Its an interesting question that I think can be better addressed if you define your goals a little in a little more detail.

for example - what's the end use of the recordings going to be?

if its primarily to generate a spectrogram I'd suggest going mono instead of stereo to save on disk space.

if it's for listening, then in what context? as a long form installation art piece? Even then you'll have to do some dramatic editing and/or compression I think. I like the idea of a livestream as a way to distribute for listening purposes though.

if it's for manipulation, then is there a reason to record the months of inactivity during the winter season? Why not start near the end of winter and end once they're all back in hibernation?

fwiw, I've developed a method of sonic timelapse that uses scripts and a combination of edits, time compression and overlaps and gets pretty high quality results (far better than time compression or editing alone). I'd imagine such a thing could be adapted to your project so that the entire year could be experienced in a matter of hours.

Actually, this project is begging to be timelapsed now that I think of it. If you had a webcam or gopro clicking say 3-8 pix per day you could probably blend that with a sped up recording to truly get the effect of change that you seem to be looking for.

just spitballing here.

It's an interesting question that I think can be better addressed if you define your goals a little in a little more detail.

For example - what's the end use of the recordings going to be?

If it's primarily to generate a spectrogram I'd suggest going mono instead of stereo to save on disk space.

If it's for listening, then in what context? As a long form installation art piece? Even then you'll have to do some dramatic editing and/or compression I think. I like the idea of a livestream as a way to distribute for listening purposes though.

If it's for manipulation, then is there a reason to record the months of inactivity during the winter season? Why not start near the end of winter and end once they're all back in hibernation?

For what it's worth, I've developed a method of sonic timelapse that uses scripts and a combination of edits, time compression and overlaps and gets pretty high quality results (far better than time compression or editing alone). I'd imagine such a thing could be adapted to your project so that the entire year could be experienced in a matter of hours.

Actually, this project is begging to be timelapsed now that I think of it. If you had a webcam or GoPro clicking say 3-8 pix per day you could probably blend that with a sped up recording to truly get the effect of change that you seem to be looking for.