It seems like just about everything has a “smart” version these days: humidifiers, doorbells and even refrigerators. But few adaptations of so-called smart technology have been able to combine utility, function and downright fun as well as the Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder.
Smart bird feeders not only up the ante on even the best bird feeders of yore in terms of features but also offer so many more ways to engage. The cameras take pictures and videos of birds, and accompanying apps identify the species and let you know when the feeder is low on food or needs to be cleaned.
The Bird Buddy, probably the most popular smart bird feeder on the market, has been taking the bird world by storm. As a budding birder myself, I knew I had to try it, so, in early January, I installed two Bird Buddy bird feeders in my sister’s backyard. Four months later, my family and I are still obsessed with them. Here’s why.
The Bird Buddy is a smart bird feeder that uses artificial intelligence to identify birds visiting the feeder and then sends pictures and videos of these visits to its accompanying app. Users can save these pictures (called postcards) to keep track of bird species and sightings, and they can also share them with friends and the broader Bird Buddy community.
The Bird Buddy With Solar Roof is the standard Bird Buddy feeder with, you guessed it, a detachable solar roof. We loved this version in particular because you don't have to recharge the camera as often as the base model.
The Bird Buddy Perfect Gift Bundle is the Bird Buddy With Solar Roof, plus a perch extender, a suet ball holder, a wall mount and a 3-in-1 nutrition set where you can put water, citrus and jellies to attract even more birds.
What I liked about it
It’s fun and engaging
After installing the two Bird Buddy feeders (which I named Woody and Guthrie — shout-out to all my folk music fans out there), I invited my sister and her husband to download the app and join the feeders so they could also receive notifications about sightings. I then added two more friends, one to each feeder. Only three additional users can be added to each feeder with the standard free subscription, but 10 can be added with the Pro subscription (more on that later).
More than anything, we loved how fun the Bird Buddy is to use. It’s engaging, engrossing and even a bit addictive, and we all began spending our days scrolling through bird postcards and texting each other screenshots with comments like “Did you see the funny face that cardinal was making?” and “Finally, a goldfinch stopped by — it’s so pretty!” Three months later, we’re still doing this.
I loved it so much that I found myself using the app as a replacement for other forms of social media. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media feeds, I looked at pictures of birds and practiced identifying them while waiting in line at the bank or supermarket. I now find myself better able to identify species in the wild when I’m out hiking.
It comes with everything you need and is easy to install
Some other smart bird feeders (that are cheaper than the Bird Buddy) don’t come with a camera, but even the most basic Bird Buddy has everything you need to start bird-watching at home right away. The basic model includes an AI-powered camera (powered by a 3,800mAh rechargeable lithium-ion battery), a charging cable, a metal hanger, a seed scoop and a universal mount so you can place it on a bird feeder pole.
Because we have a lot of squirrel-filled trees in our yard, we decided to mount both of our feeders on bird feeder poles with baffles, which squirrels are not able to climb. It took about 10 minutes to screw the (included) mount to the Bird Buddy and then screw it onto the bird feeder pole. The instructions were clear, though there were a lot of them, so I spent about an hour reading through the various online tutorials.
Various price points are available
We appreciate that the Bird Buddy offers three separate models at different price points. The basic model, the Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder ($239), is the least expensive and is perfectly adequate; the Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder With Solar Roof ($299) is just the basic model plus a solar roof; and the Bird Buddy Perfect Gift Bundle ($415) includes the solar roof, a perch extender, a suet ball holder, a wall mount and a 3-in-1 nutrition set where you can put bird-enticing nutrition like water, citrus and jellies.
Unsurprisingly, my favorite of the three models is the fanciest and most expensive feeder. The solar roof is highly effective, meaning we rarely have to go out to get the camera and bring it in to charge. During the shorter, darker days of winter, we would charge the battery every few weeks, but now that spring has brought sunnier skies and more hours of daylight, we haven’t had to charge the camera in either of the feeders for nearly two months.
The solar roof model costs only $60 more than the basic model, but the solar roof is also sold separately for $89 if you decide to buy it later. Personally, I think the extra $60 (or even the extra $89) is worth it because it saves the hassle of having to remove the camera and bring it inside to charge every other week.
Our first feeder, Woody, was a Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder With Solar Roof (the basic model plus the detachable solar roof), and it quickly began attracting birds as soon as we installed it. That said, when we installed Guthrie, the fancier Bird Buddy Perfect Gift Bundle, we immediately noticed a greater diversity of birds.
New species that hadn’t visited Woody, like black-capped chickadees and goldfinches, immediately sought out Guthrie’s perch extender and suet ball (which we filled with a peanut butter and beef suet from a local gardening shop), but they didn’t pay much attention to the oranges and lemons we put on the nutrition set or the water in the drinking reservoir. Though the perch is designed to accommodate large birds, we haven’t seen any yet, but we do often see three small birds simultaneously feeding off the perch extender.
Though we love the idea of a bird feeder attached to the house, we didn’t use the mount the gift bundle came with because we just installed new siding last summer and we’re not too eager to start drilling holes in it. Although the fanciest bundle was our favorite, we didn’t find all the additional goodies super useful, and the $415 price tag is tough to swallow. If you have the money and you want to attract the most types of birds you can, it might be worth it, but we think the Bird Buddy With Solar Roof is more than good enough for most. However, if you don’t mind going outside to retrieve the camera to charge every couple of weeks, then you can save an extra $60 and go with the basic Bird Buddy.
