Morepork/ruru in Karaka Bay

As many of you know there is a massive effort underway at the moment by Predator Free Wellington (PFW) to make the Miramar Peninsula predator free. As part of this effort PFW have placed some bird monitors around the peninsula to measure the changes in bird life. This way they'll have some objective data to show the impact of their efforts.

Recently they heard about the efforts of The Cacophony Project to automatically identify birds from the recordings and asked if we could find any evidence of specific species in their recordings. One of our researchers, Tim Hunt had applied his morepork detection algorithm to their recordings and was able to generate a list of recordings that likely contained Morepork.

Here's one from Karaka Bay - where you can here the Morepork clearly around 15s into the recording.

Here's one from Centennial Park which is just about all Morepork.

Apparently, it's well known that the Morepork are at Centennial Park. There had been reports of them at Karaka Bay, but this is the first hard evidence. As our species detection continues to improve we should get a lot more stories like this. They provide great reward for all the hard work for groups like the residents of Miramar Peninsula.

Do you know a conservation project that could use some data to verify their species monitoring? Get in touch or check out our bird monitors.