Birdweather PUC Review
By Alan Sheehan
There are a few options when it comes to electronic detection and identification of birds.
See also the bird call sensor network page on this web site for more information.
The simplest and cheapest is to download the BirdNET app to your phone. Using the app, you can record bird calls, analyse them and the app will identify the bird species (or take a wild guess if it can’t and you would like it to). That’s what the BirdNET app is good at. It’s not so good for longer term monitoring and surveys without human supervision and intervention.
That’s where two other solutions come into their own: the BirdNET-Pi and the Birdweather PUC.
The BirdNET-Pi is, as the name suggests, a Raspberry Pi computer, with a microphone, running the BirdNET software. It continuously records and analyses birdcalls and can upload the data to BirdNET and Birdweather online, so adding to a global database of bird distribution and density. A BirdNET-Pi is a DIY project that can be built relatively cheaply.
The Birdweather PUC is a little different, in that it is a turnkey solution so it costs a bit more than building a BirdNET-Pi. At the time of writing (July, 2024) the Birdweather PUC was selling for US$249 in the USA. With exchange rates and freight, that ends up just under AU$500 here.
Apart from bird monitoring and identification, the Birdweather PUC also records the local weather conditions (temperature, humidity and pressure), air quality index (AQI), CO2 levels, and VOCs, as well as light levels and it has GPS and accelerometers fitted to monitor motion and location.
At this stage, it is not clear to me how the PUC measures the AQI, CO2 and VOCs, as these are all prefaced with the letter e (i.e. eAQI, eCO2, and eVOC) denoting that they are estimated. It is not clear if the detectors in the PUC are crude and/or may lose calibration and therefore only estimate the levels, or if the mechanism for these estimates is to use the GPS location of the PUC to estimate the values based on terrestrial measurement stations. The way the sales blurb is written, it suggests the measurements are made in the PUC, but that is not clear. If you are tempted by the PUC for AQI monitoring for health purposes, I recommend doing some thorough research first. If it uses GPS position to estimate from terrestrial measurement stations, then it is probably no better than what you could achieve without it.
Operation of the PUC is very simple (as they claim). It only has one button. Press and hold till the button turns green to turn it on. Press and hold till the button turns red to turn it off. When it’s on, double press the button (it will flash blue) to access setup mode.
Setup mode allows the Birdweather app on your phone to detect and communicate with the PUC and set it up on your WIFI. While the PUC is in range of your WIFI, it automatically uploads detections to the web as they are made. When out of range, it stores the detections on the internal microSD card for uploading when it is back within range of the WIFI. Data is viewed on the Birdweather online app: https://app.birdweather.com/
The feature that attracted me to the PUC initially was the portability. It is promoted for battery operation on your backpack while hiking, so birds can be identified wherever you go. Not that I do so much bushwalking anymore these days, but we do spend a lot of time travelling, so thought it would be good to take with us.
The first time I set the PUC up I had it running on 3 AAA batteries. Watching the voltage from the batteries drop suggests the PUC is relatively heavy on power, and normal alkaline batteries would likely last about 8 hours / 1 day – which is OK for a day of bushwalking. Lithium batteries may last a bit longer.
The PUC can also be powered by USB cable, but the batteries can’t be charged this way – which is a good thing if you don’t have rechargeable batteries in it!
I also have a 50,000 mAh powerbank with a built-in solar charging panel. Using this to power the PUC via a USB cable gave about 3 days (24 hours per day) operation in overcast conditions before it needed to be recharged.
The microSD card inside the PUC is 32GB capacity. At the time of writing we had been travelling for 2.5 weeks in our caravan, so had used the PUC for probably 10-12 days or so in that time and the card was about 25% full, so the microSD card should easily have capacity for a 1 month trip away from the home WIFI. That is of course dependent on the number of bird calls detected, but in two locations we stayed for over a week, the bird calls were pretty continuous.
So why would you choose a Birdweather PUC over a BirdNET-Pi given it’s more expensive? Well, if you are not comfortable building a Raspberry Pi computer, that could be a factor. If you want to take it with you travelling, bushwalking, etc then that may be another factor. The PUC is also weatherproof when operating on batteries (and they recommend special USB cables for weatherproof operation while powered by USB cable) so that could also be a factor when walking or doing field surveys.
Both the BirdNET-Pi and the Birdweather PUC are excellent solutions for continuous monitoring and identification of bird calls, and they share much of the same online technology. (https://app.birdweather.com/)
Citation
@online{sheehan2024,
author = {Sheehan, Alan},
title = {Birdweather {PUC} {Review}},
date = {2024-07-21},
url = {https://oberon-citizen.science/posts/2024-07-21-PUC-review/},
langid = {en}
}