Not sure how I stumbled across this but I’m glad, from a June 30, 2025 University of Alberta news release by Adrianna MacPherson, Note: Links have been removed,

A new AI tool that picks out bird and amphibian sounds in audio recordings could improve how ecologists monitor and study Canada’s wildlife. 

“HawkEars is a software package that analyzes audio recordings to identify bird and amphibian species, and it is trained on species that occur in Canada,” says Jan Huus, a retired software developer and avid bird watcher who created the tool. After reading about her research, he connected with ecologist Elly Knight, an adjunct professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, and the two have been collaborating ever since, with support from the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute. 

“These acoustic cues have so much information in them because it’s essentially the currency the birds are communicating in,” says Knight, co-director of the Boreal Avian Modelling Centre with Biodiversity Pathways. 

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Northern Goshawk [downloaded from https://www.birdadvisors.com/hawks-british-columbia/]

The image is from the Bird Advisors’ 10 Species of Hawks in British Columbia – Picture and ID Guide webpage, Note: An audio file is embedded in each hawk species description,

6. Northern Goshawk

Although not very common, Northern Goshawks can be spotted in British Columbia, especially in the provincial parks. They are mostly spotted from September to February.

Northern Goshawks are the bigger and fiercer relative of the Sharp-shinned and Cooper’s Hawks. They are mostly gray with short, broad wings and a long tail and have a white stripe over their yellow eyes.

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Northern Goshawks are residents in Alaska, Canada, and the mountainous west. Some younger birds may migrate to Central States during the winter.

They live in large forests, so they are hard to find, especially as they are very secretive and can be aggressive if you get too close to a nest.

Northern Goshawks live in large tracks of mostly coniferous or mixed forests. They watch for prey on high perches and mostly eat medium-sized birds and small mammals.

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Getting back to HawkEars, Evan Cruickshank’s September 2, (?) 2025 article for The Gateway (University of Alberta’s student newspaper) provides a few more details about HawkEars, Note: Links have been removed,

An artificial intelligence (AI) tool developed during the COVID-19 pandemic is changing how Canadian scientists listen to wildlife. It’s also transforming what they learn from it. HawkEars can track species at risk, assess phenology shifts due to climate change, and fill data gaps for nocturnal or elusive species.

HawkEars identifies amphibians and birds from audio recordings using spectrograms. Jan Hughes, a retired programmer and bird watcher, created the technology during the pandemic. Elly Knight, a professor in the University of Alberta department of biological sciences, began collaborating with Hughes on HawkEars after he reached out to her.

Knight, already experienced with passive acoustic monitoring and boreal bird ecology, saw the tool’s potential and jumped on board. With support from the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute, they’ve been working together ever since.

The AI tool analyzes sound spectrograms, meaning it does not listen to raw audio, but rather looks at the output. HawkEars is able to identify 344 species of birds and 13 species of amphibians.

Monitoring wildlife like never before

According to WILDLABS, tools like HawkEars allow researchers to monitor wildlife at a broad scale and in real time. Having faster and more scalable tools speeds up research as manual fieldwork is time-intensive. The United Nations (UN) has stated that ecosystems are under increasing pressure from climate change and biodiversity loss, these tools are becoming incredibly valuable.

HawkEars also allows researchers to monitor shifts in the distribution of species, behaviour, and abundance within our forests.

“The best approach is a consensus between the AI and the human. If you aggregate the positive detections between the two, you get a better data set than if you just have a human do it,” Knight said.

According to Knight, it’s important to have a Canadian specific classifier as tools like BirdNET and Perch rely on training data sourced from the United States (U.S.). They are less effective in Canada because of how different our species diversity is in the boreal forests.

HawkEars trains exclusively on Canadian data to ensure accurate identification of local species. This makes it ideal for researchers at the U of A.HawkEars is significantly more accurate than other classifiers when used in Canada.

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It’s important to note that HawkEars is not perfect, Knight said. AI struggles in the same way that humans might. Knight specifically mentioned that certain groups of birds, such as sparrows and warblers, are especially difficult to differentiate because of how similar their calls are.

While AI is powerful, it cannot replace trained human listeners. According to Knight, there needs to be a combined effort between humans and AI for the most accurate results.

“There are certainly cases where the AI does [sic] a better choice than a human … but on average, it’s just not as good,” Knight said.

HawkEars is widely available to both researchers and the public. Knight hopes it will help decentralize data collection.

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Nice job Mr. Cruckshank (September 2, (?) 2025 article)!

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

HawkEars: A regional, high-performance avian acoustic classifier by Jan Huus, Kevin G. Kelly, Erin M. Bayne, Elly C. Knight. Ecological Informatics Volume 87, July 2025, 103122 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2025.103122 Under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0 Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

This paper is open access.

For the curious, you can find HawkEars (hosted by Jan Huus?) on GitHub here.