Documentation

Home Screen

The main screen is your hub for everything Terra. At the top you'll see Your Terra & Accessories — a horizontal carousel of your connected Terra Stations and sensors. Tap any station to start listening and viewing detections.

Below that, Global Feeds shows public curated listening stations from around the world — Cape May Point, tropical rainforests, coastal beaches, and more. These are free and unlimited for everyone.

If someone has shared access to their station with you, it will appear under Guest Feeds.

The Explore section features Migration Watch and other network-wide tools. Pull down from the top of the screen to refresh your stations at any time.

Live Listening

Tap a station to begin streaming live audio. A player bar appears at the bottom of the screen with play/pause controls and the name of the station you're streaming.

On iOS, you can use the AirPlay button to route audio to external speakers, Apple TV, or HomePod.

Bird Identification

When you select a station, you'll see several tabs. The Live ID tab shows real-time bird identifications as they happen, powered by Cornell's BirdNET AI which recognizes over 6,500 species.

Each detection card shows the species name, a photo, the confidence percentage, and the time it was detected. Tap the play button to hear the 3-second audio clip that triggered the identification.

You can help improve accuracy by voting on detections — tap thumbs up if the ID is correct, or thumbs down if it's wrong. You can also share interesting detections.

Other tabs include:

• Likely — Species statistically expected at this location and time of year
• ID History — Past detections, filterable by time range (last 60 minutes, 24 hours, or week) and sortable by name, taxonomy, time, or species
• Yard List — Every unique species ever detected at your station
• Weather — Current conditions at the station's location
• Status — Station health: CPU, memory, disk, temperature, uptime, GPS, WiFi, and audio metrics

Use the search box at the top to quickly find a specific species in any tab.

Species Notifications

Want to know the moment a specific bird is heard? Go to Settings → Notify me on these species. Search for a species by name and add it to your notification list.

Each species has a confidence threshold (default 60%) — you'll only be notified when the AI is at least that confident in the identification. You can enable or disable notifications per species, or remove them entirely.

Radio Tag Tracking

The Radio Tags tab shows wildlife detected by Terra's built-in radio receivers. There are two sub-tabs:

• Blu Series (2.4GHz) — Bluetooth-based tags that require only one transmission to validate a detection
• UHF (434MHz) — Traditional Motus tags that require at least two consecutive transmissions within a short time window to validate

There are only several thousand birds tagged at any given time — even a single detection is meaningful and provides invaluable data to science.

Migration Watch

Access Migration Watch from the Explore section on the home screen. It displays a 24-hour detection heatmap across the entire Terra network.

The map is divided into grid cells (approximately 70 × 70 miles). Darker cells mean more stations detected the selected species in that area. Only identifications with 60% or higher confidence are shown.

Use the species dropdown to filter the map to a specific bird. Navigate between days to track how migration patterns shift over time.

Live Map

View all Terra Stations on an interactive map. Green markers indicate online stations, white markers indicate offline. Tap any station to see its details, recent detections, and yard list.

Explore Wild Sites

From the Global Feeds section on the home screen, browse curated listening stations from around the world. Tap any location to start listening live — completely free and unlimited. No Terra Station required.

Settings

The Settings screen gives you full control over your Terra experience:

Station Settings

Each Terra Station has its own settings, accessible by tapping the gear icon on a station. These include:

• Station name and icon — Give your station a custom name and choose from 16 preset backyard images
• Stream settings — Bitrate (128–320 kbps), low pass filter, and high pass filter
• Audio settings — Automatic gain control, gain level, and sound level thresholds
• Motus receiver control — Enable/disable external antennas for 434MHz and 2.4GHz radio tag detection (only enable if you have an external antenna connected)
• WiFi settings — Option to disable 5GHz WiFi for extended range
• Night Mode — Invert LED behavior for dark environments
• Reboot — Remotely restart the station

Enabling Field Recording Mode

Go to your station's settings in the app and scroll to Field Recorder Mode. Toggle Recording Enabled to turn it on. You can configure exactly what gets recorded:

Storage Capacity

Terra Station has 32GB of onboard storage, with approximately 20GB available after the operating system and software are installed (this may vary slightly with software updates). That's enough for up to 300 hours of audio in MP3 format, or less in FLAC depending on environmental noise levels. Bird clips are 3 seconds each and take very little space, so you can accumulate thousands of identifications before storage becomes a concern.

Powering Your Terra Station

Terra Station accepts up to 24VDC input. The included power supply outputs 20VDC to mitigate voltage drop over the 30-foot cable, but Terra will run just fine on 12VDC — making it compatible with solar and battery configurations.

For off-grid deployments, we recommend:

• A LiFePO4 battery (lithium iron phosphate) for reliable, long-lasting power
• A charge controller matched to your battery and panel
• A 100W solar panel — though the size you need will depend on the amount of sunlight available at your location

Terra Station has also been successfully run using a 12VAC to 12VDC converter box, making it compatible with some landscape lighting wiring systems. Since AC power can travel much further than DC without significant voltage drop, this can be a practical option for reaching remote areas of your property using existing landscape wiring.

Retrieving Your Data

When your Terra Station reconnects to WiFi, recorded data syncs automatically with Terra's cloud servers. Bird IDs, radio tag detections, and metadata will appear in the app and on the Live Map as if they were detected in real time. Audio clips are uploaded in the background.

You can also retrieve data directly from the device using the local web portal — see below.

Local Web Portal

Every Terra Station runs a local web portal that you can access from any device on the same network. Open a browser and navigate to your Terra Station's IP address (you can find this in your router's device list or connected devices page).

The portal is password-protected. Set your local portal password through the Terra Listens app or Featherworks.

Status Dashboard

The main page shows real-time system health: CPU load, memory usage, disk usage, system temperature, firmware version, uptime, WiFi signal strength, and recording status. It refreshes automatically every 5 seconds.

WiFi Management

View, add, or remove WiFi networks directly from the portal. This is useful if you need to reconfigure WiFi without the app — for example, when deploying to a new location.

Hotspot

When Terra Station loses connection to all known WiFi networks, it can create its own WiFi hotspot so you can still connect to it. From the portal, you can enable or disable the hotspot, set a custom name, and add WPA2 password protection.

Recording Settings

Configure field recording directly from the portal without the app. Toggle continuous audio recording, AI bird identification clips, Motus radio tag logging, GPS logging, FLAC vs MP3 format, and set the minimum confidence threshold for detections. You can also enable automatic overwrite of old files when storage is full.

Downloads

This is the main way to retrieve field recording data directly from the device. Data is organized into five categories:

• Recordings — Continuous audio recordings in FLAC or MP3
• ID Clips — 3-second audio clips of identified birds
• ID Metadata — Detection data including species, confidence scores, and timestamps
• Motus — Radio tag detection records
• GPS — Location coordinate logs

You can download individual files, download an entire category as a ZIP archive, or delete files to free up storage. Files are sorted newest first with file sizes displayed.

Antenna Configuration

Toggle between internal and external antennas for both the 434MHz (UHF) and 2.4GHz (Blu Series) radio receivers. Only enable external antennas if you have one connected — enabling without an antenna will reduce detection range.

Use Cases

• Remote research sites — Deploy Terra with solar power in locations without WiFi. Retrieve data periodically by bringing the station within range of a hotspot.
• Temporary deployments — Set up Terra at a field site for a day, a week, or a season. All data is waiting for you when you reconnect.
• Motus stations — Run a full Motus-compatible receiver in the field. Radio tag data is stored in SensorStation format and pushed to the Motus network upon reconnection.
• Backup recording — Even with WiFi connected, enable field recording as a local backup of all detections and audio.