Is it a bird or is it a plane?

This paper describes the application of low-cost radar technology for the detection and analysis of the Doppler signatures of wild life, in particular birds and bats. We demonstrate the ability to extract the wing beat frequency in real-time. Such processing affords a method of readily discriminating between animals and other flying objects such as micro-unmanned aerial vehicles. The timing waveforms used for sampling and integration can have a significant impact on the fidelity of the data that can be captured and on the response time of the system to detect and analyse animals in motion. This work paves the way for future research in support of target classification and conservation ecology.