trailside-birder

Trailside Birder

An offline bird-call companion built on open models. Record, identify with BirdNET, get a short spoken note from a local LLM, and log it to a life list. No internet needed on the trail.

Setup

1. Install Ollama: https://ollama.com, then ollama pull gemma3:1b
2. pip install -r requirements.txt
3. Optional, for speech: install espeak-ng (Linux/Pi: sudo apt install espeak-ng; macOS uses say)

Use

python trailside.py                      # record 15 s, identify, speak
python trailside.py --voice kid          # journal | kid | expert
python trailside.py --file bird.wav      # analyze an existing recording
python trailside.py --model qwen2.5:1.5b # swap the model
python trailside.py --lat 23.02 --lon 72.57 --quiet

Sightings are saved to ~/.trailside_life_list.json.

Website

Open website/index.html in any browser (single static file).

Notes

• BirdNET model weights are CC BY-NC-SA: non-commercial use only.
• BirdNET’s command-line flags and CSV columns can change between versions; if the analyze step fails, check the BirdNET-Analyzer docs and adjust identify().
• Untested on hardware as written. Report what breaks in your field test. # trailside-birder