Today

Today (/) is the home — the page you leave open. It answers “what’s happening in the yard right now?” before you ask, and it’s the merge of what used to be two separate screens (the Dashboard and the Today log): the live “right now” view and the full searchable day are now one calm page.

Coming from an older build (or from BirdNET-Pi)? The old /today address still works — it redirects here.

The five layers

1 · The glance. The hero leads with a plain-English, comparative headline — “A busy morning.” — computed from today’s count against your last 30 days, so a quiet day and a record day read differently at a glance. Beside it, the live signal card shows the last 30 seconds of audio. It is honest: it animates only while real audio is arriving from the capture device and falls back to a flat baseline labelled idle when nothing has been heard recently — never a fake waveform. A row of pills carries the recording state, current weather, sunrise/sunset, and your station’s name and coordinates. If the station cannot read its list of audio sources, the recording pill says the state is unknown rather than claiming there is no microphone.

2 · The nudge (only when it matters). A calm strip appears under the hero only when something needs your eye: rare detections waiting in the review queue, or an outage warning when capture has gone quiet during daylight. When all is well and quiet, it’s absent entirely. If the station cannot read the review queue, the strip says so instead of staying absent, because absent is how “nothing is waiting” looks.

3 · The shape of the day. The day strip plots the whole day on one 24-hour timeline — an hourly histogram of how busy each hour was, an amber temperature line overlaid on the same axis, labelled sunrise/sunset markers, and a “now” line. The header carries the day’s peak hour, dawn-chorus count and total.

4 · The heartbeat. One unified log. The live feed streams new detections as they arrive — each row a time, a species avatar (its four-letter banding code in the species’ own colour), the names, a mini call-waveform, the confidence, and a play button; a freshly arrived detection rises in with a brief moss pulse. The full day sits behind one “Show the full day” disclosure, where you can search (prefix NOT to exclude), filter by Rare / First today / High confidence, and lock, re-label or delete any detection. The list auto-refreshes, so a page left open stays current.

5 · The support rail. Today’s top species (with sparklines), the day’s best recordings, a one-line station-health readout, and quiet “looking back” links into Reports.

Arranging the page

A station on a kitchen tablet or a visitor-centre wall rarely needs everything an operator debugging a microphone does. The Today Page Layout section at the foot of the full settings page (/admin/settings, the Settings entry of the admin menu) lists the page’s parts in their current order, each with Move up, Move down and Show/Hide. Every press is saved at once.

Parts move within their own area: the headline, the nudge and the day strip among themselves at the top; the top-species, best-recordings and station cards within the side column. The detection log keeps its place and can only be hidden. Hide the log and the side column takes the full width; hide every side card and the log does. The order is the page’s real order, so a screen reader and the Tab key follow what is on screen.

The list also holds Your picture: one photograph of the site, or the last frame of a camera, with a title, between the day strip and the log. It is empty, and so invisible, until you give it a file under Settings → General → System & Display → Today page picture (see Settings).

A new station shows everything until its first detection, so the setup checklist in the headline cannot be hidden by accident.

First run

A brand-new station — one that has never heard a bird — shows a friendly “getting ready” checklist in place of the live signal (microphone detected, model loaded, disk headroom, listening…) plus illustrated empty states, so the very first hour is an activation moment rather than a blank page. The page comes alive the moment the first call lands.

Light & dark

The whole UI honours your operating system’s colour-scheme preference and remembers any manual override. Dark mode is a cool “observatory” black tuned so the moss and dawn accents glow rather than muddy.

Every page carries the same top navigation, theme toggle and global species search, so you’re never more than one click from any home.