River Partners is undertaking large scale restoration efforts across California covering thousands of acres that provide valuable insight for bird monitoring and recovery efforts. Traditional monitoring with avian point counts is limited by experience and people hours. Autonomous recording units (ARUs) combined with point counts allows researchers to collect hours of daily data over several months in many locations concurrently, making data easily comparable. Utilizing ARUs gave the ability to continuously monitor over 90 monitoring points throughout San Joaquin, Merced, and Kern counties from May-July 2024 and 2025. Over 100,000 hours of data were processed through computer software. These efforts detected listed species: both tricolored blackbirds and a least Bell’s vireo, that were not captured during point counts due to a temporal misalignment of staff and wildlife, as well as a snapshot of avian diversity that will help inform our restoration planning efforts. ARU usage also comes with challenges when handling over 100 devices at a time. Over 2 years we learned proper protocols for deployment and data and device management that can be crucial to ensure limited data gaps when monitoring thousands of acres with limited people.