Field updates and notes

Year 2 deployments begin — six new sites across East Anglia

We've started our second season of the Wild Churchyard Project, deploying Demeter recorders at six new sites across Suffolk, Norfolk, and Cambridgeshire. The sites range from a medieval wool church in Lavenham to a small rural church in the Fens with an ancient yew — a habitat in its own right.

This year we're also trialling a new two-unit configuration at two sites to capture both tree canopy and ground-level activity simultaneously. Early data from the first week of the Charlbury deployment looks very promising — possible spotted flycatcher detected on day three.

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Demeter firmware v1.4 — improved RTC synchronisation and SD card diagnostics

We've released firmware v1.4 for Demeter, which addresses a clock drift issue affecting units running for more than 30 days and adds SD card health diagnostics to the status LED sequence. Update is available via the downloads page.

The RTC drift was traced to a capacitor value in the supercap backup circuit — all units manufactured after April 2025 have the corrected component. Earlier units can be software-corrected with v1.4.

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Why the dawn chorus is earlier than you think

We've been looking at the onset timing of dawn chorus across our Year 1 churchyard data and noticed something consistently surprising: chorus onset on most sites is 30–45 minutes before civil dawn — well before it's light enough to see anything. If you're visiting a site at dawn to listen, you're already late.

This is partly why unattended recorders are so valuable. No alarm clock required, and the data is captured whether or not anyone can be there. We'll publish a full analysis in the next white paper update.

Deploying in frost: lessons from a January churchyard

January deployments are a different experience to summer. We learned some things from our All Saints' Burnham Thorpe winter deployment that are now part of our cold-weather protocol — silica gel replacement frequency, battery warm-up time, and why you should always check the microphone membrane before leaving the site in cold weather.

More field notes

Demeter Pro: what we're building and why

We get asked a lot about a version of Demeter with LoRa connectivity for remote status monitoring. We're building it. Here's an early look at what Demeter Pro will include — and more importantly, a few things we've decided not to include and why.

Systems overview