Touch Grass Birder: a bird call identifier that works with no signal

A developer built Touch Grass Birder, an open-source bird call identifier that runs entirely on-device, combining the BirdNET acoustic model with Gemma 3 1B via llama.cpp behind a small FastAPI server. The app records six seconds of audio in the browser, identifies species locally with no API key or network round trip, and optionally generates plain-language field notes, keeping location data on the user's own hardware. The project is MIT licensed and available on GitHub.

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass https://dev.to/challenges/hf26 . Touch Grass Birder is a bird call identifier that runs entirely on your own machine. You tap Listen , hold your phone up for six seconds while a bird sings, and it tells you what you are hearing. Then you put the phone away and go look for the bird. That is the whole point: the screen is the shortest part of the experience. It is built for the places where phone apps usually give up. A trailhead with one bar. A tent before sunrise. A county park where the migrant warblers are passing through and you have no idea what you are listening to. What it does: No API key. No audio upload. No network round trip. Live demo: https://touch-grass-birder.onrender.com https://touch-grass-birder.onrender.com The hosted demo runs BirdNET, so you can point it at a recording right now. Gemma field notes are generated when you run it on your own machine a free Render instance is too small for the 0.8 GB model — make models && make run . https://github.com/mukuvi/touch-grass-birder https://github.com/mukuvi/touch-grass-birder — MIT licensed. Two open models, both running on the device, wired together behind a small FastAPI server. php flowchart LR A Phone browser<br/ records 6s, encodes WAV -- B FastAPI B -- C ffmpeg<br/ decode to 16-bit mono WAV C -- D BirdNET acoustic model<br/ open, local inference D -- E species + confidence E -- F Gemma 3 1B<br/ open-weight via llama.cpp F -- G plain-language field note E -- H data/sightings.jsonl<br/ your field log G -- A H -- A The pieces: AudioContext decodes it, and a small function in app.js writes a real 16-bit mono WAV Blob before it is sent. No server-side audio processing is needed to get a usable clip. llama.cpp CLI for a two-or-three sentence field note: what the bird sounds like, where and when you would hear it, and one field mark to look for. If the model is not present, the app simply skips the note and still identifies the bird. /api/identify , /api/sightings , /api/health , and the static app , and data/sightings.jsonl is the field log. Everything is configuration-overridable LLAMA BIN , GEMMA MODEL , MIN CONF , LLAMA THREADS , BIRDER DATA DIR so the same code runs on a laptop, a Raspberry Pi, or a phone-adjacent machine. This project only exists because the models are open. A closed bird ID API cannot work where birds are. Every closed identifier needs a round trip to a server. The best places to hear birds are exactly the places with no signal. Running BirdNET locally means the app is not a worse version of a cloud service in the backcountry, it is the only version that works there at all. The screen time is six seconds because there is no upload, no spinner, no retry; the answer is already on the device. Location data stays on the device. A rare sighting is sensitive. A closed app learns where you were and when, which is a real concern for anyone watching nesting sites or reporting a scarce species. Here the only record is a line in a file you own, on hardware you control. The app never has a server to send it to. Open weights mean I can change the model. Gemma runs from a local GGUF, so swapping to a larger Gemma, a different quantization, or a completely different model is a path change and an environment variable, not a vendor negotiation. I can fine-tune on my own regional species list later, and the bird classifier itself, BirdNET, is open source and inspectable, which matters when the output is a claim about the natural world. It costs nothing to run. There is no per-identification fee, no rate limit, and no API key to expire. A birder on a budget, a school group, or a citizen-science project can run this indefinitely. The open pieces are not a compromise here. They are the feature. The offline, private, zero-cost version is strictly better than the closed one for the use case the app is actually for. I built this with an agent, and the session is saved so you can see the process: render.yaml . Built for Hacktoberfest 2026. Files, models, and data never leave the machine: no key, no upload, no network.