Date: 3/8/26 12:12 am From: Fred Kaluza <fredkaluza...> Subject: [birders] From 128 kHz to 384 kHz — Bat Edition Launch (20% Off)
________________________________
From: Tim <tim...>
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2026 10:55
Subject: From 128 kHz to 384 kHz — Bat Edition Launch (20% Off)
It’s already been a busy year for us — I can’t believe it’s only February. I had planned to get a newsletter out over the holidays, but instead I went pretty far down the rabbit hole on a new project — more on that below.
This started as a deliberate experiment over the holidays.
I wanted to see how far we could push the existing PUC microphones — could we glimpse the edge of the ultrasonic world without changing the hardware?
It turns out we could push much further than expected.
With some tuning and signal work, the standard PUCs were capturing surprisingly clean audio up to 128 kHz. And in that data, bats began to appear.
Despite living here in Moss Beach for nearly 25 years, I hadn’t realized how active bats were overhead each night. Once we began analyzing the recordings, we discovered multiple species — including open-air calls consistent with Mexican free-tailed bats and higher-frequency Myotis bats — and began building classifiers to distinguish between search, chase, and feeding buzz behavior.
But even at 128 kHz, we were only seeing part of the picture.
We’re excited to share that the BirdNET team has moved BirdNET 3.0 into preview, marking the next major expansion of the model.
This next-generation model represents a major expansion in global acoustic biodiversity detection. With over 11,500 labeled taxa — spanning terrestrial, nocturnal, and ultrasonic soundscapes — this marks one of the largest expansions in automated wildlife sound classification to date.
A Glimpse at the Diversity
* Giant Panda, Moose, Impala
* Northern Cricket Frog, House Cricket
* Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnake
* Vampire Bat
Once the model officially goes live (including human vocal detection), we’ll begin a careful, phased rollout across the BirdWeather network, ensuring performance, stability, and consistency before full deployment.
Charlotte Probst is a fourth year PhD student at the University of Michigan who is looking at the impacts of heat waves on bird activity. Learn more about what is involved and how you can participate :
We can’t thank you all enough for the support you’ve given our little project. Join us in collecting as many sounds, from as many species, in as many locations as we can, while we can.
Thank You!
-Tim, Sam, Vitalii and Yurii (your BirdWeather team)
-- Birders is a service of the Great Lakes Commission. Visit us at www.glc.org
Messages and content distributed on Birders are the sole responsibility of the subscriber providing such content and do not reflect the views, policy or position of the Great Lakes Commission. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Birders" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to birders+<unsubscribe...> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/great-lakes.net/d/msgid/birders/<SJ2PR02MB97084A4AB16B8150E91B6E4BFC78A...>
