Tāne Mahuta

Which bird is that?

Record a few seconds of birdsong and get the three most likely native birds of Aotearoa, Māori name first. Ten species for now. Nothing you record is kept unless you choose to contribute it.

0:00 / 0:30

Press to record for up to 30 seconds. Stop early with the same button.

No bird nearby? Score one of the gallery’s xeno-canto excerpts instead. The result is labelled as a sample.

Manage a contribution Paste a token to check or delete a clip you contributed earlier.
About this prototype What it is, which birds, where the sounds came from.

Tāne Mahuta is a working prototype of a bird-sound identifier for Aotearoa New Zealand, in the spirit of Merlin Bird ID. It listens to a short clip, splits it into three-second windows, and scores each window against ten native species. The result is a ranked guess, not a certainty: when the model is unsure it says so.

The ten species

  • tūī Tūī Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae
  • kererū New Zealand pigeon Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae
  • ruru Morepork Ninox novaeseelandiae
  • pīwakawaka New Zealand fantail Rhipidura fuliginosa
  • korimako Bellbird Anthornis melanura
  • riroriro Grey warbler Gerygone igata
  • kākā New Zealand kākā Nestor meridionalis
  • pūkeko Pūkeko Porphyrio melanotus
  • tauhou Silvereye Zosterops lateralis
  • kōtare Sacred kingfisher Todiramphus sanctus

Where the sounds came from

The model is trained on recordings shared by recordists on xeno-canto under Creative Commons licences. Every recording and its recordist is listed in ATTRIBUTION.md. Because some of those recordings are non-commercial licences, this demo, its model and any dataset derived from it are non-commercial too.

Where the photos came from

Each species photo is a resized copy of a CC0, public domain, CC BY or CC BY-SA file from Wikimedia Commons, chosen by a script that refuses anything else. The photographer and licence are shown under every photo and listed in IMAGE_CREDITS.md. The sample calls in the gallery are short excerpts of xeno-canto recordings and carry their recordist and licence beside the play button.

What happens to your audio

Identifying a clip stores nothing: the audio is processed and discarded. The only way a clip is kept is the “Contribute this clip” panel, and only with the consent you give there. The full policy is in DATA_GOVERNANCE.md and the model’s limits are in MODEL_CARD.md.

Built by Lui Hellesoe under KiwiData, an Indigenous-governed AI and data sovereignty venture.