This #MakerMonday, we’re sharing a story from Raspberry Pi Official Magazine that reminds us of Raspberry Pi’s origins by encouraging young people to get into computing. We were thrilled to hear about this student’s Raspberry Pi–powered project from all the way over in Arizona, United States.

Perhaps it’s just because we’re ignorant Brits, but when we hear ‘Tucson, Arizona’, images are conjured of arid deserts, mountains, and soaring thermometers. Despite this, young maker Finnegan has created a rugged outdoor device using Raspberry Pi to record birdsong — A-BiRD: Automated Bird Recognition Device.

“[He] was just named a 2025 Davidson Fellow, a national award for exceptional young people,” his mother, Miriam, tells us via email. “[A-BiRD] runs on a Raspberry Pi mini computer and is built around Cornell’s BirdNET analyser. Using these compact processors, his system has logged over 21,000 bird songs from 98 species here in Tucson.”

According to Finnegan’s report, global bird populations are mainly tracked by analysing reported sightings, and these populations seem to be in decline.

“While acoustic monitoring has been explored, few systems autonomously identify bird species and estimate call direction in the field,” reads Finnegan’s description of the project. “To address this gap, I developed A-BiRD… to identify species by song and [use] proprietary embedded algorithms to determine the direction of origin.”

You can find a full breakdown of the project on the Davidson Institute’s website.

This story was first shared in issue 163 of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

You can grab this issue from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, WHSmith, and other newsagents, including the Raspberry Pi Store in Cambridge. It’s also available from our online store, which ships around the world. And you can get a digital version via our app on Android or iOS.

You can also subscribe to the print version of our magazine. Not only do we deliver worldwide, but people who sign up to the six- or twelve-month print subscription get a FREE Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W!