Using Cacophony Project Technology to Find the South Island Kōkako

Every year there are a number of compelling reports of encounters with the elusive South Island Kōkako. This precious bird with a beautiful haunting song was once declared extinct but hope remains of finding it alive and bringing it back from the brink of extinction.

The South Island Kōkako Charitable Trust is on a mission to find any remaining birds and help with the recovery if possible. The first step is to get 100% verifiable identification via sound or photos. It seems most likely that the distinctive song will be the key to this identification.

Currently general purpose sound recorders are used to try and record Kōkako. These just record for a period of time and then people have to manually listen to the whole recording, potentially for hundreds of hours, to try to find a Kōkako. After talking to the South Island Kōkako Trust we think we could modify The Cacophony Bird Monitor to make it much more likely to find a Kōkako. The monitor could be modified to play a Kōkako sound and then listen for a response at several predetermined times during the day. This could dramatically increase the chances that someone reviewing the recordings will find a responding Kōkako.

The nice thing about The Cacophony Project's Bird Monitor is that recordings captured are GPS and time stamped, and then uploaded to cloud storage where they can be accessed over the web. This makes it easier for groups of people to review recordings and for them to be automatically analysed any time in the future.

The obvious next step would be to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to try to find audio recordings that are most likely to be Kōkako. This is a much harder problem particularly given that we have been relying on recordings of North Island Kōkako - recordings of their South Island cousins being almost non-existent. To work around this lack of data to train from, one approach could be to train an AI to look for bird sounds that are sufficiently different from other known species. This could then be used to guide human detection efforts.

Both of these projects are outside The Cacophony Project's current goals around removing introduced predators but our technology is open source and largely applicable to the search for the Kōkako. If you or anyone you know wants to use their technical skills to help this project, please get in touch.

Below is a table with a short description of the parts of The Cacophony Project that are relevant to Kōkako project and a description of how they could be used.