll them into one "good or bad" score, because a place can be heavily used and perfectly tough, or barely used and very fragile. It's where the two overlap that you get a management question worth answering.
Quiet but fragile
Change here would be slow and easy to miss, which is exactly why it is worth a baseline.
Pressure meets fragility
If anything on the property is going to move, it moves here first. The most valuable place to have a before.
Least contested ground
Nobody is arguing over this corner, which makes it a good untreated comparison to read the rest against.
Working ground
Doing its job. Worth a station mainly to show that heavy use is not costing you anything.
Attraction is built from water, shade, forage and travel cost; sensitivity from banks, residual cover, oak recruitment, bloom and wildlife use. On this ground the creek grove is our hypothesis for high-draw by high-sensitivity: gentle footing, a forest, shrub and grass edge, a streambed metres away, which is why it's the first place we'd put a fixed station. It isn't a placement yet. No cattle use was measured on this visit, so the draw axis stays an estimate until somebody walks it.
That's the case for where to listen properly. Next: stations that stay put, so the same spot can be compared to itself a year from now.
Step 4 · put permanent stations in
Twenty metres apart, and the land already sounds different
Fixed stations are what turn a visit into a time series. Even in one creek grove they read a wren-heavy core by the streambed giving way to a goldfinch edge where the shrub opens up. In a real program these aren't clustered for localization. They take three decision roles: treatment, matched comparison and high-quality reference.
Ear 1
southeastA wren-weighted activity core
Ear 2
westThe overlap edge, where goldfinch takes the lead
Fixed stations are the backbone. In a full deployment the three roles spread across the mosaic as treatment, matched comparison and reference, recording for weeks across seasons on identical hardware, so every change is measured against a matched baseline instead of a memory.
Step 5 · act, then come back
This is time zero
A baseline only pays off if you decide the comparison before you act, so weather and site can be told apart from management. We lock the stations and the map now; you make a move; we return in the same season on the same hardware and ask what changed against a matched comparison.
Baseline
- Fixed stations across the mosaic
- Activity by forage / shade / water zone
- Which stations activity favoured
- Every station's exact spot
Management action
- Grazing timing, water placement,
- fencing, planting or fuel treatment,
- with forage, water & cattle logged.
Matched remeasurement
Same season, stations and effort, against an untreated comparison. This is the before-and-after that continues, adjusts, expands or stops the action.
Peak forage and breeding. Where is the opportunity?
Where do shade & water shape use?
Did residual cover & fuel objectives coexist?
Did the move change the trajectory?
What this looks like on a real project
A creek crossing, and the year either side of it
Here's the most common restoration job on California working land, and where a listening program sits inside it. The stock have one dependable water source, so they stand in the creek. The banks are breaking down and no young willows are coming up. The fix is well understood: put water somewhere else, fence the reach for part of the year, plant the bank back. What nobody can usually tell you is whether it worked, or whether it was just a wet year.
Set the baseline
Markers go in at the creek reach being treated and at a similar reach left alone. Both get recorded on the same days, same gear. Bank condition, stubble height and willow counts get written down beside the audio.
This is the part that can't be done retroactively. Once the fence goes up, the before is gone.
You do the work
Off-stream trough, seasonal fencing on the reach, willow and sedge planting. Your crew, your design, your call. We record the date it happened, because everything afterwards is measured from it.
We don't design or install. We're the instrument, not the contractor.
Find out
Same stations, same season, same effort. Song at the treated reach either pulls away from the untreated one or it doesn't. Insect sound tends to follow the bloom coming back.
Bird response runs through vegetation structure, so expect at least a growing season of lag. This is a multi-year instrument.
What would say it worked
Activity at the treated reach rises against the untreated one, and the bank and willow counts move the same direction. Two independent things agreeing is the whole point.
What would say it didn't
Both reaches rise together. That's weather, not your fence. Without the comparison reach you'd have called it a win, and eventually somebody would have checked.
This is the honest version of the pitch. You've been selling habitat work on your word for years because there was no practical way to measure it. This doesn't make the claim for you. It gives you something to point at when a client asks how you know, including the times the answer is "it hasn't moved yet."
The deliverable
The Still Habitat Atlas
An evidence package built to support and defend a decision you make. Private by default, with sensitive locations removed unless you choose to share them.
Private management-unit map
Forage, shade, water, sensitive habitat, infrastructure and station roles.
Two-page plain summary
What changed, how confident, the decision trigger and the recommended response.
Treatment · comparison · reference design
A defensible before/after you can actually repeat next season.
Forage, shade, water and habitat scorecard
Operational and ecological measures kept side by side, no single composite score.
Evidence ledger
Audio, reviewed clips, photos, GIS, effort and uncertainty. Every claim sourced.
Grant & planner annex
Methods, maps, outcomes and a monitoring budget for funding and stewardship.
The trust rule: every headline links to a station, date, valid effort, review state, land measurement, management action and comparison. A quiet or failed recorder is never read as biological absence.
How it fits together
Four ways to listen to land
Start with a single Ear on a roof or a fence line. Scale to a professional deployment when there is a real decision on the table, and keep the network listening long after we leave.
What we don't do. We don't design, plant, build or manage anything. No planting plans, no earthworks, no species lists to install, no advice on how to run your land. If you're working with a designer, a contractor or a grazing adviser, the plan stays theirs and we stay out of it. All we do is measure what's there beforehand and what changed afterwards, which is worth more coming from someone with nothing riding on the answer.
Catbird Ear
The accessible listening product
One always-on ear for a home, a roof, a garden or a paddock. Names species on device, publishes only the detection, and keeps listening year-round. Where most people start.
Field Studies
Professional deployment & interpretation
Three to six Ears across an intervention area and a matched comparison for a week or more, plus a walking transect, site photography and a joint interpretation session.
The Atlas
Your landowner-facing record
The private management map, the plain-language summary, the forage, shade, water and habitat scorecard and the evidence ledger. The document you hand a planner, a funder, a board or a buyer, and the one your designer can point at to show their work landed.
Longitudinal Monitoring
The recurring baseline
We return in the same seasonal window after the work is done, on the same stations and effort, and measure what changed. A permanent Ear stays on the land in between.
The question we exist to answer isn't "we found 14 species." It's what land decision changed because we listened, and can you prove it next season.