All data is live and sourced as locally as possible. The bird detections come from a microphone in the garden. The weather is from a station on the roof. The river level is from an EA gauge 500 metres away. The flight data is from planes actually overflying this location. Where local sensors aren't possible — fell summit conditions, wildlife sightings, wild swimming classifications — the best available APIs and community data are used instead, clearly labelled throughout the site.
All data flows through the same pipeline — sensors and APIs feed into Home Assistant and Node-RED running at home, which publishes everything to a public MQTT broker. The website subscribes directly from the browser — no backend, no server costs. The bird and bat detectors each keep their own database as the source of truth, queried and published on a schedule, so the public site stays simple while the underlying records stay safe.
Bird Detection
BirdNET-Pi
Open source acoustic bird monitoring. Raspberry Pi 4 4GB with USB microphone, runs BirdNET neural network in real time. Detects species from audio and publishes via MQTT apprise to the local Mosquitto broker.
Bat Detection
acoupi · BatDetect2
Raspberry Pi 4 4GB running acoupi with BatDetect2 neural network and AudioMoth USB microphone. Detects UK bat species in real time at dusk, publishing detections via MQTT with time-expanded audio saved for playback.
Home Automation
Home Assistant
Open source home automation platform running as a VM on a Lenovo ThinkCentre running Proxmox. Collects weather station data, triggers automations, provides the webhook for analytics.
Data Processing
Node-RED
Visual flow-based programming tool running as a Home Assistant add-on. Processes all data streams, handles notifications, and relays each detector's database to the public site — the databases themselves are the source of truth.
Messaging
MQTT · HiveMQ
Lightweight publish/subscribe protocol. HiveMQ's free public broker relays all data from home to the website. Retained messages mean data survives page refreshes.
Weather Data
Ecowitt via HA
Personal weather station on a pole mount feeding into Home Assistant. Temperature, wind, rainfall, solar radiation, UV, lightning, humidity and pressure — all live.
River Data
EA Flood API
Environment Agency's real-time flood monitoring API. Free, no key required. 9 stations covering the Glenderamackin, Greta, Derwent and 4 lakes. Updated every 15 minutes.
Fell & Weather Cam
Reolink · Node-RED
Reolink WiFi camera mounted in the garden pointing toward Blencathra. Node-RED saves a snapshot every 5 minutes during daylight. Live image shown on both the Fells and Weather pages, with a full day time-lapse viewer.
Flight Data
FlightRadar24 · HA
Home Assistant FlightRadar24 integration detects flights entering a 15km radius around Threlkeld and fires events into Node-RED for processing and storage.
Mountain Weather
Open-Meteo
Free weather API with no key required. Queried at specific summit elevations for real summit conditions — not valley readings extrapolated upward.
Wildlife Data
iNaturalist API
Community science platform. The API returns verified research-grade observations within 10km of Threlkeld. No key required. Updated in real time as observations are verified.
Maps
Leaflet · OpenStreetMap
Open source mapping library with OpenStreetMap tiles, styled with a CSS dark-theme filter. Used on the wildlife observation map and fell summit map. No API key, no usage limits.
Hosting
GitHub Pages
Free static site hosting from a public GitHub repository. No server, no database, no build process — just HTML, CSS and JavaScript files committed and pushed.
Notifications
HA · iOS Companion
Push notifications via the Home Assistant iOS companion app. New species alerts delivered immediately during waking hours, queued overnight and sent at 8am. Daily dawn chorus summary at 8:45am with yesterday's top species, best confidence score and first detection. Rare Cumbrian species flagged separately.
Almost zero. GitHub Pages is free. HiveMQ's public broker is free. Open-Meteo, iNaturalist, the EA API and OpenStreetMap tiles are all free with no key required. The only costs are home electricity for the Raspberry Pis (~£3/month combined) and the hardware purchased once.
