Smart Home Week
This article is part of TechRadar’s Smart Home Week 2024, where we bring you all the latest news, tips and tricks to help you create the smart home of your dreams.
A squirrel landed on my bird feeder and greedily ate all the seeds. Not for the first or last time, I wished I could yell at my furry pet to get off his perch and give my beloved birds a treat.
I dashed out the back door to chase away a mouse that had jumped off my Bird Buddy and scattered most of the seeds onto the ground.
Aside from my complaint that the Bird Buddy, a smart bird feeder with a built-in camera that can be hung from a tree or screwed onto a perch, doesn’t have a tiny speaker that can carry my voice from the app to where the squirrel is staring at the camera, I love this gadget.
I gave up the fight and assumed that 70% of Bird Buddy’s food would end up with the squirrels.
I have been birding, or “birdwatching” as we like to call it, for seven years now. It started when I lost my job and returned to photography, one of my hobbies. I have a good long focal length 200mm lens and a solid Sony Alpha a6000 APS-C camera. Over time, I have started to notice not only the different appearances of various bird species, but also their calls. When I hear something special, like the staccato sound of a woodpecker pecking or the strange call of a green parrot that once appeared in my backyard, I tilt my head to one side and freeze, like a dog hearing its owner’s voice.
Smart Home Week
This article is part of TechRadar’s Smart Home Week 2024, bringing you all the latest news, tips and tricks to help you create the smart home of your dreams.
My goal with bird photography is to get close – I want to see the birds’ eyes and the tiny fibers of their colorful feathers. I’ve considered a 600mm lens, but the price is holding me back.
Frankly, it’s hard to get close to birds without a long lens. If you notice a rare bird at your feeder, you might want to carefully open the back door and sneak out to get a good photo. But birds have excellent eyesight and hearing, so they’ll fly away if you make the slightest movement.
If you follow bird TikToks, you may have noticed people dressing up in disguises and making baseball caps almost entirely out of bird food. Then they sit still on a chair and wait for the birds, which usually come. I’ve considered such extreme measures to get closer to the birds, but luckily there’s a better way.
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A smart product that fits the package. (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff) It’s super easy to set up. (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff) We had it up on our tree in no time. (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff) Make sure you point the solar panel towards the sun. (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
Bird Buddy first launched on Kickstarter in 2020. It’s a simple but brilliant idea: place an app-connected camera inside a bird feeder. Birds will flock to the food and, if all goes well, you’ll end up feeding them in front of the wide-angle camera, placed right in front of their faces, in their beaks.
I’ve wanted one for years but was worried that spending $200+ on a bird feeder would be too expensive, whereas, I spend at least that much on bird food every year.
Luckily, I didn’t have to make any phone calls – my family bought me a Bird Buddy for my birthday.
There’s another reason why I didn’t buy this gadget. The basic Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder ($239/£239) has a rechargeable camera that needs to be removed from the feeder from time to time to charge. I was worried that I’d forget and soon my bird sanctuary would just have a basic bird feeder hanging up. Luckily, my family bought me the Bird Buddy with solar roof for $299 (£299). Problem solved! Well, maybe not, but more on that later.
The app displayed an important message about my data privacy and expectations: Notice the view from the camera. It looks like the roof is blocking some of it, but remember that the bird is flying underneath that canopy. (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
The early bird gets the worm
Setting up Bird Buddy is easy. There’s very little assembly required other than attaching the solar roof, placing the camera inside the feeder housing, and plugging the camera into the solar panel roof. Before that, a little bit of app setup was required, including making sure the 5MP camera was fully charged and connected to your phone and WiFi network.
At first I thought the camera wasn’t charging. I kept looking for the power/connection light, which looks like a small hole in the camera body. It took me a few minutes to realize that this was actually a microphone and the light was hidden underneath the body and very hard to find. Hopefully in future BirdBuddy Smart Feeder devices, that light will be moved to the surface of the camera chassis.
Once the camera was charged and plugged in, I assembled the feeder and put the included wire hanger in place (you can also order a fixture to screw the smart feeder onto a post). A strong 802.11 b/g/n WiFi connection (2.4Ghz only) is essential to receive regular bird updates from the smart bird feeder, but I didn’t hesitate to place it near my other feeders either. Thanks to an Eero WiFi Mesh Network Extender installed in one of the back windows, I was confident that the WiFi would reach my entire small backyard well.
