RSS & Calendar Feeds

The station publishes lightweight, public, read-only feeds so you can follow your yard from a feed reader or a calendar app without leaving a browser tab open.

The rare feeds list first-ever-at-this-station detections with confidence above 0.85 (strictly > 0.85) — a low-noise stream of genuinely new birds. The today feed is every detection from the current day (chatty by design).

Discovery

The dashboard advertises the rare RSS feed in its <head>, so feed readers offered the page will find it automatically:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
      title="BirdNet · rare detections" href="/feeds/rare.rss">

Each feed item links back to the detection detail page for that bird, and the iCal events carry a stable UID, a 3-minute duration, and the same detail link.

BNB_BASE_URL — make the links absolute

Feed items need absolute URLs so they work in an external reader. Set BNB_BASE_URL to how the station is reached from outside:

BNB_BASE_URL=http://birdnet.local        # mDNS on the LAN
# or
BNB_BASE_URL=https://birds.example.com    # behind a reverse proxy

If unset it defaults to http://localhost:8502 (the server’s own port). A request can name its own base with ?base=…, which is how a reverse proxy gets the scheme and path prefix right, but only for an address the station already knows: the host the request was addressed to, or the host of BNB_PUBLIC_URL or BNB_BASE_URL. Any other ?base= is ignored and the default is used, so a feed address cannot be made to point at someone else’s site. If a proxy rewrites Host and your readers pass ?base=, set BNB_BASE_URL. Cap item counts with ?limit=….

Caching

RSS responds with Cache-Control: private, max-age=300 (5 minutes); iCal with private, max-age=3600 (one hour), since calendar clients repoll slowly. Both say private, so a shared cache or CDN in front of the station will not keep a copy. An empty station still returns valid, well-formed XML/iCalendar.

These endpoints are unauthenticated and expose the same information as the public dashboard. If you gate the UI behind a reverse proxy, decide whether to expose /feeds/* alongside it.