How birdlife is changing in Akaroa

We recently significantly expanded the number of birds that can be recognised by the DOC AI Cam. As a result of this we've also added the option to re-process old recordings made by the original bird monitors or the DOC AI Cam.

To test this we reprocessed the recordings from Grant's old bird monitor in Akaroa. There were over 45,000 one minute recordings from 2019 to 2022. The previous analysis had only detected morepork and that was from June 2021. The analysis took about 5 days for us to run and would have cost $380 ex GST.

Once it was complete we exported the data into a spreadsheet and did some basic analysis using pivot tables. The first just shows the number of recordings taken each month. You can see the monitor wasn't running all the time.

The next shows the average number of times the most popular birds appeared in recordings, split by the years. If a bird appeared in every recording it would have a value of one.

This is interesting. Some of the main trends are:

• Blackbirds dropped significantly
• Moreporks/rūrū dropped in 2022
• Belbirds and Tūī both increased

This lines up with what Grant was seeing in his back yard, but it's nice to have some objective measures of this. It also shows the value of making the recordings, even if we can't identify the birds you're interested in now.

The next step is to reprocess some of the recordings from his DOC AI Cam (another 10,000 or so), so we can get some more current data.