Saezuri

A living collage of the birds you’re hearing.

A self-hosted display for your BirdNET-Go instance. It watches recent detections and arranges the species you’re hearing into a woodblock-style collage — each bird sized by how often it calls.

Get started View on GitHub

The last 24 hours, one bird per species — larger means heard more often.

What it does

A calm, glanceable view of your local birdlife

Point it at BirdNET-Go and leave it on a screen. Everything runs on your own network — no account, no cloud, no writes.

Sized by what you hear

Each species grows with its detection count in the chosen window, so the regulars you hear most anchor the plate.

Silhouette collage

Birds nest by their actual outline, not bounding boxes — they cluster tightly and organically without ever overlapping.

Live and hands-off

Re-reads the snapshot every 12 seconds and re-packs as new birds arrive. Pauses when the tab isn't visible; refreshes the moment it is.

Time windows

Flip between the last hour, 12 hours, 24 hours, 7 days, or all-time to see who has been around — each one its own shareable URL.

Art arrives on its own

The moment a species is heard, its ready-made kachō-e cutout is downloaded for you — free, no key. Add a Gemini key and anything the library lacks is generated in the same style instead.

Hear what you see

Pick a bird for a card with its counts, when it called, and a play button for a freely-licensed reference recording — cached on your own server, recordist credited.

Names in your language

Species names follow your browser language, in any of the 16 locales BirdNET-Go ships dictionaries for, with a picker to override it.

E-ink friendly

Every window is also a chrome-free PNG at a fixed pixel size, so a small panel can just fetch and show it.

Light & dark

A warm-paper day theme and a charcoal night theme, following your display — easy on a wall screen at any hour.

Self-hosted & read-only

The browser only ever talks to its own origin; a background service reads from your instance and serves only static files. No auth on a LAN, optional token for private setups.

Runs anywhere

One small multi-arch container (amd64 + arm64), happy on a Raspberry Pi and over plain HTTP.

Install

Two ways to run it

Either way you’ll need a running BirdNET-Go instance on your network.

Home Assistant

Saezuri is available as a Home Assistant App (previously Add-on). Add this repository to your app store, install Saezuri, and it appears in the sidebar.

Add it to Home Assistant

https://github.com/vrwrts/saezuri

Saezuri as a Home Assistant App is best paired with the community-built BirdNET-Go Home Assistant app. Saezuri looks for a BirdNET-Go App on startup and will work with it without any configuration needed from you. Alternatively, set BirdNET-Go URL to your instance and leave everything else alone.

Every setting outlined below is available as an option, under the same name in lower case. The full list, including what to do when detection picks the wrong instance, is in the app docs.

Docker

Point Saezuri at BirdNET-Go with a single environment variable.

Run the container (use your instance’s address):

docker run -d -p 8090:8080 \
  -e BIRDNETGO_URL=http://192.168.1.10:8080 \
  -v saezuri-illustrations:/data/illustrations \
  -v saezuri-calls:/data/calls \
  ghcr.io/vrwrts/saezuri:latest

…or with Docker Compose:

services:
  saezuri:
    image: ghcr.io/vrwrts/saezuri:latest
    ports: ["8090:8080"]
    environment:
      BIRDNETGO_URL: http://192.168.1.10:8080
    volumes:
      - saezuri-illustrations:/data/illustrations
      - saezuri-calls:/data/calls
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  saezuri-illustrations:
  saezuri-calls:

The two volumes keep the illustrations and reference recordings it collects, so replacing the container doesn’t start it over. Then open http://localhost:8090 — 8090 rather than 8080, because 8080 is BirdNET-Go’s own default and the two often share a host. Only one setting is required:

Variable	Required	Description
`BIRDNETGO_URL`	yes	Base URL of your BirdNET-Go instance, e.g. `http://192.168.1.10:8080`.
`BIRDNETGO_TOKEN`	no	Token for a private (PrivateMode) instance. Used by the background service — never sent to the browser.

All settings

Everything else has a working default. Set only what you want to change. Under Home Assistant these are options with the same names in lower case, for example frame_width.

Illustrations

Variable	Default	Description
`ILLUSTRATIONS_REPO`	`vrwrts/saezuri-illustrations`	Repo the free pre-made cutouts are downloaded from. Set it empty to turn downloading off.
`ILLUSTRATIONS_REF`	`main`	Branch or release tag to pull art from. Pin a tag for a fixed art set.
`ILLUSTRATIONS_BASE_URL`	derived	Overrides the download base URL entirely. For testing against a local file server.
`GEMINI_API_KEY`	unset	Google AI key. Set it to also generate art, in the same style, for species the library lacks. Uses the paid image API with your key.
`GENERATE_MAX_PER_CYCLE`	`4`	Cap on species generated per run.
`GENERATE_SLEEP`	`6`	Seconds between image-API calls, to stay under the Gemini free tier. Read by the bundled pipeline.

Reference calls

Variable	Default	Description
`CALL_PROVIDERS`	`commons`	Archives to look recordings up in, tried in order. Only Wikimedia Commons today. Set it empty to stop all outbound lookups — here, empty means off rather than all.
`CALLS_MAX_PER_CYCLE`	`4`	Cap on species looked up per batch.

E-ink frames

Variable	Default	Description
`FRAME_WIDTH`	`800`	Frame width in device pixels — set it to your panel. 700 or less switches to portrait packing.
`FRAME_HEIGHT`	`480`	Frame height in device pixels.
`FRAME_BG`	`#fcfcfb`	Background fill. Use something like `#17181c` for a dark panel.
`FRAME_SHADOW`	`1`	Per-tile drop shadow; `0` disables it, which some quantized panels prefer.
`FRAME_WINDOWS`	all five	Which windows to render, e.g. `7d` for a single-purpose panel.

Display languages

Variable	Default	Description
`SPECIES_DICT_LOCALES`	all 16	Which BirdNET-Go name dictionaries to publish for the browser to use. Narrow it to save disk and bandwidth, e.g. `de,nl,en`.

Refresh cadence

Variable	Default	Description
`PUBLISH_DEBOUNCE_MS`	`20000`	Minimum gap between publishes triggered by new detections.
`AGING_INTERVAL_MS`	`120000`	Periodic republish, so windows shed detections that aged out.
`SUMMARY_INTERVAL_MS`	`1800000`	How often the all-time summary — the one expensive call — is refreshed.

Paths

Variable	Default	Description
`FRAME_HTML_DIR`	`/usr/share/nginx/html`	Root the background service publishes into. The image default is right; change it only outside Docker.
`CACHE_DIR`	`/var/cache/saezuri`	Scratch directory for the illustration pipeline.
`PYTHON_BIN`	`python3`	Interpreter used to run the pipeline.
`WORKER_SCRIPT`	`/opt/saezuri/pipeline/worker.py`	Pipeline entry script.

Neither kind of setting fails loudly: a number that isn’t greater than zero falls back to its default, and a comma-list naming nothing valid falls back to the full set — so FRAME_WINDOWS=6h renders every window rather than erroring. CALL_PROVIDERS is the deliberate exception, where empty means off.