Fun features that also make life easier
Each Bird Buddy comes with a free standard subscription to the app, even for invited guests. This standard subscription not only gives you access to all the previously mentioned postcards and videos, but it also lets you know when the feeder is low on food, when the solar-powered roof needs to be recharged (if you have one) and when the feeder requires a cleaning. In addition to Bird Buddy letting you know when it’s time to clean the feeder, it also directs you to a video showing you how to clean it.
The Pro subscription is $6 per month or $60 per year, and the annual is offered for 50% off if you upgrade within the first 48 hours of pairing the feeder. According to Bird Buddy, the renewal is also priced at whatever you initially paid, so if you upgrade within the first 48 hours, you can later renew at $30. Once you upgrade to Pro, you also get the following perks:
- Muting and ignoring species: Personalize your postcards by choosing bird species you no longer want to see in your Inbox. Because we were getting so many dark-eyed juncos and house sparrows, I added them to the “ignore” list.
- Frenzy mode: Enabling Frenzy mode will use more battery power, but it will result in a greater number of postcards.
- High-resolution video: Receive crisper, higher-definition videos than with the standard subscription.
- Additional guest slots: Host up to 10 guest members per feeder (only three are allowed with standard subscriptions).
The ability to spy on other feeders
Unlike other brands of smart bird feeders, which have a mostly US-based audience, Bird Buddy is wildly popular worldwide, so it has users in far-flung destinations that have very different bird populations from our country. One of my favorite features about the app is that it allows you to spy on bird feeders in the broader Bird Buddy community (only if their owners have given permission, of course).
Users can select two additional community feeders to appear in their feed continuously, plus a third feeder that will appear for 72 hours. After the 72 hours are up, you’re able to select a different feeder to add on for another 72 hours, and so on.
Because I wanted to see tropical birds, I selected feeders in Ecuador and Panama. And, as I’m heading hiking in Slovenia in May, I also chose a Bird Buddy in Slovenia so I could begin learning some of its common birds like the great tit and Eurasian blue tit.
As enjoyable as it’s been to see these foreign-to-me birds abroad, it also made me appreciate my own local birds even more. White-necked jacobins and blue-chested hummingbirds are certainly more colorful and eye-catching than the somewhat bland and boring dark-eyed juncos that visit our feeders multiple times per day, but I noticed that all three of those foreign feeders received far fewer species than mine.
On a single day, a Northern cardinal, goldfinch, house finch, house sparrow, brown-headed cowbird, dark-eyed junco and black-capped chickadee visited, and this is not uncommon for a single day. We also regularly receive white-breasted nuthatches, orange-crowned warblers and robins. In fact, there are often two or three different species of birds at the feeder at the same time. On the foreign feeders, however, I only saw the same two or three species appearing every single day.
What I didn’t like about it
The app is a bit wonky
Though the app offers a lot of fun features, they don’t always work perfectly and the app isn’t always intuitive. On more than one occasion, I couldn’t get a feature to activate (for instance, I wasn’t able to “ignore” or “mute” a species even though I have a Pro membership), so I had to reach out to customer service so they could walk me through it or adjust something on the back end. Thankfully, talking with customer service was very pleasant and they responded promptly.
It’s expensive
Starting at $239, this is not a cheap bird feeder. But given how many birds it has attracted, and how much joy it’s brought to our family, we think it’s worth the price. That said, it’s still a pretty pricey feeder that simply may be beyond the budget of some bird-loving consumers.
The back panel sticks
Though the videos on Bird Buddy’s app all show the back panel easily sliding off, I’ve found that it usually sticks a bit. I struggle a little to pull down the top latch to pour in birdseed, then I fight with it a bit to get the door off to clean it. It’s not a huge struggle (and my sister doesn’t seem to struggle with it as much as I do), but it’s annoying enough that it’s worth noting, especially given the high price point of the feeder.
The identification isn’t perfect
No technology — especially new technology — is perfect, so it’s understandable that there will be identification errors from time to time. I am a fairly new birder, so I rely on Bird Buddy to identify bird species for me, but on several occasions, I’ve noticed misidentifications. Most notably, it has repeatedly misidentified a house sparrow as a chipping sparrow. How do I know this? Because I went to record my would-be chipping sparrow spotting on Cornell University’s fabulous bird database app, eBird. However, I received an email from eBird a few days later requesting more information about my sighting. I sent them the Bird Buddy postcard, and they told me that they do not accept AI identifications from any feeders because they can be wrong. My entry was flagged because eBird noticed that it was too early in the season for chipping sparrows to appear in our area and, being a novice birder, I didn’t realize that the bird I spotted (a house sparrow) lacked the rusty cap of an actual chipping sparrow. Even though it’s expected for this new technology to have a few errors, I wish the app had a feature to flag misidentifications, so users could help the AI learn and get better.
Bottom line
The Bird Buddy is a fantastically fun smart bird feeder that is easy to use and can be hung from a tree or mounted on a pole, fence or wall. If you want to attract the most amount of birds simultaneously and overall, go with the Bird Buddy Perfect Gift Bundle. However, we don’t use the wall mount it came with, and the price can be hard to swallow. So if you don’t care about attracting the widest variety, save yourself some money and go with the Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder With Solar Roof. The basic model also works very well, but there is a noticeable difference in how often you have to charge the camera when using the solar roof, so the roof bundle is well worth the extra $60.
No matter which model you choose, the Bird Buddy is just about guaranteed to bring you a bit of joy. It’s expensive, but its easy of use, and the constant photos of birds really make my day. We think it’s worth it for anyone who wants the best birding experience in their own backyard.