Cacophony Blog

The first version of the Cacophony Index is now live. The Cacophony Project was first started to attempt to answer a seemingly simple question: "is a bird population getting better or worse over time?". We now have a tool available which can start to answer this question.

Author: David Blake

David Blake is a semi-retired property investor who now likes to spend his time trapping pests and planting native trees. From time to time he helps out by volunteering at The Cacophony Project doing some filming and occasionally contributing to parts of the software.

Some of the predator monitoring and trapping solutions we are developing require more power than traditional tools. This article explores why we think the effectiveness of tools is more important than power use for most of the applications we are interested in.

We have created a new tool that allows us to test many different methods to lure and capture predators of any type, using sound and thermal vision. We are calling this tool the Cacophony Predator Lab.

In this blog article, we will discuss how sound lure experiments can be set up to test the effectiveness of various sounds for attracting possums. The sound lure software is configured from a web interface that allows you to upload any set of sounds and play them at any volume or time sequence.

Recent testing of the Cacophony Project's thermal camera has reinforced how good this type of technology is for predator monitoring and control. This blog post highlights the core reasons that the thermal camera developed by The Cacophony Project is a great technology for this application.

The key advantages are:

Last week, Menno Finlay-Smits from the Cacophony Project participated on a Techweek 2019 panel which was centred on the idea of "Tech for Good". The panelists each represented an organisations that each attempt to "do good" in the world in its own way. We discussed various ways that organisations can do this, as well as emerging entity structures that focus on more than just profit.

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 Cacophony Project is fortunate to have many talented people helping to move it forward.

Grant Ryan from the Cacophony Project was featured on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon show on Friday morning. The interview covered a wide range of topics with a focus on the origins and philosophy of the project. Click below to listen for yourself.

The Cacophony Project is an ambitious project with many moving parts. It can be difficult to understand what our technology does and how the various components of the project fit together.

Here's the high level parts of the project and how they relate to each other:

On November 4 2018, the Cacophony Project was privileged to become a signatory of the Banks Peninsula 2050 Predator Free Initiative. Along with key personnel from DOC, Ecan, Christchurch City Council, Banks Peninsula Iwi and Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust, the Cacophony Project's Clare McClennan was present to participate in the signing ceremony held at the Living Springs amphitheater. This historic partnership aims to focus and coordinate efforts to eliminate invasive predators on Banks Peninsula.

The thermal video footage from the Cacophonator devices has proven to be invaluable for machine learning and studying predator behaviour.  Occasionally, however, we noticed that recording for some animals was starting later than it should. In this article we discuss the reasons why this was happening and what we have done to improve our animal detection algorithm. 

The video in this link shows a visual representation of the contributions to the software components of the project over time. The visualisation is based on source code changes pushed to Github and shows the areas of the software being worked on and the people involved. You can see how the project builds momentum as more and more clever people get involved. It also highlights the sophistication of the software that links all the parts of our predator-free projects together.