As I am an engineer I thought about automating the task as I do not want to get up that early in the morning. The idea was to buy a microphone plug it into a some raspberry pi. Then a node-red flow should automatically trigger recording of the bird songs in my garden every morning. The recorded mp3 file could then be uploaded automatically by the flow to the dawn chorus website.
Uploading the file should be doable quite easy. But does anyone have a good idea what microphone to use and how to record the audio???
I would have thought that a USB microphone would be the way to go. Not actually done this myself but I believe that most if not all USB mics should work automatically on a Pi with no additional drivers needed.
Recording can be done with ALSA so make sure you have that set up correctly. My experiences with Linux sound architecture have been mixed in the past. Like most things Linux, seems that it either just works or is a bit of a nightmare of following tutorials until you hit the right one. The terminal command arecord will record sound so you could at least trigger that from Node-RED to record to a specific file name. Then you could use another flow to do the upload. Both could be on a simple timed trigger node but to track the actual dawn, you will want one of the several contributed nodes that have sunrise calcs built in. Not at home right now so can't get the right name but something like sunrise/suncalc? Or somewhat overkill for this but CRON+ would also do the job.
