Common Tasks

Short, copy-pasteable answers to “how do I…?” Each links to the page with the full story.

Get a phone alert when a rare bird shows up

1. Create an Apprise URL for your service (Telegram, Pushover, ntfy, Discord…).
2. Set it: BIRDNET_NOTIFY_URLS=tgram://bottoken/chatid (or via /admin/settings → Notifications). The station sends to Telegram directly — BIRDNET_APPRISE_URL is the base URL of an Apprise server, not a destination.
3. Set BIRDNET_NOTIFY_CONFIDENCE=0.85 so only solid detections ping you.
4. Use the rare-bird rules so you’re alerted on new or unusual species, not every robin.

See Notifications & Integrations.

Get one alert per species per day instead of per-detection pings

Choose the First of each species, daily trigger (--notify-trigger new-species-daily, in the onboarding wizard or /admin/settings → Notifications) to get one alert per species per day instead of one per detection. The trigger modes are each, new-species and new-species-daily; there is no evening-digest mode — the weekly report e-mail is the closest thing to one.

Keep a recording forever

Retention is disk-based — old clips are purged once the disk fills. Open the Today page (or a species’ recordings), and use the lock action on the detection. Locked clips are never purged. See Recording & Retention.

Fix a misidentified detection

On the Today page, use re-label on the row to correct the species, or delete it if it’s pure noise.

Cut down on false positives

Nudge the confidence threshold up — see the full Tuning guide. For a single noisy species, add a per-species threshold instead of raising the global bar.

Listen to last night’s owl

Go to Recordings, filter the Clips list to Rare (or search the owl’s name), pick the clip, and play it inline. The History calendar is the fastest way to jump to a specific night.

Add a second microphone or an RTSP camera

Use Cameras and streams on the Capture tab, or set BIRDNET_RTSP_URLS= with comma-separated URLs. You can run several sources at once.

Expose the dashboard to the internet (safely)

The dashboard is LAN-reachable by default (0.0.0.0:8502) — fine at home, where viewing is open and /admin is protected by the auto-generated password. For anyone else on the network, --tls-mode self-signed brings HTTPS up on 8503 with a certificate the station generates itself. But never port-forward either port straight to a public IP: encryption is not exposure-proofing, and a self-signed certificate carries no publicly-trusted name. Put it behind a reverse proxy with a real certificate and a password, or use a VPN — see Remote Access & Security. To restrict it to the local machine instead, set BIRDNET_LISTEN=127.0.0.1:8502.

Send detections to Home Assistant

Set BIRDNET_MQTT_HOST and BIRDNET_MQTT_HA_DISCOVERY=1. The station registers itself automatically and the latest detection appears as Home Assistant entities. See Integrations Reference.

Back up everything before an upgrade

Download a full backup from the Data tab and keep it off the station — the automatic snapshots run weekly and live on the station’s own card, so they will not help you if the upgrade takes the card with it. Take one manually right before you update.

Move my data to a new Pi

Download a full backup from the Data tab on the old Pi, install on the new one, and restore the archive there. Your detections, settings and recordings come across. Restoring overwrites whatever is on the new station, so do it before you start collecting on it.

Import my old BirdNET-Pi history

See Migrating from BirdNET-Pi — it’s a safe, read-only import at /station/data#import (the old /admin/migrate redirects there).