A genuinely delightful smart bird feeder

Of all the weird and wonderful things I saw at CES this year, Bird Buddy caught my attention in a way few tech products do anymore. It’s a colorful, cutesy bird feeder with a Wi-Fi-connected camera nestled inside to record and identify the birds (and other critters) that stop by to feed. It’s expensive, and at launch, some of its features still aren’t ready for prime time, but after using a Bird Buddy for more than a month, I can’t help but love this thing — flaws and all.

Price and availability

Following an

exceedingly well-funded Kickstarter campaign

, Bird Buddy’s smart feeder is currently available to buy directly from the company. However, Bird Buddy says orders placed today won’t ship until sometime in July. There are several different hardware bundles to choose from, with prices as high as $480 for a kit that includes just about every piece of hardware Bird Buddy currently offers. The base version I tested, which includes the feeder, the camera, a feed scoop, a “universal mount,” and a nylon cord for hanging, goes for $249, but as of writing, it’s available for a “limited-time pre-sale price” of $199.

Design, hardware, and what’s in the box

Ignoring the camera module, Bird Buddy looks like a fairly standard bird feeder. It’s nine inches tall and shaped like a little house, with a roof overhanging a gravity-fed seed tray. Most of the feeder is made of colorful plastic in either blue or yellow, with clear plastic bits on the front and back to show how much seed is left. There’s a hatch on the back to add your feed of choice — it holds about four cups — and tiny holes under the tray to allow rainwater to drain through. With its soft angles and vibrant colorways, it’s got a more modern look than most bird feeders out there, teetering on outright trendy.

The white, pill-shaped camera module is held in place with a single magnet, and its sole button sticks out a bit, which makes the camera easy to remove for charging with a USB-C cable. There’s a little platform at the front of the feed tray with raised bird footprints on it — a very cute touch.

There’s a door on the back of the feeder to add more seed.

Bird Buddy includes two mounting options with its base-model feeder: a plastic mount to place the feeder at the top of a pole and a braided nylon cord for hanging. I went with the cord, which cleverly loops under the feeder’s roof to help distribute its weight evenly. A couple of weeks in, though, the cord had gotten frayed and discolored, with one section wearing so thin it looked liable to break. I ended up replacing it with the chain you see in the photos here. The replacement chain was four bucks at the hardware store, but considering how expensive this feeder is, it should come with a more durable hanging option in the box.

Beyond the included hanging cable, I’m a little concerned about Bird Buddy’s long-term durability on the whole. My feeder hasn’t ever fallen to the ground, but it’s already collected visible damage in a few spots, including several areas where it looks like squirrels have gnawed away at the plastic housing.

Damage like this isn’t very noticeable from a distance, and probably even less so on the blue model, but I have to wonder what this thing will look like a couple of years down the road if it’s already getting banged up after a few weeks.

Squirrels have already chewed off bits of my feeder.

There’s a seed scoop included, which is handy, plus a USB-A-to-C cable for charging the camera module. The feeder doesn’t come with any seed to get you started, but you’ll want to get a type that’ll attract whichever birds are in your area.

Features and app

When Bird Buddy’s camera module detects motion in the feed tray, it starts recording. After a video is recorded, it’s uploaded to the

cloud

over Wi-Fi, and the Bird Buddy companion app sends a notification prompting you to review the footage and a handful of stills. You can save the video and stills to your Bird Buddy account (and from there, download them to your phone) and optionally share them to appear in a quasi-social in-app video stream.

Wi-Fi access is a must; Bird Buddy doesn’t have local video storage, so it can’t do much of anything without an internet connection. I’ve got a small backyard, so Wi-Fi coverage hasn’t been an issue for me. If you live on a larger property, though, you’ll need to be mindful of where you’re setting up your Bird Buddy.

The Bird Buddy app is divided into several tabs: an Inbox where you’ll see a chronological feed of activity at your feeder; a Collection that catalogs the different types of birds that your camera has spotted; and Bird Buddy TV, an endless stream of bird videos uploaded by other Bird Buddy users around the world. There’s also a section where you can help Bird Buddy identify any species it couldn’t make out on its own. As a very amateur birdwatcher, I’m not much help there, but it should be a fun diversion for more knowledgeable users.

The videos Bird Buddy records are one to two minutes long, but often only show birds for a few seconds of that runtime. Annoyingly, the in-app player doesn’t highlight sections of the video where there’s activity in any way. So, you’ll spend a lot of time scrubbing through to manually find highlights (or even more time watching an empty bird feeder and waiting). Considering Bird Buddy’s got the machine-learning chops to visually identify scores of species of birds, video highlights seem trivial in comparison, and this feels like a big missed opportunity to me. For the $249 this thing costs, I shouldn’t have to manually edit clips to remove long stretches of inactivity before sharing.

