Bird song analysis on Banks Peninsula

Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust has installed a number of Bird Monitors to measure the impact of the efforts to eradicate pests. Over the past couple of years over 38,000 recordings have been made as these have been rolled out.

At the time of writing the bird monitors can only recognise morepork/ruru. With a little bit of pivot table work you can see which bird monitor has the most morepork. Here the winner was Onuku with 3.2% of recordings containing morepork. The names of the property owners have been removed.

As we get the ability to recognise more species of birds we will be able to retrospectively apply that to all these old recordings. This is why it's useful to start recording now.

You can see that the Flag Peak Bird monitor has the highest Cacophony Index - our measure of the amount of bird song. However that bird monitor only had 85 recordings at the time - so that may have been luck. With over 11,000 recordings the Onuku bird monitor probably wins the Cacophony Index competition as well.

Interestingly these values haven't changed significantly over time. However we would expect them to if significant planting or predator control started to impact bird populations.