See those lots of seeds? Yep, the squirrels noticed them too. (Image credit: Future/Lance Ulanoff)
To fill the Bird Buddy, open a small panel on the back and pour in your seeds using the included food cup. The only way to do this is to tilt the feeder forward, which causes the seeds to slide out the front, but not enough to be a problem. You’ll need about 2 cups to fill the Bird Buddy, which is half the amount of seeds that will fit in a regular feeder.
It’s normal for a bird to ignore a new feeder for a day or more (sometimes it can take weeks). It took a bird a day to find my smart feeder. Soon I got my first warning sign: a blue jay that was just too big for the small feeder. I could watch him struggle for a perch via the live video feed. Eventually, he gave up.
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Incidentally, while Bird Buddy can automatically identify bird species, it may make a wrong guess if visibility is unclear or completely blocked.
The captured images and videos are called postcards and can be downloaded, shared, kept private or even allowed to expire as the memories of the bird visit fade.
It’s only a 5MP, 120-degree FOV camera, but since the birds are usually just a few centimetres from the lens, the images are sharp and the video looks pretty clear, although the frame rate seems a little low.
The videos also contain audio, but you can’t hear it unless you download the video, which can be a pain.
The Smart Feeder is about 20 feet away from my house and within range of a WiFi signal. (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
worm
There were a few times when I wanted to zoom in on a live feed but wasn’t able to, and I was also frequently greeted with a warning that continuous live streaming could drain my battery.
Speaking of batteries, I struggled for weeks to find the right position and location to get the solar charge I needed. At one point, my Bird Buddy was showing only 8% battery left. I pulled it away from the tree and let it get plenty of sunlight to fully charge it. After some trial and error, I found a spot where I could keep the solar panel (only on one side of the roof) facing the sun for most of the day and get the Smart Bird Feeder charged to over 80%.
Collage of visitors. (Image credit: Future/Lance Ulanoff)
Let’s feed them!
I can’t tell you how excited I was when this male cardinal showed up and posed. (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
Bird Buddy learns about your smart feeder visitors and alerts you when certain types of birds are likely to be seen during the day (you can also tell it to ignore common types), and it organizes bird types into collections, including “mystery visitors,” which are birds it can’t identify.
We ended up seeing three kinds of sparrows, a cardinal (a male – a pretty red one – and a female), house finches, a blue jay, a chickadee, a mourning dove, and…oh, there were lots of squirrels.
Here’s the usual procedure: I put food in the Bird Buddy, and within a few minutes a squirrel is there and eating the food. I run outside and yell at the squirrel, and he jumps up and the seeds fly everywhere. This is a common problem in the Bird Buddy community, but there is no good solution.
I have a cage around my usual feeder for this reason. The squirrels can’t get to the food. I don’t have a cage for Bird Buddies. I’ve also tried mixing spices into the food. Birds don’t have heat receptors, but squirrels love and hate spice. Guess what? My squirrels now prefer the spicier things in their life.
In conclusion, I have given up the fight and now expect 70% of my Bird Buddy’s food to go to Mr Squirrel. I hope that future Bird Buddies will have speakers or little haptic motors that will send harmless shock-like vibrations to the squirrels.
Need more
The best part of this photo is capturing a pesky squirrel mid-flight while a curious sparrow looks on. (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
Despite these minor glitches, I love Birdbuddy. It’s a single-purpose smart home gadget that does exactly what it promises, with minimal fuss: It tells me as much or as little about my avian visitors as I want it to. I can share any exciting (“Look, a squirrel is jumping off the Bird Buddy!”) funny photos or videos I take with the community, or keep them just for myself. I can also see other people’s Bird Buddies’ feeds, if they choose to share them. They seem to live in more exotic places and have a greater variety of birds.
My new goal is to purchase another Bird Buddy to set up in another location and bird watch more extensively. In the meantime, my first Birdbuddy has brought me closer to my fellow birders than I ever imagined.
As I write this, I have my iPhone 15 Pro propped up next to my MacBook Air and am watching a live feed of a sparrow flying into Bird Buddy, grabbing a seed, then flying away as another splash of blood comes in. It’s fun and relaxing, something that can’t be said for most smart home technology.
(Image courtesy of Future/Lance Ulanoff)
