Record
Autonomous stereo recorders capture the natural soundscape inside or near an aviary, including overlapping calls and environmental noise.
FIELDWORK & DATA
From aviary sound
to research data.
Recorders listen over days. Short audio clips and zoo population records help us test whether models can recognize species and estimate how many birds are present.
HOW IT WORKS
One recording, many questions.
Prepare
Long recordings are split into short clips. For BioDCASE Task 6, the released clips are approximately three seconds long at 48 kHz.
Compare
Models analyze the audio. Known species inventories and population counts let us compare predictions with zoo records.
THE RECORDER
Why two microphones?
Our published recording setup uses a Frontier Labs BAR-LT autonomous recorder with two microphones. Stereo audio gives us two views of the same acoustic scene, which can support spatial analysis and help assess the consistency of detections.
Recorders collect sound without needing an observer in the aviary all day. They also capture the hard parts of real monitoring: silence, overlapping birds, visitors, and changing activity across hours.
Image: Azure-winged magpie. This is a species photo, not a photo of the recorder or an example recording.PUBLIC DATASET
A subset released for BioDCASE
BioDCASE 2026 makes a curated subset of our wider zoo recording collection available for the bird counting challenge. The full collection is larger and is not represented by this download.