STEADY ACRE
A living library of the wildlife on your land
Cricket · Acoustic Intelligence
LISTENING...
A living library of the wildlife on your land

Hear every species
that calls your land home.

Cricket listens day and night. It names every bird, owl, coyote, frog, and insect it hears, so you (and your guests) get a real picture of the life on your property.

Become a pilot site For properties ↓
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115 species and counting Real-time on-device AI Birds, owls, mammals, amphibians, insects Continuous 24/7 listening Pinned to your land's map Audio you can play back A record that builds season over season Designed in the East Bay Hills Field-tested in California oak and vineyard country Made for the people who live with the land
For Properties

Built for places where
the land matters.

Cricket is going onto a small number of Bay Area properties in summer 2026. Below is what it actually does once it's on the ground.

Eco-lodges & retreats
Your guests want to know what they're hearing at 5am. A quiet kiosk in the great room shows the night's detections: the great horned owl over the east meadow, the coyote chorus at 2am, the first dawn-chorus warbler. Conversation starter, naturalist program, and a reason to come back.
Vineyards & working farms
Starling pressure block by block. Owl-box occupancy confirmed year over year. Nocturnal damage logged with timestamps. The biodiversity record SIP, Demeter, and ROA buyers ask for, built continuously, not the week of the audit.
Conservation & science
Steady, hands-off listening without a researcher on site. Cricket runs unattended for months, identifies species on the device itself, and hands you clean, labeled detections for your dataset. Works for land trusts, university field stations, restoration projects, and conservancies.
Private land & legacy properties
If you've spent years caring for a piece of land, you already know what's there. Cricket gives you a record. For your kids. For the next owner. For the simple pleasure of knowing exactly which night the saw-whet owl came back.
How It Works

Real listening.
No cloud.

Most monitors stream audio to a remote server. Cricket runs its own models directly on the hardware. The moment it hears something, it knows. And nothing has to leave your property for that to happen.

01
Listen
A weatherproof node listens continuously. Larger sites mesh several nodes together over LoRa so a 200-acre property covers as cleanly as a 5-acre one.
02
Identify
A model trained on thousands of species runs locally on the device the moment something is detected. No internet needed. No audio ever leaves your property.
03
Share
Detections appear on a live map with GPS, confidence scores, and short audio clips you can play back. Build a guest-facing kiosk, an annual stewardship report, a research export. Whatever the place needs.
Recently Heard

Live from partner properties.

A rolling sample from Cricket nodes currently in the field. Updated as detections roll in.

Demo feed · auto-rotating sample · live wiring goes online with the first pilot site.
How We Build

Quiet principles,
not slogans.

Open by default
The hardware and software are documented. If something goes wrong, you or a local technician can fix it. No proprietary locks.
Runs without the cloud
Everything happens on the device. Rural internet is real. Cricket doesn't need it, and neither do you.
Field repairable
Commodity parts. Published schematics. A failed node should be a 30-minute fix in your workshop, not a box you have to ship back to a vendor.
Your data stays here
Detections live on your property. They're never sold, shared, or peeked at. Not now. Not with a subscription. Not ever.
About

Built by one person,
and a lot of heart.

East Bay Hills field site
East Bay Hills · Active Field Site

Steady Acre is a solo project by Jack Beautz, a software engineer and hobbyist naturalist based in the Bay Area.

I built Cricket because I think the land people farm and live on deserves more attention than it gets. A healthy ecosystem isn't just a nice thing to have. It produces richer soil, better pollination, cleaner water, and food that actually tastes like something.

The biodiversity you hear at night is a direct measure of how alive a place is. Farmers, vintners, lodge owners, land trusts, and people who simply love a piece of ground are the best-positioned people in the world to protect that. Most of them already care deeply. I wanted to build something that gives them a clearer picture of what's out there.

Everything here is designed and built by me: the hardware, the models, the dashboard. If you're a property owner, land manager, researcher, or just curious, I'd love to hear from you.

jack@beautz.net
Field Season · Summer 2026

There's more out there
to hear.

First pilot sites going in this season.
Pilot Inquiries · Summer 2026

Get Cricket on your land.

I'm placing a small number of pilot installations on Bay Area properties this summer: vineyards, retreats, lodges, conservancies, private land. Tell me about your place and I'll write back within 48 hours.

Or email me directly →
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