BushEars

Who it's for

Two ways in.

For guests

Included with your stay

At participating lodges, BushEars is part of the guest experience. Hear what called around camp while you slept — and take the sound of your safari home.

See a night →

For lodges

A new reason to book

A story every guest tells at breakfast, a recording they play for years, and a guide who looks brilliant doing it — a memorable new amenity for your lodge.

Become a founding lodge →

The problem, simply

The bush is at its loudest exactly when you can least catch it.

A leopard saws twice and is gone. A hyena whoops across the dark. A bushbaby screams like something out of a nightmare. By the time you're awake and reaching for your phone — it's over.

The problem was never that these sounds are rare. It's that you're asleep for them.

Guide Mode · out on the drive

"That was a lion."

The vehicle stops. Your guide cuts the engine. Everyone goes quiet — and far out in the dark, something calls. Before anyone can even ask, the answer's already there on the screen: Lion. Your guide grins: "The Mbiri males. Hold on."

BushEars listens in the gaps — when the engine's off and the chatter drops, on a dawn or dusk drive when the bush is at its most vocal. During quiet stops it settles the background noise, surfaces a likely call, and hands it to your guide to confirm. It tells you what it heard, never where — and when it isn't sure, it simply stays quiet.

The app names the call. Your guide names the pride.

BushEars

Guide Listen

Listening…

Just heard

Lion

heard just now · clear

✓ ConfirmNot sureNo

Recording strength shown only as a recording detail. Distance is not estimated.

GuideNight WatchReportsYou

What you wake up to

BushEars tells you what it heard. Your guide tells you what it meant.

BushEars flagged a likely lion roar. Your guide knows which lions, where they'd been, and why they were calling. Nothing replaces that — BushEars just makes sure the conversation happens at all. A story to wake up to, and a recording to take home.

BushEars

Night Watch

Listened 11h 48m · dusk → dawn

Last night's highlights

02:40 Lion roar

Guide confirmed

✓

03:15 Spotted hyena

High confidence

✓

04:52 Fiery-necked nightjar

High confidence

✓

Recording strength is shown only as a recording detail. Distance is not estimated.

GuideNight WatchReportsYou

How it works

Three simple things.

First

It listens

Awake all night, so you don't have to. It processes sound on the device and keeps only brief clips when it flags a possible call.

Then

It recognises the call

The big, unmistakable voices of the African night — compared against a model of known wildlife calls. If it isn't confident, it says nothing at all.

By morning

It tells the story

A simple timeline, each call with its sound — a story to wake up to, and a recording to take home.

It only ever tells you what it heard — never where an animal is. And when it isn't sure, it says so plainly. No guessing, no drama.

The voices of the night

The sounds that stop you dead.

Not the little brown birds — the ones you'll still hear ten years later. These are what BushEars is built for.

Lion

The roar

A low moan you feel before you hear it, building into the call that defines the African night. BushEars captures the roar — it never tells you where the lion is.

Leopard

The rasp · in field testing

Like a handsaw dragged across wood. Rough, patient, unhurried. Most people go on safari their whole lives and never hear it. If BushEars catches one, your morning is made.

Spotted hyena

The whoop

The rising ooo-WHOOP? everyone knows from a film and nobody can name in real life. Each hyena's whoop is slightly its own.

Hippo

The grunt

That explosive honking laugh from down at the water. Once you've heard it, you never mistake it again.

Black-backed jackal

The wail

A rising cry that breaks into yapping. The most reliable voice out there — if the night has one sound in it, it's usually this one.

Thick-tailed bushbaby

The scream

Nothing prepares you. It sounds like a child in trouble. It is a small, wide-eyed, entirely harmless primate having a completely ordinary evening.

Fiery-necked nightjar

"Good Lord, deliver us"

A mellow, descending whistle everyone in southern Africa has heard and half the continent can quote. Usually the first voice of the dark.

Others — leopard, elephant, baboon, the little owls — are in field testing. They only get shown to you once we're sure.

Our promises

What BushEars will not do — and why that matters.

We'd rather tell you this up front than have you find out and feel misled.

✕ It won't tell you where

It knows what it heard, not what was standing where. So BushEars never draws a map, never gives a distance, never points a direction. Anyone who says their app can do that from one microphone is guessing.

✕ It won't pretend to know everything

It's built for a small number of voices it can get right, not a long list it gets vaguely. It will hear things it can't name — and it'll tell you so, rather than invent something.

✕ It won't keep your conversations

It's designed to hear wildlife, not people. Audio is processed on the device in a short rolling buffer; only brief clips are kept when it flags a possible call, clips with speech are blocked from automatic upload, and nothing is shared to improve the model without your explicit say-so.

BushEars is not a safety system. Ever.

A quiet report does not mean a quiet night. A leopard walking past your tent makes no sound at all — and most of what's out there never says a word. BushEars is for the morning, over coffee, when it's all safely in the past. It is never a reason to walk anywhere at night. Listen to your guide, always. They are the safety system; we're the storyteller.

Be part of it

It gets better every night — because people teach it.

This isn't just an app. It's building a provenance-tracked library of the sounds of the southern African night — and it grows every time someone helps it learn.

🛏️

Guests

Take home the actual sound of your nights in the bush. When a call is right — or wrong — just tell it. One tap. You slept, and you helped.

🧭

Guides

You know these sounds better than any machine ever will. Confirm what it got right, correct what it got wrong, and it starts hearing your valley the way you do. Correcting it is worth more than agreeing.

🏕️

Lodges

Give your guests a story to wake up to at breakfast, and a recording of their own wild night to take home and play for years. Guide Mode, Night Watch, and a morning report with your name on it.

🎙️

Sanctuaries & researchers

You are the reason this can exist. Lend us an afternoon of recording — your terms, your name credited, your recordings never sold — and helps build a licence-clean, guide-verified library of southern Africa's night sounds.

Over a million bird recordings. For mammals, barely a thousand.

The world's great wildlife-sound library holds over a million recordings — overwhelmingly birds. When it opened to land mammals, everyone contributed about a thousand, across 275 species. African mammals are the thinnest part of that. The reason nobody's built this isn't that nobody thought of it — it's that the recordings have never been collected. That's what we're doing.

The sound that gets you, ten years later.

You'll come home with four hundred photos — and not one second of the sound. The lion at 2:40. The jackal before first light. Photos go in a folder. The sound gets you in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday — if something catches it.

BushEars catches the calls you'd otherwise miss.

Get in touch

Bring BushEars to your bush.

We're early, and honest about it: the listening works, the animals are being taught to it one recording at a time, and the first lodges are being spoken to now. If you run a lodge, guide in the bush, keep animals that make a noise, or just want to know when it's ready — we'd like to hear from you.

bushears.co.za

🌙

Thank you — we've got it.

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