Birdsong may show biodiversity gain

Funding of new water retention ponds for flood mitigation has also offered the Flood Group with opportunities to show that their projects provide additional benefits. Amongst these are increases in biodiversity. One way to measure this is by monitoring bird-song. We have a new highly sensitive recorder which can be programmed to capture sounds at regular intervals. The result is analysed by new AI tools that identify birds.

Our first trial of the equipment and software was near a pond, which we refurbished 18 months ago. It almost completely silted up. Recently, we detected over 30 bird species in 24hours, including woodcock, green plovers, coots and moorhens, several types of owls, and a cattle egret.

We will be returning to the pond every few months to make and analyse similar recordings to demonstrate changes over time.

The pond was refurbished with funding from the The Wildlife Trust BCN

Birdsong recorder (left), AI song analyser (top) and Lapwing discovered in equipment trial