Signal

birdd can join a Signal group and create observations from chat messages.

Commands

!saw

Records an observation. !saw takes a required subject and supports trailing tags and a note. Structured extension fields can be provided after ::. Any media attached to the message is stored with the observation when your flock has media enabled.

!saw <subject> [#tag...] [-- note] [:: field=value...]

Examples:

!saw Red-tailed Hawk
!saw creek flooding #water #trail -- near the footbridge

The fields accepted after :: depend on the extension profiles installed by your node operator. For example, the optional bird count profile accepts:

!saw Common Loon :: count=3

!today

Shows up to ten observations from today (by calendar day as configured on your flock’s node). Results include the local flock and directly trusted remote flocks. Add here to include only observations by the local flock. See Trust, federation, and audiences for how remote visibility works.

!today
!today here

!recent

Show the newest observations. The default limit is five.

!recent
!recent 69

Note

birdd has an arbitrary 4096-byte message limit to avoid signal errors/abuse filters. birdd truncates results at the message limit. Interested in contributing to birdd? I’d love a patch to paginate long result sets!

!search

Find up to ten observations using a case-insensitive subject search.

!search loon
!search red-tailed hawk

!obs

List observations whose subject exactly matches after normalizing case and whitespace. If no exact subject exists, Birdd suggests grouped partial matches.

!obs Common Loon
!observations common loon

!show

Show one observation and any media available on this node. Use a short reference returned by another command or the full observation UUID.

!show 0198abcd
!show 0198abcd-1234-7000-8000-123456789abc

!profiles

List the structured metadata profiles installed on this node, or show the fields and example for one profile. !profile is an alias. The profile names below require the optional bird count manifest.

!profiles
!profiles wildlife

Profile fields follow :: in a !saw command. The profile name can be explicit, or Birdd can infer it from its fields.

!saw Common Loon :: wildlife count=3
!saw Common Loon :: count=3

!help

List all commands or show focused help for a command or profile.

!help
!help saw
!help wildlife

For profile inference, validation, receipts, and extension output behavior, see Signal integration.