📖 Reviews now live on the Naturalist pageSep 2026 · Monthly and seasonal reviews now appear right where you're browsing the daily diary — pick a month or season and its review sits at the top, with the day-by-day record and species firsts below
📅 Seasonal reviews, automaticallySep 2026 · Beneath Blencathra now writes a Season in Review every quarter — 1 Mar, 1 Jun, 1 Sep, 1 Dec — alongside the monthly ones, entirely on its own, no manual trigger needed
🌧️ Rain gauge upgraded to a tipping bucketSep 2026 · The weather station's piezoelectric rain sensor had been giving faulty readings, so it's been replaced with a traditional tipping-bucket gauge for steadier, more reliable rainfall going forward
📰 Beneath Blencathra — printable monthly reportsSep 2026 · Monthly weather and wildlife reviews now lay out as a proper printable report, almanac-style, with inverted black-on-white charts and one-tap PDF export
🌧️ Monthly Weather Review now uses real historical rainfallSep 2026 · With the on-site gauge's own record affected by that fault, the review now falls back on the Environment Agency's historical archive for the nearby station instead — verified, durable data for every past month — and will return to the local gauge once its new sensor has built up a trustworthy history · The report also judges "wet" or "dry" against this valley's own multi-year rainfall record rather than a generic English average
🦇 Monthly Wildlife Review now reliably includes batsSep 2026 · Fixed a chain of bugs that left the report generating once and then serving that same stale, batless copy every month · Each report now regenerates properly and reflects that month's real bird and bat activity in full
🛡️ Bat detection history hardenedSep 2026 · The stored record now self-heals from its backup file if the detector restarts, and the storage cap raised tenfold so a full season of nightly passes is never truncated
🗺️ Summit map moved to open tilesSep 2026 · Switched the fell summit map from CartoDB's dark tiles, now requiring a paid key, to free OpenStreetMap tiles with a CSS dark-theme filter · Also fixed a timing bug that occasionally left the stargazing and northern lights cards blank on first load
⚙️ Data & How-To pageJun 2026 · Every feed downloadable in JSON or CSV, plus a full build-your-own guide — the sensors, the pipeline and the code, so anyone could put one on their own patch. Open data, openly built
🐿️ Red squirrel camera (beta)Jun 2026 · A feeder camera that wakes on motion, then uses AI vision to tell red from grey · Reds are celebrated and logged; grey incursions are recorded for local conservation · Take a look →
✉️ Weekly nature emailJun 2026 · "This Week in Threlkeld" — a free Sunday-evening summary of the valley's week, opening with a written naturalist's account and the week's figures across birds, bats, weather, river and sky
🛡️ Backed up every which way, watched overJun 2026 · Databases, scripts and the automation flows back up off-site nightly, and each detector's whole SD card is imaged to a spare drive weekly · A status dashboard now watches every backup and feed, quietly raising the alarm if any one falls silent
📖 Valley Firsts, woven into the recordJun 2026 · The Naturalist's daily diary now interleaves each species' first appearance of the year as markers in the timeline — one continuous record of the valley announcing itself, day by day
🌅 Dawn chorus vs sunriseJun 2026 · Tracks the first confident birdsong each day relative to Threlkeld's sunrise · Robins and Reed Buntings reliably open the valley before first light
🌧️ River level vs catchment rainfallJun 2026 · The Glenderamackin's level overlaid with rainfall in its upper catchment near Mungrisdale · Watch the river answer rain on the fells, hours later
🧠 The AI Naturalist gathers everythingJun 2026 · The daily summary now draws on dawn chorus, river and rainfall alongside birds, bats, weather and sky — weaving the day's threads into a single written account
🦇 Bat detection calendar + per-night speciesJun 2026 · Year-grid heatmap matching the birds page, with each night's species breakdown on tap · Nightly species data published from the detector's own database
🛡️ Detection data made bulletproofJun 2026 · Both bird and bat histories now read directly from each detector's own database as the single source of truth, published reliably and backed up nightly · Robust by design, no data at risk
🦇 Bat detector launchedJun 2026 · acoupi + BatDetect2 on Raspberry Pi 4 · Live species detection, species summary, activity charts, time-expanded audio playback
📷 Fell & Weather Cam + time-lapseJun 2026 · Reolink WiFi camera with live snapshot and full-day time-lapse viewer on both Fells and Weather pages · Updated every 5 minutes during daylight
📅 Bird species activity calendarJun 2026 · GitHub-style heatmap showing daily detection counts across the full year, powered by complete detection history
🌱 GDD bird cross-referencingJun 2026 · Growing Degree Day milestones now confirmed by actual BirdNET detections · Swift arrival confirmed
✈️ Flight total counterJun 2026 · Running total of all flights logged, night flights tracking, aircraft photo in last seen card
🌊 EA flood alertsMay 2026 · Live flood warnings for Rivers Greta and Glenderamackin area
🐦 Bird detection storageMay 2026 · Complete detection history retained in the BirdNET-Pi database · Powers the calendar, species summary and phenology
🌡️ BirdNET-Pi monitoringMay 2026 · Temperature, fan status and IP published to Home Assistant
🌱 Phenology loggingMay 2026 · First detection date per species per year logged automatically · Back-filled from full detection history
🌌 Northern Lights forecastMay 2026 · NOAA Kp index with aurora likelihood rating for Threlkeld at 54.6°N
🌱 Growing Degree DaysMay 2026 · Accumulated heat units since 1 Jan with seasonal milestones cross-referenced against bird detections
⭐ Stargazing conditionsMay 2026 · Cloud cover, moon phase, visibility and Bortle 3–4 dark sky rating for tonight
🌤️ 7-day weather forecastMay 2026 · Open-Meteo forecast with hourly breakdown added to weather page
✈️ Flight mapMay 2026 · OSM tile map with SVG flight markers, tooltips and trail lines
📱 PWA appMay 2026 · Installable as home screen app on iPhone and Android · Works offline with cached data
The project is actively growing. Several hardware builds are planned or underway for 2026: