Your First Detections
From a blank account to your first identified bird, in about 15 minutes. All you need is the web address of your BirdNET-NG hub (something like https://birdnet.example.com) and an Android phone.
The same walkthrough lives inside the app at
https://<your hub>/welcome, in the app's own look, with a download button for the Android app and your hub's address filled in. Share that link with new users; this page is the reference copy.
1. Create your account
Open the hub in a browser and click Register, or use the invite link someone sent you (it pre-fills your team membership). Some hubs are invitation-only: if registration tells you so, ask the person who shared the hub for an invite link. You are signed in right after registering.
Optional but recommended: add two-factor authentication later under Account → Security.
2. Create your team
If you registered without an invite, the app greets you with a Create a new team screen. Pick a name (the slug is generated for you) and confirm. You become the team's owner: you can configure everything, invite people, and add recording devices.
If you joined through an invite instead, you land straight on your team's dashboard with the role the inviter chose. Note that only admins and owners can register new recording devices.
3. Have a look at the settings (optional)
Everything works with the defaults, so you can skip this at first. When you want to tune things, Tenant settings holds:
- Language: bird names and reports in your language (38 languages available).
- Detection visibility: whether non-bird sounds the AI recognises (frogs, insects, human voices, ...) appear in your lists. Off by default.
- Minimum confidence: how sure the AI must be before a detection is recorded.
4. Install the app on your phone
On the phone, sign in to the hub in a browser, open the Satellites page and tap Get mobile app. Android will ask you to allow installs from your browser ("install unknown apps"): allow it and open the downloaded APK.
The app keeps itself up to date afterwards: when a new version is released, a banner appears and one tap installs it.
Details, permissions and troubleshooting: Satellite: Android.
5. Register the phone as a satellite
Open the app, enter your hub address and sign in with the account from step 1. Give the phone a name ("Garden", "Balcony south", ...) and let it grab its GPS position, or place the pin on the map yourself. The position matters: the AI uses it to know which species are plausible at your location and season.
Grant the permissions the app asks for: microphone, location, notifications. Also accept the battery-optimization exemption so Android does not stop the recording in the background.
6. Start recording
Tap the big record button. That is all. The screen can be off; recording continues in the background with a persistent notification. A phone plugged into a charger near an open window, or outside under a roof, works great.
No internet for a while? The phone stores audio locally and uploads when connectivity returns.
7. Watch the detections come in
- On the phone: the Live tab shows a listening pulse, a spectrogram, and every detection as it happens.
- On the hub: the Dashboard shows recent detections (with photos), and the Detections page lists everything with audio playback and a spectrogram.
Early morning (the dawn chorus) is by far the most active time; a quiet afternoon can go an hour without a single bird. If a test is needed right now, playing a bird song from a speaker works.
Each detection stores the 3-second audio clip, so you can always listen back and judge for yourself. Not sure the AI got it right? The Verification page lets you confirm or reject detections, which improves the system for everyone.
8. Go further
- Invite your family or team: Members page. Viewers can watch and verify; admins can add more phones.
- Alerts: get an email (or Slack, Telegram, Discord, ...) when a rare species shows up. The rare-species and first-of-season rules are already set up; just add a channel on the Alerts page.
- Reports: the PDF icon in the header builds a printable report of your detections, with species photos, maps and charts.
- Analytics: activity heatmaps, biodiversity indices, species timelines, weather correlation. It grows more interesting as data accumulates.