From What to Who? AI Learns to Recognize Individual Animals

Summary

Image credit: Quang / Adobe Stock Individual ID in Chatty Species In the wild, zebra finches don’t sing in isolation. They move through dynamic social groups, calling and responding to one another across space and time. For ecologists, understanding this communication requires knowing who is communicating with whom , and how information flows through a group. Tracking communication at the level of individuals, however, has long been out of reach, especially in highly social, “chatty” animals that operate in large groups. In natural soundscapes, following specific birds across time requires painstaking manual annotation, and even then, it’s difficult to scale beyond small datasets or controlled settings. Recording of wild zebra finches by Hugo Loning This challenge brought together two different perspectives. Dr. Hugo Loning , an ecologist studying wild zebra finches, and Dr. Aneesh Chauhan , an AI and robotics researcher exploring bioacoustic monitoring. Together, they began exploring how AI can help identify individual birds in the wild. To do this, they applied BirdAVES , a self-supervised bioacoustic model developed by Earth Species Project. This approach aims to make it possible to recognize individual zebra finches from field recordings, turning hours of audio into “who-sang-when” timelines and enabling new questions about social behavior, movement, and information sharing. Their paper was accepted at the first AI for Non-Human Animals Workshop at NeurIPS 2025. We spoke with Hugo and Aneesh about how the collaboration came together, what it takes to study communication in the wild, and how tools like BirdAVES are helping bridge the gap between ecology and AI. ⮕ How did this collaboration between ecology and machine learning come together in the first place? [Hugo] I first met Aneesh after attending one of his talks on a collaborative project on local biodiversity monitoring with colleagues in my group. For that project, Aneesh had used classical bioacoustic monitoring methods and BirdNet to identify which species were present and to measure broad biodiversity metrics in a local organic community-run garden and in a University farm in Brazil, and was now wondering whether his results made sense. I approached Aneesh after the talk thinking I could potentially help validate his results as I am a reasonably knowledgeable birder in our region. At that point…