The Birds Were There the Whole Time

I have microphones outside that listen for birds. A neural net running on a little server chews on the audio around the clock, and every time it’s confident it heard a species, it posts the result to my home dashboard. Common Chiffchaff at 94% confidence. Great Tit. Blackcap. The dashboard is where I glance to see what’s been singing.

For a while, the dashboard said nothing. Every bird…