Noctaves
Nocturnal migration monitoring often means spending hours searching through sonograms, looking for the calls that matter. Much of what you find isn't a bird at all — wind, insects, a neighbour's dog, or any number of other sounds. Sonaves does the heavy lifting, homing in on sounds that resemble bird calls and proposing the species they may belong to. Instead of searching the entire haystack, you can quickly focus on the bits you're after.
Sonaves is built for everything that comes around that:
Check that it's recording, adjust its settings, see what it heard last night — from your phone, from anywhere. Just as useful for the unit behind your garden shed as for the one on a headland you visit twice a year.
Detection is where most systems stop. Every observation lands in a review queue where you listen, then accept it, correct the species, or reject it. What comes out is a verified dataset — ready to publish, submit, or use in a paper.
Run one station or a dozen; they all report into the same place. No separate databases on separate SD cards, no merging spreadsheets to compare sites. The audio behind a detection from last April is still there next spring.
Every location has its quirks — a species the global model misses, a local sound it insists is a bird. Set your own detection rules and deploy custom classifiers on top of the standard model, without visiting the device.
Continuous recording produces enormous volumes of silence, wind, and traffic. Sonaves ships none of it. Identification happens on the device and only the clips that matter travel onward — no paying to move and store gigabytes of nothing.
Most nights are quiet. Some are unforgettable. Detections arrive to you as they happen — so when migration peaks, you know that night, not while scrubbing through eight hours of recording the next day.
We custom-build our Sonaves units — no need for DIY setups with buckets, recorders and flimsy cellophane for waterproofing.
Each Sonaves unit combines a 3D-printed true-parabola dish, an electret microphone tuned for bird calls, and a Raspberry Pi that listens, processes and uploads recordings on site. Multiple configurations are available for power and network connectivity, depending on how you plan to deploy your unit. At its simplest, it is plug-and-play straight out of the box — no assembly, no configuration, no fuss.
Sonaves works best where electricity and Wi-Fi or 4G connectivity are available. It is not intended for very remote deployments without connectivity.
| Parabolic dish | 3D-printed, ASA (UV resistant), 28cm / 40cm (quarter segment printing above) / 60cm diameter |
| Recording & Processing | Raspberry Pi 4 2GB |
| Microphone | We are trying multiple setups: Shown here, Clippy EM272 |
| A2D card | We are working with multiple units (Behringer UMC22, Scarlett Solo, IOAudio HAT) |
NocMig is often considered an "extreme birding" activity — long nights, hours of recordings and a lot of time spent searching for the calls that matter. But with the right tools, it can be an activity anyone can enjoy.
Sonaves removes the complexity.
Once installed, Sonaves devices record, process and upload automatically. Results are available through the web, with no SD cards to swap, no files to transfer and no manual uploads. You can simply focus on the birds.
This enables:
Teachers can show students last night's migration activity — locally and across the wider network.
Visitors during the day can hear what passed overhead overnight.
Guests can follow migration activity from their phones and stay connected long after their stay.
Multiple stations can be monitored and compared in one place.
Web interface description goes here.
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