Haikubox: Helping consumers better understand backyard birds
Head outside on a spring morning and you may be amazed at the volume and variety of birds singing. Experiencing a dawn chorus can bring a feeling of happiness and well-being, and it may seem like the birds are singing just to express their joy at being alive. In truth, singing loudly from a treetop or hidden perch is one of the ways birds communicate. This singing is usually done by males who are trying to let nearby females know about their breeding readiness or fitness, and letting potential rivals know that they’ve staked out and are defending territory.
Many other animals use sound to communicate, and scientists are using their vocalizations in new ways to understand the animals that produce those sounds, including their behaviours, diversity and distribution.
Haikubox is one of the newest bioacoustics products making a scientific contribution, while also helping consumers better understand their backyard birds. Haikubox may focus on birds, but its roots are in the deep, dark oceans.
As a biological oceanographer, my research has predominantly focused on ocean bioacoustics – the sounds made by whales, dolphins, manatees and fish. Ocean animals often live in places where visibility is poor, so animals frequently communicate using sound. The best-known example may be the songs and rumbles produced by whales which vocalize to communicate over vast distances, but other aquatic animals also make sounds, including dolphins which whistle, manatees which squeak, and fish which drum, croak, click and chirp.
At Loggerhead Instruments, we’ve developed autonomous audio recorders to help oceanographers conduct passive acoustic monitoring studies. Researchers around the world deploy these recorders to learn where underwater creatures live, when and where they migrate and spawn, and even to discover new soniferous species.
Bioacoustics is one tool being used to find and study the highly endangered North Atlantic Right Whale – by better understanding how they migrate and where they are, researchers hope to protect them from deadly ship strikes or entanglements. Other researchers are using acoustic monitoring to gauge boat traffic in marine protected areas, identify the spawning grounds of commercially important fish like Red Grouper, determine if pile driving or other anthropogenic underwater noise impacts animals, and record vocalizations from unseen, and possibly unknown, sea animals.
We are developing new recording devices which harness the power of AI. This new generation of passive acoustic recorders can identify animals’ unique vocalizations automatically and in real-time. This is an especially promising technology for protecting Right Whales and other marine mammals, since it may help vessel operators avoid them if they are known to be nearby.
This non-generative AI is also what fuels Haikubox, which uses technology originally developed at the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to identify birds using their songs and calls. We are organically growing a geographically dispersed network of bird monitoring devices, one backyard at a time. Each time someone installs a Haikubox, they not only contribute their recordings to future scientific studies, they also have real-time information about the birds right outside their door.
While it is still an early-stage product, we’ve already shown success in informing people about their local environment and improving their understanding of how small changes can make a big difference for conservation. We’ve heard from customers who have shared their excitement about stepping outside to spot or listen to a new species, and who now think about their yard as a microhabitat that they can improve for birds.
I’ve taken my own conservation steps: we installed native plants that will provide insects and berries to local birds, and we better appreciate our trees that support owls, gnatcatchers, warblers, and waxwings – all bird species we learned about because of our Haikubox. A 2019 paper showed that over 3 billion birds have been lost in the last 50 years, with common backyard birds suffering some of the worst losses. Individuals making even small changes can have a big impact on the future of bird populations.
The Haikubox network has already collected over 1 billion bird identifications and recordings and along with researchers at the Cornell Lab, the team recently published its first peer-reviewed scientific paper focused on how birds reacted to North America’s April 2024 total solar eclipse. We believe it is the first continent-wide look at birds’ reactions to a total solar eclipse that didn’t require a human presence (which can influence bird behavior), and it provided some surprising results.
We are grateful for the support we’ve received to develop these products from the National Science Foundation (NSF), NOAA and the Department of Energy, which made it possible for our tiny company to facilitate scientific discovery and conservation efforts.