The Collection tab shows cards for each species your feeder has seen to date. Tapping one lets you see all the photos and videos you’ve recorded of that given species, plus other info like typical size and weight, where you can find that particular bird worldwide, and some fun facts (did you know that house sparrows mate for life?). It reminds me a lot of the Pokémon series’s Pokédex — there are even unique written descriptions for each species, and the option to play recordings of the sounds they make.

Bird Buddy often fails to record birds that don’t stick around for long, though, making the collecting aspect a little frustrating. I’ve seen plenty of birds land on my feeder that Bird Buddy didn’t catch videos of, including a couple of bluejays and a cardinal, two common species around my yard, but still missing from my Collection.

Another frustration: notifications don’t say what type of animal your feeder recorded, and there’s no option to filter notifications by species. That might sound like a nitpick, but in my first week with the feeder, I got dozens of notifications about squirrels stopping by, but very few about birds.

Eventually, I stopped tapping the notifications and opened the Bird Buddy app from my app drawer instead — it’s easier to dismiss unwanted recordings that way. Now that I’ve moved the feeder to a less squirrel-accessible location, nine out of 10 notifications are about house sparrows. I don’t have anything against sparrows, but it’d be nice to get fewer notifications about them relative to other species.

Video and photo quality

Bird Buddy’s camera uses a vertically oriented five-megapixel sensor with a 120-degree field of view that provides a good view of what’s happening both in the feed tray and out in front of the feeder. The sensor can record 1080p video, but it’s currently capped at 720p — a move Bird Buddy says is to save on battery. That’s all well and good, but I think users should still have the option to record high-resolution video at the expense of some battery life.

Even at 720p, though, videos are plenty crisp enough to see the action. The camera’s focus is fixed on the feeder’s tray, and footage of critters feeding is typically clear enough to see fine details in plumage (or fur). There’s no night vision or HDR, but considering birds typically feed during daylight hours, that’s not much of a drawback here. Strangely, there’s no audio saved with the videos — Bird Buddy has a microphone, but it’s not currently used.

While Bird Buddy calls the stills it serves “photos,” they’re really just isolated frames from recorded video. That’s usually fine, but these screen-grab images are often blurry to the point of being useless. Sifting through the content Bird Buddy captures is part of the experience, though, and I almost always get a good frame or two along with each video.

Battery life and charging

Packing a 3,800mAh battery, the standard Bird Buddy kit typically lasts about five days on a single charge, though that number can vary greatly depending on a lot of factors: distance from your Wi-Fi router, how often the camera records, and ambient temperature to name a few. Bird Buddy also sells kits with tiny solar panels, but the panels don’t generate enough power to keep the camera running indefinitely; Bird Buddy says that with solar power, the camera can last up to 15 days before needing to be charged.

You’ll charge the feeder over USB-C. Bird Buddy doesn’t specify how much wattage the feeder draws, but says it can charge from zero to full in about two hours. In my own testing, I’ve seen charging at up to 7.5W, which is low for a battery this size. You can charge the camera overnight and not miss much, at least.

Competition

You can find plenty of smart bird feeders online, though likely none from companies you’ve heard of. Bird Buddy’s closest competition seems to be the Netvue Birdfy AI, which also goes for $250 at retail.

The Birdfy AI has several advantages over Bird Buddy, including higher-resolution 1080p video, night vision, and a microSD card slot to add local storage. And, like Bird Buddy, Birdfy AI can visually identify bird species. Netvue’s feeder is considerably less stylish than Bird Buddy’s, though, and only saves videos online for a week unless you pay a monthly subscription.

Should you buy it?

The Bird Buddy smart bird feeder is so extremely charming, it’s hard not to like. Everybody I’ve spoken to about it has been as enamored as I am, and a couple of people have even gone on to buy one based on my impressions before this review was even published. Getting an up-close view of the birds that visit your home is a genuinely delightful experience not many gadgets can deliver, and it’s refreshing that there’s no subscription attached to access features like species identification and cloud video storage. Bird Buddy’s very cutesy hardware and app add a lot to the experience, too. And for less plugged-in users, it could be a great smart home on-ramp.

At the same time, though, it’s frustrating in ways a $249 product shouldn’t be. The camera regularly fails to record birds that don’t stick around long enough, the companion app still needs some polish, and the hardware isn’t being used to its full potential: the 5MP image sensor only records 720p video, and the camera module’s got a built-in microphone that, as of now, doesn’t do anything — videos don’t come with audio. Given Bird Buddy’s sophisticated marketing and premium, designerly packaging, it’s also clear a lot of the sticker price is going to pay for things that don’t make the product itself any better.

Bird Buddy says it intends to continually improve the feeder through firmware updates, and it very well might. Still, there’s no guarantee it’ll ever be meaningfully better than it is today — and it’s never a good idea to buy a product based on the potential for future improvement. Despite its quirks, I’ve had a blast with my Bird Buddy feeder. If you’re into birdwatching and you can afford it, what’s currently on offer here is already very compelling — and that it might get better later is a bonus.